Is there a new age of prosperity just around the corner based upon a new green economy, if so what form will it take ? I will start by offering the opinion that no one really knows what the green economy is or how it will benefit us other than creating jobs building windmills which are expensive, don't work when the wind is too low or too high and run on subsidies paid by you and I to rich land owners (and in economic terms a job is a cost not a benefit anyway ). We could create many jobs for example by doing away with combined harvesters, think of all the additional salaries that will benefit the local economy and the tax they would pay to central government. OK I wasn't being serious there but there are many people who do think in those terms. What do you think the green economy will look like.
green economy will (and already has) cause inflation green subsidies paid for by increases in energy costs for home owners green cross subsidies for VED so nobody can afford to run a V6 or V8 and everybody is forced to run around in little buzz bomb sub 1200cc cars that last about 7 years, a huge carbvon foot print to build another car to last 5 years rather than building something properly to last 15 - 20 years in the first instance huge increase in coal fired power stations to provide the "clean energy" to power electric vehicles huge increase and introduction of pay to use road user taxes to prop up government coffers after people can't afford to buy anty petrol and are forced into electric cars the green future is looking rather dim and it will cost us dearly
Put simply it will take the form of TAX......... Mankind will carry on doing what mankind does because mother nature intends it that way. The problem is that the Ecomentalists have made so much noise in the past that the f***ing politicians have twigged they can use that doom-mongery as an excuse for taxing us. If the f***ing ecomentalists had kept their traps shut inflation would have been lower and we wouldn't have the next problem we will have to face which is the problem of disposing of all the batteries from our eco-friendly cars.......Answer......MORE TAX!! Mr angry!!
maybe the politicians can get the horse in front of the cart for a change and introduce a green tax on electric cars for battery disposals before the problem gets completely out of hand
Until someone can show me all the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet about the full costs of making solar panels, windmills, nuclear power plants, their life expectancy, maintenance and the total energy costs in all the different forms of energy production, I just don't have a view. I've never seen this, so any opinion I have is ill informed. Take Eco cars. My not particularly fuel efficient Alfa has 110'000 miles on the clock, 12 years old. The motor is surely capable of double that, and the car is rust free. I can't help feeling that using it to the end of its life, say another 10 years, is the most energy efficient thing I can do, rather than, for example, chopping it in for an electric one. What is the real energy cost in producing electricity? I have absolutely no idea. As with so much, the facts you need to make real decisions are thin on the ground.
I Googled it. I watched the film. There is far more to say about this than I can be bothered to type on an iPhone. Wait till I get to a Mac - then I'll bore ya!
There are some good figures out there on Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). Some typical values are - Conventional oil 100:1, deepwater oil 20:1, nuclear 10:1, windmills + PV 3-5:1, shale oil 1:1. Nothing comes close to the easy oil of the last century. Absolutley agree with you on your 12 year old Alfa.
Utopia by another name. Possibly achievable for the super rich or for 10% if we reduced the population by 80% and enslaved 10% but it is totally unrealistic that the current population of the world could transition to and maintain that lifestyle - even if they wanted to. I will take a bit longer to explore the site further but I wouldn't expect to significantly change my initial view. Today we are having to make choices between planting crops to feed people or fuel vehicles
Diamonds, by their scarcity and physical properties, have a financial value which has no theoretical limit. Oil is similar but different. You have to invest energy to extract energy and when the ratio of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) reaches 1:1 there is no longer any gain to be had, at any price. Technology helped initially but EROEI ratio's of recent and proposed solutions are all significantly lower than that of conventional oil. Sure any return is better than no return but the required investment to maintain current energy useage increases massively and that investment requires a return that becomes harder and harder to achieve. This means that the economy will run out of steam before it runs out of oil.
Are we? There seems to be an underlying assumption that farmers have the objective of producing the maximum amount of crops they can. That is not so - farmers' objective is to produce the maximum amount of crops they can sell. Given buyers willing to pay, most farmers could produce more. It is quite wrong to assume farmers are already producing as much as they can. Surely a whole new market for their produce is just what agriculturalists want and need, especially a market for basic, simple, bulk materials.
Neither is human optimism. We understand the energy balance of the earth much better today, but the problem is two fold, EROEI and the massive increase in investment required to maintain current energy supplies and the return on investment (financial) that would be required to justify that investment. Then there is geopolitics.
OK. But shouldn't that be 'That is not so - farmers' objective is to produce the maximum amount of crops they can sell profitably.Given buyers willing and able to pay' Biofuels have very low EROEI ratios, they produce fuels very ineficiently. Modern large scale farming is very energy intensive, the poor of the world cannot afford the price.
Yes, you are right. Obviously "sell" means "sell for more than the cost of production"; and "buyers" means "demand from buyers able to pay for what they want" - what else would these terms mean? Antiquated small scale farming is even more energy intensive, with much energy being supplied by the muscles of the poor and their oxen, but most of the energy used by all farmers comes directly from the sun. ["All" - well maybe not mushroom farmers!] You are right about the inefficiency of current biofuels production methods, of course, but they are still in their infancy. There is a lot of scope for efficiency gains, led by science and technology and driven by both market forces and political imperatives.
Maybe I slipped into pedant mode there but I was emphasising that to work all parts of the equation have to come together. Yes antiquated farming ran on people and livestock, modern farming runs on diesel and fertilisers. Growing food is not constrained by EROEI, it we don't eat we die therefore it is more of an economic requirement. I don't share your optimism in relation to efficiency gains led by sicence and technology and driven by both market forces and political imperative. The easy gains have been made what gains are left to make willalways be difficult and subject to diminishing returns. That last bit of performance is always the hardest to achieve. Every government promises efficiency saving but few actually deliver any. Efficiencies have always tended to come from reducing manpower, the idea that the 'Green Economy' will provide jobs is a reversal of that trend and will be a backward step economically.
Your view could be right John, but it could quite equally be wrong. As I say, we don't know what the future might bring, but the technological advances of the past century have been so massive and so unforeseen that to bet against their continuation seems to me to be unduly pessimistic and going against the trend. What I find more interesting is how machines have delivered the leisure they promised. Unfortunately, it is a bit like the monkey's paw fable. The leisure has come but it is in the form of unemployment for a huge proportion of the workforce in the developed countries. Those still in work are sweating their guts out. The Venus Project looks like a completely unworkable load of tripe, but I have so much to say on the subject (or did, about about 10 am this morning when I had no time to say it) that I may stick a post on my blog and just have you read that. But I did think that the analysis of the current situation was acute. As is always the way, it's a lot easier to see what's wrong than to know how to fix it. So one of the things to throw into the mix is whether we will need as much energy as we consume now if we stop making all this stuff that no one needs and maybe increasingly doesn't want, or can't afford. Economies are slowing worldwide. This might be just a swing in a cycle, or it might be indicative of a bigger malaise. I wrote on my blog a few years ago about how consumption was fuelled by credit and that as everyone had maxed out their credit, I couldn't see how consumption could continue on its previous trajectory. And I still can't.
I'm not going to divulge details of my customers or their lines of business, however we have customers that pay a 2.5% sustainability levy which we use to pay a tree planting project. Those who opt to use this levy actually gain access to the milk and honey land of 'environmental' contracts - government supported green projects in renewables for example. This 2.5% charge is rewarded back to them ten thousand fold in these contracts. This is the new sound of the old military 'cost plus' song sheet. I've been a shareholder in my company for 18 months. When I started buying shares they were 82p each, now they are £1.50 each. This is in a time when our primary market share (construction) has gone even further down the toilet, yet the young upstart (solar and wind power) are becoming growth areas for us. Wind power in particular is a sector we supply a LOT of kit for..
Eco (especially electric) cars are a blind alley, too complex too expensive to produce and too many noxious substances used in them. Solar however, works. Photo voltaic panels are now very efficient, cheap to manufacture and generally made from recycled materials. Thermal solar panels (those used for hot water etc) can reach 400°c inside - as hot as a nuclear reactor. this isn't on a bright sunny day, its on any day. this technology has reached the tipping point where it really is working. I met a customer on Friday who install solar PV panels (the ones that produce electricity) Their product is highly effective, and its quite easy to see why houses with solar panels on the roof have become commonplace
In governmental circles "efficiency savings" are simply a weasel words meaning expenditure cuts. Goverments can always cut expenditure if they choose to but the result is a reduction in the output of services delivered to the population, which is politically damaging. "Efficiency savings" is a bit of spin designed to suggest that expenditure can somehow be cut without affecting output. As you rightly say this rarely happens. This has nothing to do with energy efficiency as a measurable scientific quantum, which is the sense in which you were (very accurately) using it.
