What are we gonna do?

[harryting]

The market will take care most of the issues, eventually.

What is giving me a heartburn is the hypocrisy (or a lack of understanding) shown by the extremists. They always want their cake and eat it too.

Dan, if you remember, Washington passed a referendum requiring utiltiies to have certain percentage of *green power* 2-3 years back (before the current recession). Now that extra cost is being passed on to the consumer and guess who complain the loudest?! The same **** ***!

 

[Peter Nachtwey]

I think you should start by reducing your energy consumption.

We are doing that and it is being done. We just built an energy efficient building. We have lights that turn on and off automatically, sun lights in the warehouse areas, double pane windows etc. It still takes energy to heat the build up when it is below freezing.

A liter of 95 octane gazoline costs 1.5 € ~ 2 US$. A kWH electricity costs approx. 0.23 € ~ 0.30 US$. Cars are taxed according to their energy efficiency etc.

I pay about 1/4 what you do for electricity and about $3/gal instead of your $7.50/gal. If I reduce my electriciy consumption by 30% I still pay more and I still need to get to work. I don't see how this maintains a standard of living.
Compare the distances we must travel. We have a whole lot of nothing space that is bigger than Denmark.
Taxing cars according to their energy efficiency has been tried in some places. People did buy more fuel efficient cars AND then the states that raised taxes complained that their gas tax revenue was down.

But there are also investment benefits for investing in energy saving solutions.

I have done that.

So it can be done without reducing the standard of living.

No it can't. You will always reduce the standard of living for some one.
At least your car and gas tax idea will. People in rural areas have to get around. When joe six pack has to pays and extra $4.00 per gallon of gas for tax, that comes right out of his beer allowance if he can afford to buy that.
I no for me that would mean about an extra $4 a day if I only go to work.
That is $800 per year just going to work.

The hard part is to achieve another 50% reduction in energy consumption.

I agree here. There are plenty of energy reduction things that are easy to do but they are being done where they make sense. There has to be a ROI.

*: No, there is no public uproar regarding the high taxes. The population knows that it gets it all back in schools, roads, pensions, hospitals, kindergartens etc. etc.

Speak for yourself. I regard the government as being corrupted by lobbyist and inefficient. It makes no different which party is in power. Bureacrats rule by regulation and not by law. Bureaucrats are mindless idiots that don't produce any wealth like lawyers. You should see our transit/bus system. What a joke. It takes an hour and a half to go 6 miles. I can walk that fast and ride a bike twice as fast but I would need to take a shower after getting to work. The bus time delay occurs because two transfers are required and the next bus left a minute before you arrived so you must wait a half hour for the next bus. I complained to our transit authorities but it makes no difference. I can optimize connections and schedules. I am good at that sort of thing. We have big buses and even smaller ones now riding around emtpy half the time. Sometimes they have a couple of people on them that have time to waste.

 

[RussB]

Oil- The world has become so dependent on products derived from oil that I am increasingly skeptical that we have the capacity to break the cycle. An example how interwoven oil is into our life can be found in the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (everyone should read this book). The industrial food machine is a big consumer of oil. The following is paraphrased from the book.

More than half of the world’s supply of nitrogen is man made.

Interesting article until this statement, I quit reading here.
Nitrogen is not man made, never was, never will be, it is an element. The air you breath is about 78% Nitrogen. Now Nitrites and Nitrates are different and high nitrogen fertilizers are what I believe are being referred to here. But remember "words have meanings" and statements like the one here makes me believe that the writer did not do their homework and that a high content of the article is conjecture.
I already have my own opinions which I try hard to base on facts. I really do not need these 'facts' diluted any more.

 

[RocketTester]

Brings back memories.

When I was finishing my BS, energy talk was the rage, with President Carter at the helm. In grad school, most fellow ME students were doing research on solar energy and such since that was the funding pool. I did a senior project on the economics of energy which concluded that what is most economic is also most energy-efficient since all costs tie back to oil (laborers use energy at home, etc). This idea was promoted by Prof Odum, an ecologist at UGA. Mike6158 re-iterates this as regards fertilizer. I also wrote a paper that debunked the "solar-assisted heat pump", based on a simple "thermo 1st law" argument.

Since then, enormous strides have been made in photo-electic cells and wind power development. The later now "pencils out" without government assistance. On the downside, environmentalists have opposed almost every energy alternative, though some are reversing on nuclear power since about the only way to make mega-power without CO2. Indeed, German Greens came to power pledging to shut their few nuke plants, but haven't done so. In a related note, I read that R-134A is now bad since a potent "climate change" gas. Since the EPA will never back-track on its "Freon causes ozone-hole" claim, it is moving toward mandating butane mixtures as a coolant (currently in Europe), though it formerly suppressed its use in automobile AC for "safety reasons" (OSHA's concern?). Environmentalists may be secret conservatives since they follow Nancy Reagan's "just say no" plan.

 

[leitmotif]

The market will take care most of the issues, eventually.

What is giving me a heartburn is the hypocrisy (or a lack of understanding) shown by the extremists. They always want their cake and eat it too.

Dan, if you remember, Washington passed a referendum requiring utiltiies to have certain percentage of *green power* 2-3 years back (before the current recession). Now that extra cost is being passed on to the consumer and guess who complain the loudest?! The same **** ***!

Harry
Your statement re heartburn summarizes my feelings and why I posted it. Other than their apparent total ignorance what really gets me is they want it at same or lower cost of existing generation, with NO emissions or environmental degradation, and they want it right now.

Re statemtent on oil converted to nitrogen. Nope cannot be done - you can make NH4 and other nitrogen containing molecules which is what farmers use to get nitrogen into soil. Poor wording, no argument at all - if people are gonna write this stuff they should make a better effort at accuracy.
Reminds me of media statement at liquid oxygen tanker capsize "highly flammable oxygen" Oxygen by itself does not burn - but WITH a combustible it is gonna be exiting.

I know a guy who calls fuel cells fool cells. He is also death on hydrogen as a fuel.

Seems to me we should be studying, researching and evaluating all options that will let us minimize energy use for more or same output ASSUMING there will be no oil in 20 years. No one option will meet needs of all in all locations and at same cost so we need multiple options.

Interesting comments thank you all

Dan Bentler

 

[KalleOlsen]

I read somewhere sometime (and with no big interest at that time) that the world used more energy on cooling than heating. If we could use solar energy to cool our offices and houses, we could at least freeze with a green grin.

Btw here we have had so far, the coldest winter in 110 years. I cut my own firewood but unfortunally my Jonsered still needs gas to run.

Kalle

 

[testsubject]

What about this alternative. I remember reading about it about a year ago and was pretty excited then...
http://www.bloomenergy.com/

 

[harryting]

The "Bloom Box" was featured on a 60 Minute episode about a year back. It's basically a fuel cell generator powered by natural gas or another hydrocarbon fuel.

I remember watching it and shaking my head at the TV. The 60 minute story is simply glowing, with reporter saying stupid thing like how this will "revolutionize" the energy business and I don't recall the more familiar words "fuel cell" ever or very late into the segment. Most tech reporters also felt the same and lambasted the reporting done by 60 Minute.

Wikipedia got a good summery of this technology if you are interested.

 

[Tom Jenkins]

I've been designing energy conservation systems since the mid '80s. Conservation is still the most cost effective energy "source" available. If everyone emulated Peter's company we would make significant progress.

There is no easy answer to generation. The big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't consistent enough for base load and not predictably available for peak loads. If some genius comes up with a storage mechanism for wind and solar they will become a significant source, but until then I'm skeptical.

I do think that the market place will find the correct mix faster and more efficiently than government subsidies. Bereaucrats can't seem to understand the law of unintended consequences, but the open market never ignores it! Government intrference can be useful in funding basic research and jump starting new technologies (think nuclear power for example) but I think the influence of government over the long haul distorts economics (think grain ethanol) and inhibits creativity.

Will restricted energy availability lower our standard of living - probably. Will it lower our quality of life - not so much. After all, how many people really need a 90" flat screen TV?

 

[JesperMP]

@ Peter Nachtwey.

You are complaining about the sad state of your public transport, but dont you see that it is an argument for it being fixed.
The US has a whole lot of nothing space that is bigger than Denmark ? Yes, but not so that it can account for double the energy consumption per capita. I bet that most people still live in or near cities and commute to work.
In Denmark I argue we have a standard of living that is at least on the level of the US, but we have a documented energy consumption that is half of yours.

Taxing energy consumption means you will be an incentive to reduce energy consumption. It works. IT WILL NOT COST YOU ANYTHING. On the contrary.
Because 1: The taxes will influence you to reduce the energy consumption in a multitude of ways - so you do not have to pay nearly as much more taxes.
Because 2: The taxes gained from energy consumption mean that taxes on income can be reduced.
Look at it holistically. If your country saves energy (and thereby money) everyone in your country will become wealthier by the same amount.

 

[harryting]

Look at it holistically. If your country saves energy (and thereby money) everyone in your country will become wealthier by the same amount.

I'm not originally from the US. My feeling on this is that the US is not the same as country XXY. Whether the topic is mass transportation, broadband access, or... being different is not the same. US actually doesn't compare bad at all with Canada and Australia, two nations with similiar livable land mass distribution and living standard. Most importantly, if you add in the equation of US's GDP and export, US looks even better. Yes, even today, US makes a lot of "stuff" for rest of the world.

Wealth is destroyed by tax. Because if Wealth is increased by productivity and trade, not by amount of gold or currency (think of Zimbabwe).

This doesn't mean we can't do better, we can. But I think a lot of criticism is misplaced.

 

[tracer]

jesper: Raising taxes on energy here in the states, would just about kill me. A major diiference between Denmark and here is distance. My plant is approx 68 miles each way from the house. when I was working I was paying 500 to 600$ USD's a month just on gas and I don't drive a big gas hogging SUV

 

[Peter Nachtwey]

You trust government too much.

@ Peter Nachtwey.
You are complaining about the sad state of your public transport, but dont you see that it is an argument for it being fixed.

How do you tell public employees that they are idiots? I don't think the concept of optimizing the routes by computer has even occurred to them. Even our street lights are stupid. It seems that I must wait at a light with no cars going by until another car comes along to stop and lets me go.

The US has a whole lot of nothing space that is bigger than Denmark ? Yes, but not so that it can account for double the energy consumption per capita.

What about industry? As pointed out above the US makes a lot of stuff. Making things like steel and aluminum require a lot of energy. You don't use much energy if you just buy the steel and aluminum.

I bet that most people still live in or near cities and commute to work.
In Denmark I argue we have a standard of living that is at least on the level of the US, but we have a documented energy consumption that is half of yours.

It is close if you look at the averages you are right. However, the US GDP per capita is MUCH higher then Denmarks.

Taxing energy consumption means you will be an incentive to reduce energy consumption. It works. IT WILL NOT COST YOU ANYTHING. On the contrary.

That is insane. To give the government anything more that what is necessary is stupid because they will waste it. I prefer to trust competition and market force.

Because 1: The taxes will influence you to reduce the energy consumption in a multitude of ways - so you do not have to pay nearly as much more taxes.

So how does one get to work without paying much more?

Because 2: The taxes gained from energy consumption mean that taxes on income can be reduced.

Do you really believe that? From experience I know the government will spend all available money and then some. What they don't take away by taxes they take away by inflation.

Look at it holistically. If your country saves energy (and thereby money) everyone in your country will become wealthier by the same amount.

You are looking only at the consumption side and not the production side of the equation. I don't see how everyone becomes wealthier. That never happens. There are always winners and losers.

 

[JesperMP]

Making things like steel and aluminum require a lot of energy. You don't use much energy if you just buy the steel and aluminum.

I aggree that that accounts for some of the difference.

It is close if you look at the averages you are right. However, the US GDP per capita is MUCH higher then Denmarks.

Wrong Peter.
US GDP per capita in 2010 = 47132 USD.
Denmark GDP per capita in 2010 = 55113 USD.

So how does one get to work without paying much more?

I have answered already.
Because, 1: You adapt by reducing your energy consumption (you will chose a significantly less thirsty car the next time), and 2: The taxes will be spent in a way that they come back to you.

Your arguments circle around that you dont trust government.
I repeat that we dont live in straw huts around here. And we really really have half the energy consumption than you have.
You want a quick technological fix. But it will not come for a forseeable time.
For ideological reasons you dont want to do what is easy to do right here and now.
I give up.

 

[tracer]

Personal I think ya'll are comparing apples to oranges here:
< 3.79 million square miles > vs <43,094 square kilometres >
<310 million people > vs <+/- 5.6 million people >
regarding higher taxes and trusting the goverment: let us consider what happened after the state goverment won those big lawsuits against big tobacco.....
remember all these millions of dollars were supposed to be re-compence to the states for health care for indigent smokers. I dunno about the other states, but in texas, that money went for pay raise's and new offices, and new gov cars for the elected officials. our taxes didn't go down one cent. In geberal our taxes are never reduced. in fact there is a Tax on phone service that was instigated, to pay off the spanish american war. It's still being collected. I remember from years ago the city of Lincoln ne, instituted a 1.2 cent tax on cigarettes to pay for the construction of the pershing auditorium. It was paid off in the late 80's, when people asked when the tax was to end, the city stated that it wouldn't that they had already made plans for the income.
as for the GDP (if I remember correctly) this is an average projected by some bean counter. A good majority of Americans make a decent wage. but we're also still supporting the remenants of the welfare queens, and others who don't work.
In denmark ya'll get free health care (?) while we basically are expected to pay for all of our's individually. or do with out. one bout with cancer can easily cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars.