Energy is the Life of the Country

I remember being impressed about the importance of power by an input-output model of the US economy in my college economics class.  A country may be rich in labor and raw materials, but without that power input, growth is a struggle.

In the United States, one economist estimated that each household has the effective assistance of 14 people’s labor.  That is because of the washer and dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, lawnmower, autos, power tools, fans, pumps, etc.  We don’t have to haul water from the village well any more.  We don’t have to keep live chickens in the yard in order to eat chicken unless we want to raise chickens.

Power is often described in categories as renewable or non-renewable.   I prefer to use categories such as transportable, compact and universal.  For example, wind power is not compact enough for powering land transport unless it can be stored as some other secondary form but is suitable for ships, while gasoline is a primary and compact source of automobile power.  Sunlight in larger arrays is quite useful for some industrial processes.   However, electricity is by far the cheapest and most transportable form of energy.  It is 1000 times less expensive to send a megawatt of power over utility lines than the equivalent methane through the next best medium, a gas pipeline.  Even with the inevitable losses, it is cheaper to convert many power sources, such as solar arrays and wind farms, to electricity for transport than to convert them into, say, hydrogen split from water, then transmitted by pipeline.

For the next two or more decades, developed nations will depend primarily on fossil fuels, derived from petroleum and coal, for electric power.  In the US, and I believe in China as well, the largest electric generation source is coal fired boilers.  Next in importance is nuclear and natural gas, in that order.  Renewable sources remain a tiny wedge of the energy pie diagram.  They are cost effective only in special locations such as those designated as Wind Power Class 7, where the wind speed averages about 10 meters per second, or the Mojave Desert where there is over 300 days of full sun per year.  Without subsidies, other wind and solar locations would not exist.

I like ground source heat pumps, geothermal energy and low speed hydropower sources, but they are even more dependent on special locations than wind and solar.

The lesson is that we ought to generate electricity from whatever source is local and convenient and tie them all together with a good electric grid, perhaps using DC instead of AC power to avoid phasing issues.

We look forward to fusion power, but for the last 50 years since the first Tokamak, commercial fusion has remained 50 years away.  It is still 50 years away.

So we are stuck with fossil fuels for the near term, perhaps most of our lifetimes, or we could choose a less rosy, perhaps dismal, economic future.

Energy As Wealth

Money is the universal commodity, they say.  With money you can buy anything (except maybe happiness).

In a prior blog, “The Decline of Money”, May, 2010, I demonstrated that all money is fiat currency, and there is no stable fiat currency, not even theoretically.  Money can be created without limit.  There is no natural limit to digits printed on paper.  While money is useful for buying things, it is too volatile a measure to be any kind of real yardstick for wealth.

In the U.S, we each employ the indirect labor of many invisible people.  These invisible people wash our clothes, heat our water, push our vehicles, melt silica into glass, smelt ores, mine diamonds, sinter gypsum into cement, assemble molecules into chemicals, carry messages and light up the night.  Our prosperity is thoroughly and intimately tied to the efforts of these voiceless servants.  Our regional, national and World Gross Product goes up and down with the contributions of these assistants more closely than it does with bank reserves, interest rates or the stock markets.

I’m talking about energy.  Energy is the one most universal commodity, without which civilization rapidly decays, not just into the stone age, but into a hunter-gatherer phase that can support only a few hundred million out of the 6 billion humans on this planet.   Energy is control over the environment and control is wealth for an advancing civilization.

The unit of energy (see our prior discussion in “World Energy – The Questions and the Numbers" we use to describe energy is the joule.  A joule will lift one pound about 9 inches (or push against a force of 1 newton a distance of 1 meter).  For a planet, we need to talk in exojoules, a billion billion joules (10¹⁸ joules) or EJ.  We use about 500 EJ every year.  Many charts show usage in quadrillions of BTU’s, or “quads”.  500 EJ is about 473 quads.  As a developing nation matures, the singular marker of that maturity is its energy consumption.  China is the current poster child for this phenomenon. 

When you shift your perspective on wealth from money to energy, you begin understand economic trends and events that are otherwise mysterious.

In the 1991, when Russia’s economy collapsed, one of the fallouts was that Russian oil exports to Cuba were discontinued.  Food still grew, people still worked, but crops rotted in the field for lack of transport.  Electricity ran only an hour a day.  Within weeks, food disappeared off the shelves of stores.  Food was rationed.  Within the year the average Cuban lost 20 pounds.  Cuba’s collective state owned farming coupled to its geographic isolation as an island nation made it particularly vulnerable to this kind of energy collapse. 

In my first course in economics, I had a wall chart entitled “The Input/Output Model of the Economy” by Samuelson.  One of the major inputs was energy, along with employment and natural resources.  However, automation leverages labor, and natural resources cannot be mined, harvested, refined, smelted or distributed without energy.  Energy is conserved – it’s physics.  The branch of economics that deals with resource inputs, as opposed to monetary effects, is called Thermoeconomics.  In fact, there is plenty of support behind the idea that energy is primary and monetary effects are secondary to economies on a national or global scale.

With this perspective, let’s examine some US energy policies in this time of extended high unemployment and recession:

Switching to more efficient usage:

This includes fluorescent lighting, LED’s, better insulation on buildings, improvements in auto mileage, and efficient factory methods.  As a means to reduce energy consumption, this will not work.  It effectively reduces the cost of each mile or each heating bill, so we will use more of them.  In fact, this is what actually happens.  True, we are getting more utility from those extra miles, more and better light, and we are living and working in more comfortable environments because of these efficiency improvements.  That’s an increase in prosperity.  Some of us will choose to drive more, others will spend the extra energy cooling their homes in summer.  Having this choice is also a measure of prosperity.  Technologies that improve efficiency and factories that make efficient products will generate more jobs.  This is a positive effect all the way around.  Left to market forces, the things that work best will drive out the things that don’t work or are too expensive for what they do.  The useful role for government here is to encourage research and entrepreneurship, and otherwise keep hands off.

Restricting energy production:

Obviously, anything that reduces the energy input will reduce prosperity.  That includes the prohibition of deep water exploration in the Gulf, discouraging nuclear power plant permits, and any kind of carbon tax or tax and trade.  The political pundits try to put costs on these actions in terms of instant jobs lost, or in terms of  per household increases in the cost of electricity.  These are only the initial effects.  The ultimate effects as these energy reductions ripple through the economy are many times greater.  The average politician does not understand this, and hopes that you will not, either. 

In order for the US to sustain a healthy GDP growth in the range of 3.5% per year, we need to add a similar amount to the energy inputs.  That is roughly 17.5 EJ per year, equivalent to a few thousand large electric power plants added every year.  There is no source of energy we can afford to give up without losing wealth. 

Windmills clutter the landscape and kill migrating birds.  Solar panels absorb heat and raise the local temperature.   Fracking rock formations for natural gas can introduce chemicals into the water table.  Hydroelectric dams disrupt fish and can break and drown thousands downstream.  There is no such thing as a problem-free energy source. 

Our goal should be to trade off cleaner and better energy sources for more destructive sources, avoiding both environmental fanatics and irresponsible exploiters.   It’s a classic cost-benefit analysis that will change with every new invention, not a political contest or an opportunity for sound bites and slogans.

It should also be clear that to stimulate an economy in recession we cannot restrict energy inputs.

Carbon Footprints and Energy Diets:

This is called stretching a metaphor.  We are hardly fat from energy, and we don’t leave carbon footprints.

We could usefully consume ten times more energy per capita.  We could switch from wood to aluminum for construction.  We could use cement instead of asphalt for roads.  We could use flying cars instead of roads at all.  We could commute on intercontinental rocket planes in 90 minutes between Washington and Beijing.  We could dispense with parkas and wear electrically heated and cooled clothing.  All these would use more energy. 

On a national and less consumer oriented level, if we had access to huge quantities of cheap energy we could desalinate the oceans and water the Sahara.  We could build and launch space parasols to counter potential global warming.  We could pump water up Niagara Falls to store truly massive amounts of energy.   We could force-grow food under lights for starving refugees, set up comfortable retirement colonies under the lighter gravity of the Moon, create a fleet of ion rockets to move precious minerals from the asteroid belt, and on and on.  Yes, it begins to sound like the new frontiers of science fiction, but that is exactly what energy can accomplish,  with vision.  We don’t have to settle for a bleak future and a decimated population.

The counterculture wants to make energy consumption a crime.  How often do you see people wandering around the streets with carbon footprint numbers over their heads?  Are we now supposed to feel guilty about using energy?  Will going on an energy diet do anything but make us poor?  No.  In absolute terms, energy is prosperity.  The people that claim they are saving the planet are not saving it for people.  They don’t really like people. 

Alternative Energy:

All the energy we have here came from the Sun.  The Earth’s core is hot from the decay of radioactive materials from the formation of the solar system.  Coal and surface oil are solar energy stored by plants and marine fossils.  Wind and wave power are driven by the temperature differentials caused by solar radiation on the surface.  Even fusion energy, when we figure out how to produce it, will use tritium or deuterium from the sea, left by the condensation of solar gasses. 

The more of the sun’s energy we can capture directly, the less we have to tap the stored energy in coal and oil, although there is a lot of stored energy still left, thousands of years at the current rate of usage.  So, alternative energy that taps the main supply, the sun, is the way to go.

Ethanol from food sources is simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.  Without the subsidies, corn and sugar-derived ethanol is not only a waste of energy, it is not even a clean fuel.  Ethanol is a poor fuel at best.  Its only saving grace is that it can be blended to go into a gas tank.  Derived from cellulosic materials like wood pulp and switch grasses it is marginally useful, but all that we are really doing is converting an inefficient source into a portable form of stored energy.   Better far to concentrate on energy storage per se, preferably electric, and to deliver huge quantities of cheap electricity from whatever source may be convenient to wherever it needs to be.

Biodiesel from algae may be a good alternative energy source as well as a convenient chemical storage form for energy in certain applications.  Algae tends to die off before the growth medium saturates with the fatty esters used to make biodiesel, and the esterification process requires alcohol.  Again, the better solution is stored electric energy.

Wind power, wave power, geothermal and ground source heat pumps are all good and proven sources of alternative energy, where they are available.  A lot more could be done with them.

Hybrid vehicles with a good combination of energy recovered from braking, stored electric energy and diesel generation ought to be useful on today’s roads.  However, they are likely to better solutions to public transportation, busses and trams, than they are for personal vehicles.  It’s absurd to build a car like the Chevy Volt that takes two days to recharge for two hours of driving.  That is government meddling at its finest.

What about pollution?  Is there an economic cost to the environment?  Is there a limit to just how much we can take out of the planet for our prosperity?  Well, yes there is, but we are a long way from any kind of a tipping point, and that includes global warming.  As a species we will either face a future where prosperity is limited to a few, or where the world population is limited by policy, war or calamity, or where we get off this planet and continue our quest for prosperity elsewhere.  All of these choices are difficult, none of them are desirable with today’s technology, and the default condition will be war and catastrophe.  I personally hope we will see at least a short run of prosperity so we have a chance to develop our best long-term options.

Otherwise, we are just huddling on a tiny planet worrying about running out of oil.

The Smoking Gun - Warmergate

CO2 a dangerous gas?

The EPA has recently decided to enforce CO2 controls on the absurd theory that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. Chaudhari, a railroad engineer by training, is cheerleading delegates in Copenhagen to decide how much the “developed nations” (read: the US and the EU) must pay the undeveloped nations (read: China and India) to compensate them for their cost to reduce CO2. All over the world the leading broadcast networks are making believe that the science of man-made globe warming is “settled” and going on to speculate what the effects will be.

Not since the Church forced Galileo to recant has any scandal this large set back the cause of truth.

Scientific Consensus

Is there any scientific consensus on man-made global warming? If you are like most politicians and you can’t do the science, how about looking at the opinions of the real experts? Look at the qualifications of these 150 signatories. How can anyone claim scientific consensus of man made global warming?

http://www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/

My friends are suing the EPA for exceeding their charter on the CO2 pronouncement. There will be a court challenge on a factual and scientific level. I believe the EPA will lose.

Corrupted Data - the Smoking Gun

In spite of the climategate emails, here are those that say the data, as shown in the IPCC report and the the infamous “hockey stick” curve publicized by Michael Mann, are still evidence of a problem we must address, no matter the cost. But the data behind that report, produced by the CRU group, has never been released and they apparently destroyed it. Of the three remaining data bases, two are derived from that CRU data and the third is at NASA, and is known as GISS.

Willis Eschenbach analyzed the temperature data in the GISS data base derived from the Southern Hemisphere, a critical part of the global warming theory. In order to understand the way that pieces of data were adjusted for any relocations of the stations, missing data, or badly calibrated instruments, he chose the raw data from Darwin, Australia. There were 5 stations, numbered Zero through Four. In order to determine if a station's data was reliable, the data from one station was cross-checked with up to three other stations, hopefully nearby, and the odd man was voted out. Some stations had incomplete data and other data from nearby stations were used to fill in. Al this is compatible with real-life data gathering . Been there, done that.

Willis then reverse-engineered the "adjustments" put into the GISS data from the actual raw data. This was necessary since the actual adjustment codes that went into the IPCC report have never been revealed. What he found was a smoking gun:

All the temperature increase included in the GISS data were caused by "adjustments". The raw data did not show any temperature increases at all. I include a reference to his study for your further research.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

Now others are taking the time to examine the GISS data in comparison with the raw data. The same sort of smoking gun adjustments were found in data from Orland, California, Fairmont, California and Tennessee.

No objective observer can view these "adjustments" with anything but alarm. This isn't any kind of coincidence and it can't be an innocent difference of opinion about global warming.

It's time to get all the IPCC data out in the open and checked thoroughly.

Standard of Integrity, Standard of Care

My highest personal standard prevents me from supporting either the Waxman/Markey cap and trade bill in the US or the UN FCC treaty being discussed in Copenhagen. While they refer to a piece of bad science, their impact has nothing to do with correcting a climate problem and everything to do with creating massive government intervention.

The slightest doubt about the causes of global warming ought to be sufficient grounds to stop these two efforts dead in their tracks. That is the high standard. That is responsible behavior. Everything else is empty rhetoric.

Then we can launch the long-overdue climate satellite and try to recover some of the historical proxy data and get a real baseline and some current and reliable readings. Then we can look at all the previously ignored geo-engineering proposals and set up real incentives for alternative energy and conservation.

Those are the things a person of high standards would require. They make a considerable contrast to what is happening right now.

Extent of the Petroleum Scandal

You are beginning to see the the extent of the energy/greenie/cap&trade scandal. It is the largest fraud in human history, one which underpins many of the the seemingly illogical decisions our elected officials make, and our international policies as well.

My company first handled a small amount of Bakken oil in June of this year. It is a light, sweet oil comparable to Bonny Light, Saudi Light or Louisiana Sweet. No one has yet stepped up to build a pipeline for the delivery of this oil. It was shipped by rail - the same rail company that Warren Buffet just bought. The cost of developing this oil source would be a tiny fraction of the cost of the Waxman/Markey Cap & Trade bill. There is enough Bakken crude to power the USA for 2000 years.

The Bakken is not the only suppressed discovery. An enormous field was discovered a decade ago off Alaska's North Slope, on Gull Island, by Chevron. It was measured, capped and all but one or two who knew of it were silenced. This is the same Chevron who killed GM's original EV-1 electric car and who still controls the company that makes the best batteries, Ovonics. Part of the media message that disparaged North Slope oil was the accidental oil spill of the Exxon Valdez. Every time we hear of North Slope oil now we see dead, slimy seals.

If we had this oil, we would not be funding Wahabbi terrorists with oil money. We would not be paying oil money to Russian oligarchs. Chavez would be bankrupt and unable to pay off his political cronies for a comeback after he was voted out of office. GM would still be in business on its own hook. Our balance of payments would be positive, not negative. We would not be involved in Afghanistan with an insurgency fueled by Islamic oil and opium. Iran would not have the funds for a nuclear weapon. Etc.

Do you get it now?

The relationship between powerful forces in the USA and Saudi Arabia, through the medium of Aramco, is a conspiracy so deep and so large that it is difficult to comprehend.

Richard Nixon was faced with the rising costs of the escalating Vietnam conflict and runaway inflation. Aramco was already in existence, founded by the "seven sisters", the world's largest oil companies, in collaboration with the then struggling Saudi royal family. Henry Kissinger provided the following solution:

The USA would buy huge quantities of Saudi crude oil and maintain a high price for it, in order to make the Saudis wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Remember, crude once sold for under $2 a barrel. In exchange for this, the Saudis would buy bonds issued by the US Treasury, and that money would fund the US economy and the war in Vietnam. So the taxpayer's dollar was circulated to the mideast and then back to the US Treasury. Among the various necessary "adjustments" were:

- Increasing the tax rates on US citizens and corporations partly by allowing inflation to raise incomes into the higher regions of the tax rate schedule

- Increasing both oil usage and gasoline taxes. Note how little incentive there was in 1970's for fuel efficient cars. Auto sales boomed, roads were built, and alternative energy was quashed.

- The dollar was allowed to rise against other currencies to keep the dollar price of oil high. The Fed controlled interest rates and the rate of inflation to control the value of the dollar.

- In order to keep the "deal" in operation, the Saudi royal family had to be protected. When bin Laden became a threat to the Saudi family, he was pursued, but never eliminated because that made the USA essential to the royal family. US forces "failed" to pursue and trap bin Laden at least three times.

The Saudi royal family is observant of the strict Wahabbi traditions only in the public eye. I have heard that the Royals like a good Scotch whiskey, and their behavior in Switzerland and London is hardly traditional. However, they remain vulnerable to Islamic radicals and, being rich and Saudi, they prefer to buy them off rather than to be on the wrong side of a jihad. The royals are constantly worried about maintaining their ruling position. I am informed by a Saudi security agent on that score.

Oil prices are maintained by a mechanism here in the USA where futures are traded on an exchange and the major buyers and sellers are Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, and Citi. The volume of trades on these exchanges exceeds actual world oil production by a factor of ten. How can this be? Many trades are "round trip" trades, where a single party both buys and sells the same lot of oil, affecting the market price but not taking delivery of any product. Very little real product changes hands. This is also part of the "deal". These companies make money on the trading fees, not just the speculation on price changes. They are not hurting. They get sweetheart deals on oil lots as additional compensation. They manage to raise the price of crude far above it's real value. Propaganda about "peak oil" and "global warming" do the rest.

I don't know how much money has been moved around and how much has been extracted from the US economy by these arrangements. I has to be in the tens of trillions. The flow of money from these deals is such a huge part of the banking reserves for every large bank, that they would collapse if it was withdrawn.

No wonder Obama bows to King Faisal.

Carbon Legislation and the Treaty

The duty of responsible government is to document problems, research alternative solutions, and implement the best of those. There is a massive failure of all three principles in the current Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade bill.

First, the US Cap & Trade legislation assumes an anthropomorphic warming effect due to CO2 before any agency is set up to monitor or take fair measurements, and the best of existing evidence is ignored. The legislation sets CO2 goals that have no scientific basis, and then mandates onerous taxes to force some kind of compliance. None of the alternatives, such as geo-engineering or Manhattan-project efforts for alternative energy are even contemplated. Nuclear energy, an obvious solution to CO2 emission, is disfavored.

The bill creates a new currency, the carbon credit, which can be turned into dollars at a variable rate based on legislated escalations, not results or real value. This new currency is inflationary and unregulated by any fiscal agency. At the beginning of the enactment period, this currency is handed out to "deserving" industries in a highly political manner, effectively bribing supporters and generating campaign contributions from those who can pay for favors. Acceptance of these widespread credits by the Government gives them instant value as a form of currency. Winning these handouts is a major lobbying effort, underway right now.

Fact: Goldman Sachs owns 10% of the carbon exchange which will trade carbon credits world-wide. This is a $6 trillion market created out of fiat fake currency and supported on the backs of consumers.

The handouts weaken the effect of the CO2 reduction to the point where it is absurd to think there will be any

measurable effect at all. There will be no global effort, so CO2 reduction by the USA will simply mean that emitting industries that cannot pass on their carbon costs to consumers will simply relocate elsewhere. Since China and India will not pass such a law, emitting industries will go there. That will weaken the American economy and cost jobs, not create them.

The main effect of the bill appears to be to raise another tax and to transfer power over a vast segment of industry to the Federal Government and the politicians who control the handouts. The public will pay with higher costs on necessary things like heat and electricity, higher costs on everything that is made with energy as a major input, such as plastics, steel and cement, and pay again through a net loss of jobs. This cost will be about $1.6 trillion.

A few supporters of Cap & Trade tout the bill as a way to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. This would be a worthy goal but oil is not running out.

Proven reserves can be legally claimed only by drilling a hole and having a geologist certify the findings. The oil majors would rather leave the oil in the ground than drill. It costs nothing to leave it there and it will appreciate in value if it is kept scarce.

At the same time, they are spending millions on 3D seismic surveys, which are so good they are like an underground X-ray of the oil pools. A map of surveyed but unproven reserves shows significant oil fields in almost every country in the globe, and the USA is the richest of them all.

We have more than enough in the US to get rid of suppliers in inimical countries. We don't seem to want to advertise or drill for that oil. I cite Bakken reserves, Gull Island, Alaska, and the Athabasca tar sands. All of these are cheaper sources of energy than wind. They will certainly serve us until we have real substitutes for the convenient, compact, powerful liquid energy of petroleum. However, creating an artificial scarcity in the commodity that provides 75% of all the mechanical power on Earth makes the unproven reserves even more valuable. The oil majors KNOW that cap & trade will not work, they KNOW they can pass on any extra costs to consumers and they KNOW they are going to make more $trillions on the unproven reserves when they finally decide to tap them.

That is a steep price for a non-existent benefit. Foisting this bill on the USA goes well beyond hypocrisy into malfeasance and treason.

Gaia's Natural Language Post #1

Let’s inject a little science into this discussion.  Science is not some egghead opinion – science is Gaia’s native language. 

 

We may call it the “energy” problem but it isn’t. It’s the “power” problem.  Energy is force over distance.  Moving a metric ton uphill a meter against gravity requires 9800 joules.  It could take a week or a second.  If you do it in a second it requires 9800 watts of power.  If you do it in a week it only takes 16 milliwatts.  What you buy when you get a tank of fuel is latent, or potential energy, but the rate your engine burns it is power (“horsepower”).  What you buy off the electric grid is power.  Power is energy burned per unit of time.

 

Energy on this planet (are we all from the same planet? Raise your, er, arms or tentacles, or whatever) comes from only three original sources:  the sun’s radiation, past or current, the radioactive material in the Earth that came from burned out stars, and the residual heat that came from the infalling matter when the planet was created.  Every other manifestation of energy, from fossil fuels to wave power, derives from one of those sources.   I deliberately omit such esoteric things as zero-point energy, and sustainable hydrogen fusion until someone tells me they can demonstrate it.

 

If it is stored, such as fossil fuel or the head on a hydro-electric dam, it is potential energy.  When we convert potential energy into electricity or horsepower it becomes power.  Petroleum reserves are potential energy.  Coal reserves are potential energy. 

 

When we exert a force to move something, such as a water falling from a dam or a speeding vehicle, we are converting potential energy into kinetic energy.  Nature does this all the time, creating tides from the moon’s attraction, hurricanes from stored heat in the ocean, and forest fires from stored energy in the form of trees. 

 

Every time some energy is converted from one form to another, some energy is lost.

 

Thermodynamics is the study of such conversions.  The zeroth law is that the temperature of a material is a measure of the motion of its particles.  Heat is molecular motion.  Temperature is a way of measuring the collective speed of large numbers of particles.  Usually we are talking about molecules as the moving particles.  So temperature and kinetic energy are related.  For the curious, we call this aggregate, which cannot be seen in individual cases such as the “temperature” of a single particle, as an emergent phenomenon.  It emerges from the collective motion of a huge number of random particles, each with a different velocity.  It is a lot more convenient to just measure the temperature than to describe the velocities of a bazillion molecules.

 

Every time we convert energy from one form to another we run into the first law of thermodynamics.  Energy can only run downhill, from regions of higher concentration to regions of lower concentration.  In an engine we drive a piston with hot gases, allowing the gasses to expand, cool and escape at a far lower temperature.  All engines start with higher temperature sources of energy and convert them into lower energy sources.

 

In my physics class we referred to the laws of thermodynamics as: 0)  You can’t get something for nothing; 1) You can’t win; and 2) Things aren’t getting any better.  That last needs a bit more explanation.

 

When an engine ( any kind of engine, none are immune) exhausts its stuff (steam, hot air, or carbon dioxide)  that exhaust is above the ambient temperature.  It has to be or it won’t exhaust.  Anything above ambient temperature is wasted heat.  The second law is that everything wastes heat.  There is no such thing as 100% efficiency.  The whole universe is converting energy from one form to another all the time at a furious pace, and there is waste in every step.  So eventually, there will be no more pockets of higher energy and every thing will come to a dead stop.  The stars will go out.  This is entropy inevitably winding down to zero.

 

My species won’t live that long, so I don’t have to worry about it right now.  More of a problem is that the Earth will wind down long before that.  You can’t do anything about it – it will happen.  Perhaps cockroaches and water bears will be around to see it, they got through everything else so far.

 

Our choices are simply between dismal outcomes as long as we are confined to this planet.  One is farther out, one is nearer.  One is more dire, and earlier.   If we elect to eliminate all possible sources of power generation and conserve our planetary resources, 95% of us will be dead in a few generations.  That is what the planet can support with primitive technology – about 200 to 500 million humans.  That number is based on population studies of primitive human cultures.

 

If we elect to burn our existing resources on an exponential curve so that each succeeding generation has a rising energy budget and that population is growing at the current rate, we will lose as much as half the population in ten generations.  That is based on climate models and rather pessimistic projections of the consequences of habitat destruction.

 

Obviously, neither extreme is welcome, but the dependence of human beings on huge power resources is absolute.  There is no quality of life, no prosperity, no science and no hope without power.  That is not an opinion, but a conclusion based on economics buttressed by anthropology and the history of technology.  There is no possible way for us to return to a simple pastoral life style without tragedy on an unimaginable scale.

 

The loose cannon on the deck is technology.  Every solution to the problem of finding the happy medium between these extremes involves engineering, science, invention, innovation and new technology.  That is where we have to focus our attentions and that is the subject of yet another blog.