| Monday
December 29, 2008 We have a large and
varied mailbag; I'll get to what I can.
========
Subj: The real lesson of recent
history
Is not the real lesson of recent history --
climatological, political, financial, take your pick -- that Things Are
Variable And Not Always Predictable and that humans in general, and
Americans in particular, need the resources to adapt to whatever changes
happen?
Or, as Herman Kahn used to say, that the most
surprising thing of all would be for any "surprise-free projection" really
to come true?
This is scarcely a new lesson:
Panta rei kai ouden menei (All is in flux; nothing
abides) goes back to Heraclitus (540-480 B.C.). Alas, there's *another* oft-retaught
lesson of history -- the lesson that humans do not learn anything from
history.
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
I would not argue very strenuously with that. One
can hope that reason will prevail, but it usually takes a while.
==========
Subject: Frank Borman reminisces
Dr Pournelle
Almost an hour, but worth every minute, especially the
last five.
http://eaa.org/video/
timelessvoices.html?videoId=5474347001
Live long and prosper
h lynn keith
============
How desperate are climate
scientists? Desperate enough to contemplate geo-engineering
Dear Jerry,
For a counterpoint to the articles that one of your
readers cited about global warming being disproven, Hansen is still in full
panic mode as the following indicates. Whether one agrees or disagrees with
him, the fact that he is willing to consider Geoengineering indicates how
bad he thinks the situation is and his doubts about whether any feasible
measures to reduce emissions will be adequate.
How desperate are climate scientists? Desperate enough
to contemplate geo-engineering
"On Wednesday, in the Q & A session after Jim
Hansen's talk about the dire state of the earth at the AGU meeting,
eminent Rutgers University professor Paul Falkowski asked Hansen: "The
genie is out of the bottle now -- What do you think of geoengineering as a
way to deal with global warming?" I half-expected Hansen to throw his
laser-pointer at Falkowski. After all, geoengineering -- deliberate,
large-scale manipulation of the earth's climate -- has long been a taboo
subject in the climate debate. Only crackpots brought it up. But Hansen
didn't miss a beat. He said it would make sense to try "soft"
geoengineering first, such as no-till agricutlure and afforestation. But
as a last resort, Hansen admitted, more aggressive geoengineering schemes
might be necessary. Call it prudence. Or desperation. "
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/12/20/12555/747
-- Robert K. Kawaratani
瓦谷ロバート孝一
Or call it great theater.
==
Subject: Global warming isn't a theory any more, it's
a religion
Jerry, I've been confronting True Believers in Man
Made Global Warming with the inconvenient fact that the last several years
have been colder than average. Their answer? "Global Warming doesn't just
mean hotter weather, it means greater temperature swings. Hot years will be
hotter than before and colder ones will be colder." In other words, if it
gets hotter, it's Global Warming. If it's colder, well, that's Global
Warming too. At this point, it looks like there's no observation that can
disprove Global Warming once you've bought into the idea, and the whole
theory becomes meaningless in the sense of Pepper. It's no longer junk
science, it's a religious cult with a pseudo-scientific basis. And The
Marching Morons get one step closer...
-- Joe Zeff
If you can't play with words, what good are they?
http://www.lasfs.info
===========
Jerry,
You may have already seen this, but it is quite
counterintuitive to me. One would think that the obscure articles would get
seen and read electronically.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/
content/abstract/321/5887/395
Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of
Science and Scholarship
James A. Evans
Online journals promise to serve more
information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched
and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists
and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather
than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an
ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their
citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show
that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to
be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those
citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of
print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor
findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is
more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch
with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the
range of findings and ideas built upon.
Dave Hammond
===========
Christmas and history
Merry Christmas to you, Dr. P,
I received the fairly normal (and duly appreciated)
"dad gifts" for Christmas this year. The most notable exception was from my
son the Marine who is currently stationed stateside after his initial
posting in Okinawa. He was unable to come home for the holidays, so I was
opening presents with his mother and siblings. I opened the small gift he
had sent for me, ands I was stunned speechless. It was a shadow box. The
backdrop was the immortal black-and-white Joe Rosenthal photo of the flag
raising on Mount Suribachi. Inside was a spent bullet, some shell casings,
and black volcanic sand that my son had collected on a trip to Iwo Jima.
It has been a rare experience for me to hold history
in my hand. It might serve us well to remember that the US lost
significantly more lives in just over a month on tiny 8 square mile Iwo Jima
(6,821) than we have lost _in_total_ in Iraq and Afghanistan (4,710). It is
hard to imagine more concentrated heroism and warrior ethos than was
displayed by both sides.
Perhaps some might not find these thoughts in the
spirit of the season, but we still have servicemen in far off lands this
very day who fight a deadly and merciless foe. Let us not forget them, nor
those who have gone before, now or ever.
Steve Chu
============
Road Stirs Up Debate,
Jerry
This Representative got an 80-mile, $631 million
interstate spur built in the middle of Pa., and had it named Interstate 99,
instead of something like I-876 or I-280:
http://www.nytimes.com/
2008/12/28/us/28highway.html
"More controversially, Mr. Shuster also included a
rider in the bill intended to speed construction by letting it bypass
federal environmental oversight."
This guy is very talented! I wish he had the same
desire for nuclear energy.
And this just in - the Feds want to tax cows:
http://www.nj.com/news/
index.ssf/2008/12/farmers_
say_new_epaimposed_cow.html
We need to get Rep. Shuster on this!
Ed
============
Subj: Biofuels: Grassoline production to begin in
Tennessee
http://deltafarmpress.com/biofuels/switchgrass-harvest-1128/
>>UT created a for-profit company called Genera
Energy to construct and operate the new facility with a private company
called DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol. Ground was broken on the Vonore
plant Oct. 14 [2008]. When completed, the principle product of the
biorefinery will be “grassoline,” ethanol fuel derived from plant material
such as switchgrass, wood chips and other forest and agricultural biomass.
Expected capacity is 250,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually. ...
Switchgrass was planted on 723 acres in 2008 ...<<
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
===========
A little energy 'rithmatic
In your Dec 18 view you note,
"One hundred 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plants should cost about $150
billion (the first two might cost $25 billion each, but the hundredth will
be less than a billion)."
Taking the low end of your
scale, the capital cost per Watt is $1. I remind (and update) you about my
own fave candidate, <a href="http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com">Focus
Fusion</a>. It has just received paltry ($1.2 million) but adequate funding
to push hard for the next 2 yrs. or so to prove break-even plus with
proton-Boron11 aneutronic fusion.
At ~$250,000 per 5MW generator,
that's $0.05/Watt. Or 1/20 your best case nuclear (fission) plants. And
zero waste disposal costs.
I hope and anticipate that
mass-produced FF generators will be being produced in their thousands under
generous licensing terms all over the planet before any of those dinosaur
Fission behemoth projects will have broken sod. Which will put an end to
them tout suite.
Brian Hall
I had some correspondence with Mr. Hall, but it's
not really relevant. Obviously I would love to have electricity at a much
lower investment rate; and I know there is a lot of theory about Focus
Fusion. To the best of my knowledge they haven't actually generated any
electricity with the system, and the numbers look too good to be true. Of
course many things that look too good to be true turn out to be true --
alas a lot more don't.
I have no special knowledge about Focus Fusion.
They seem to have raised some money so their demonstrations must be
effective, but I don't know anything that isn't easily available to
everyone else. I can hope that their theory works out and all will be
well.
On the other hand, I don't intend to stop pushing
for more conventional sources of energy, particularly nuclear fission,
which we know how to build. I have seen great promises of new developments
used to stop investment in what we can do -- cake tomorrow but never today
-- many times before, and the promised new systems don't live up to the
promises. I can sure hope that this system will do it, and that it has
been neglected by most energy research establishments by mistake or
misunderstanding or misplaced skepticism. I really wish mankind had
access to some new and cheap energy sources, and I encourage those who
have the training and abilities and access to go find out about Focus
Fusion; but I don't agree that we should neglect what we know how to do in
the hopes that new science will bring new techniques soon enough to make
further investment in power generation a waste of resources.
The following is from the June 2008 issue of
Discover:
A focus fusion reactor could be built for just $300,000, says Lerner,
president of
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in New Jersey. But huge technical hurdles
remain. These include increasing the density of the plasma so the fusion
reaction will be more intense. (Conventional fusion experiments do not
come close to the temperatures and densities needed for efficient
hydrogen-boron fusion.) Still, the payoff could be huge: While mainstream
fusion research programs are still decades from fruition, Lerner claims he
requires just $750,000 in funding and two years of work to prove his
process generates more energy than it consumes. “The next experiment is
aimed at achieving higher density, higher magnetic field, and higher
efficiency,” he says. “We believe it will succeed.”
I wish him very well, but my experience has been
that even if it works as advertised it will be a decade or more before
there is any practical application, and two decades before this system
puts power into the grid. I sure hope I am wrong on that, but I don't
think it would be prudent to abandon more conventional power generation
means in hopes that this will make such investment needless. It hasn't yet
broken even in energy input/output, which is the first demonstration that
will be needed. Once it does that, we can get very excited; but it will
still be a while after break even before it adds energy to the grid.
The US is in the Coming Energy Crisis I predicted
back in my columns in the 1970's. It will take us time to get out of it.
New technology will help, but I doubt we'll get out of this on the cheap.
That would take a miracle.
===========
So much for 'homeland security'.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/us/29homicide.html>
- Roland Dobbins
==============
Harry Erwin's Letter from
England
Things are generally quiet over
here.
I'm removing the spaces between
stories to see if it improves the appearance.
BBC review of the political year
<http://tinyurl.com/8w2teb>
Frozen Russian-UK relationship continues (Guardian) <http://tinyurl.com/7p67g3
> MP revolt over privatisation of Royal Mail (Independent) <http://tinyurl.com/9vy9om
> Photographers arrested for breach of the peace (Register story): <http://tinyurl.com/93r6e5
> Marking in red ink banned (Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/9q7nm9>
Secret council tax database (Telegraph--higher council taxes for people who
live in 'nice' areas) <http://tinyurl.com/9tzgf9>
It's cheaper to pay the fines than to buy a television licence
(Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/88z2l7>
(Diane and I do not have a television, and we regularly get threatening
letters from the TV Licensing Authority.) Article on Koon exhibition at
Versailles (Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/74udxa
> (We saw it when we visited Versailles, and we were not impressed.)
Police commander of investigation into the Damian Green arrest accuses the
Tories of being "wholly corrupt" (Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/8blccx
> and <http://tinyurl.com/75aqyf>
Recycling theatre (Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/4khq2q>
Dumbing down of university qualifications at Cambridge (Telegraph) <http://tinyurl.com/a3p7jx
> Historic sites in the UK affected by budget cuts (Independent) <http://tinyurl.com/7gz9jr
> "The drugs watchdog Nice is to change the way it makes decisions onNHS
treatments, bringing to an end decisions on care of terminally ill patients
made solely on cost-efficiency grounds." (Guardian story) <http://tinyurl.com/9cq52a
>
--
Harry Erwin, PhD
"If you can't be a good example,
then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine Aird)
==========
Intelligence: Afghanistan Attacked By
The Math Machine,
Jerry
It's your old friend, Operations Research, now
debuting in Afghanistan:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw
/htintel/articles/20081219.aspx
Ed
Afghanistan Attacked By The Math Machine
December 19, 2008: The U.S. Army is deploying
the same kind of "math and missiles" unit that defeated roadside bombs in
Iraq, to Afghanistan. For the last two years, "Task Force Odin" has used
of manned and UAV aerial reconnaissance aircraft, along with pattern
analysis and data mining, to find IEDs (roadside bombs), and the people
who plant them in Iraq.
Task Force Odin was reported in the media
mainly as aircraft and UAVs watching the roads for signs of IEDs, and UAVs,
while helicopters and gunships opened fire on terrorists trying to set up
roadside bombs. Explosions and dead bodies are more of mass media staple
than massive use of math, no matter how critical the number crunching was
to the undertaking.
Task Force Odin is really about two very
different technologies. On the one hand there was the effort to provide
Internet like access to live video feeds from aircraft and UAVs. The U.S.
Air Force and SOCOM (Special Operations Command) have been particularly
keen on this, and has shared the technology with the other services, and
friendly nations. The less publicized effort was Constant Hawk. This was a
U.S. Army image analysis system that's basically just another pattern
analysis system. However, it's been a very successful system when it comes
to finding newly planted IEDs. Last year, the U.S. Army named Constant
Hawk one of the top ten inventions of the year. The army does this to give
some of the more obscure, yet very valuable, developments some well
deserved recognition.
Pattern analysis is one of the fundamental
tools Operations Research (OR) practitioners have been using since World
War II (when the newly developed field of OR got its first big workout).
Pattern analysis is widely used on Wall Street, by engineers, law
enforcement, marketing specialists, and now, the military. Constant Hawk
uses a special video camera system to observe a locality and find useful
patterns of behavior. Some of the Constant Hawk systems are mounted on
light (C-12s, mainly) aircraft, others are mounted on ground structures.
Special software compares photos from different times. When changes are
noted, they are checked more closely, which has resulted in the early
detection of thousands of roadside bombs and terrorist ambushes. This has
largely eliminated roadside bomb attacks on supply convoys, which travel
the same routes all the time. But those routes are also watched by
Constant Hawk. No matter what the enemy does, the Hawk will notice.
Eventually, the Hawk, and several other efforts, morphed into Task Force
Odin. The Task Force Odin led to the death of over 3,000 terrorists caught
in the act of setting up roadside bombs, or lying in wait to set them off
and attack their victims with gunfire. Hundreds more terrorists were
captured, and many thousands of roadside bombs were avoided or destroyed
before they could go off.<snip>
Someone ought to write a good history of OR.
While no one can do what the Epps genius in NUMBERS does, we have done
some amazing things with OR. The classis story is submarines and convoys:
before the OR guys got into the act, the aircraft and escort ships made
the best possible attacks on submarines; that is, they used tactics
designed to maximize the number of subs they sank. The OR people point out
that this is suboptimization: you want to maximize the number of convoy
ships that get through to harbor.
That turned out to require entirely different
tactics: instead of making the best possible attack, make the fastest
possible attack. Disrupt the submarine's chances of making a successful
attack. Make him submerge (in the early days of the North Atlantic War the
best sub tactic was to surface at night in the path of the convoy or even
inside it, and then launch as many torpedoes as possible). I have glossed
over the finer details, but the point is that the objective was to get
ships through, not sink subs by sneaking up on them. Choosing your
criterion of success is always important.
But there aren't so many of us old OR types left.
My son Phillip learned the trade at the Naval Post Graduate Institute in
Monterrey.
============
Bob Thompson comments on
Education
There are two keys to increased
productivity: low energy prices, and a well educated work force
imbued with a work ethic. Eliminate either and you have a society
either unable or unwilling to meet the demands of the non-productive
(which includes both the deserving poor and the undeserving poor as
well as those "employed" in "jobs" that consume but add nothing to
the goods available for distribution). When energy prices and/or
appropriate education are threatened, it's rather difficult to have
a positive reaction.
Low energy prices are obviously important, but don't
discount the effect of availability and prices of other raw materials. In
particular, metals and chemical feedstocks are critical.
As to your second issue, it's becoming less important
every year as automation reduces the need for human labor. Obviously, we'll
always need well-educated, hard-working people, but fewer of them every
year. Look at agriculture or mining as examples. Five hundred years ago,
essentially everyone worked the fields to produce enough food to keep
everyone fed. One hundred years ago, a mine required an army of laborers.
Today, that mine gets by with a tiny fraction of the number of laborers,
most of whom are now doing jobs that machines and robots will eventually do
instead.
More important, I think, is to focus on educating and
supporting our best and brightest 1%. They're the ones who will develop the
robotics and make the research breakthroughs that will allow everyone else
to live a life of leisure.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com
A republic which has no use for a great part of
its citizens will not remain a Republic. The citizens must feel useful and
important; the best way to do that is to let the BE important. It may be
more efficient to export someone's job and then pay him to do nothing than
it would be to subsidize his work place or put a tariff on the
competition, but do that enough and you have a class of consumers who do
not contribute -- not because they don't want to -- and from there to a
class who feels entitled without contributing is very short. When the mob
is hungry it usually burns the bakeries on the theory that the bakers are
gouging them. We saw that in Los Angeles during the riots. The result was
fewer stores in the poorer areas.
Once you have a consumer class that feels no need
or desire to contribute, it will be organized by community organizers
seeking political office. They may have the well being of their clients in
mind, but they have their own well being in mind as well; and Pournelle's
law is inexorable.
Of course it is important to educate the top 15 -
20%. The 1% will probably mange on their own. neglecting the education of
the best and brightest is one way to decivilize. Alas, it is not the only
way. Neglecting to find some way for the left side of the bell curve to
contribute and feel needed will do the job just about as well.
We have chosen the worst way of all: we pretend
that equality in the classroom and No Child Left Behind can work, when
what that does it subject the left side of the bell curve to
incomprehension and the right side of it to boredom; and worse, since we
don't even enforce discipline, while we do punish teachers who leave
anyone behind without rewarding them for letting any get ahead -- the
results are easily predictable to anyone who has read this far.
We have sown the wind for generations. But taking
the brightest out of general classrooms and leaving the rest behind is a
formula for ending the Republic.
Perhaps we all hope for that?
============
Global Warming?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
comment/columnists/christopherbooker
/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-
made-global-warming-was-disproved.html
Actually, the comments to the article are hilarious!
The first, on May 21, headed
"Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the
entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for
lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed
"The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that
this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's
Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of
2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on
as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic
over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America
have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have
ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in
three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have
been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models
which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as
temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale
not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the
US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years
flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out
much of their net rise in the 20th century. <snip>
-- David Couvillon Colonel of Marines;
Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of
the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog
Excellance; Collector of Hot Sauce; Avoider of Yard Work
=================
Will the US Come Apart?
The end of all things
Jerry,
All good things must come to an end; is this a
potentially accurate assessment?
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB123051100709638419.html
As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor
Predicts End of U.S.
In Moscow, Igor Panarin's Forecasts Are All the Rage;
America 'Disintegrates' in 2010
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin
has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time,
he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will
trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously.
Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.<snip>
There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration
will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds,
poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario --
for Russia."
<snip> Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass
immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil
war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010,
or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska
reverting to Russian control.<snip>
There isn't a serious secessionist movement in
the US; indeed, the nationalization of government is a more marked trend.
Eventually things will come apart, but not in 2010. As to Alaska going
over to the Russians, it's a lot harder to get to Alaska and drop booby
trapped Christmas toys than it was to do that to Afghanistan which was --
then -- territorially contiguous to the USSR.
But what does hold the US together? Not what is
learned in the public schools; not the habits learned in the neighborhood;
so what is holding us together? It was once a shared language, and a
shared religion, and assimilation of immigrants through the melting pot
process. We have given all those up. Professor Panarin is premature. Note
that Robert Heinlein had a similar prediction in Friday quite a few
years ago. The education system no longer creates citizens -- and not much
else does either.
==============
Switchgrass again. Arithmetic
sorely needed.
Jerry,
So, "West Tennessee has the
potential to produce nearly 7 million dry tons of switchgrass per year"
How much will this help? Not much:
Wikipedia notes that "Switchgrass has the potential
for enough biomass to produce up to 100 gallons (380 liters) of ethanol per
metric ton harvested."
So, Tennessee could produce 700 million gallons of
ethanol. Let's assume we have 100 million cars in the US, that drive 10,000
miles and each get 20 miles a gallon. These are approximate numbers and
we're ignoring the fact that ethanol contains less energy per gallon than
gasoline, but you'll see that it doesn't matter.
Those cars use 5 x 10^(10) gallons of gasoline per
year. The supposed ethanol production from switchgrass would produce 1.4% of
the that energy.
But, it is much worse than that. Ethanol production
CONSUMES energy to produce ethanol. Corn-based ethanol is a barely break
even process. Switchgrass is supposed to be better, but this has not been
proven on a large (or even medium) scale.
In fact, "In recent studies, it has been argued that
switchgrass has a negative ethanol fuel energy balance, requiring 45 percent
more fossil energy to create switchgrass into a biofuel than is
produced.[22] Some studies have countered these arguments, however, finding
that for every unit of energy input to create a biofuel from switchgrass,
four units of energy are yielded."
I'd conservatively guess that we could hope that a 1
BTU of energy into the production might yield 2 BTU out, so now the net gain
is 0.7% of gasoline needs.
Furthermore, ethanol production consumes large
quantities of water. In Tennessee they may have enough excess water, but I
don't think it is certain. This talk was a real eye opener for me:
http://www.nseresearch.org/2007/
presentations/NanoTech_Shannon.pdf
Water availability is very likely to be the production
limiter for large scale biofuel production. I believe that the shortage of
water will limit biofuels to a very minor role in the US energy production
portfolio.
Switchgrass is, I suppose, marginally better than
"burning food". However, all biofuel concepts suffer from the same problems:
1. Takes up land (a LOT of land) needed for other
things. It would take roughly 20 or more "Tennessees" to produce the
gasoline for the US.
2. Uses a lot of water. See the talk above.
3. Is fundamentally a very, very diffuse and low power
density system. Plants "fix" solar energy into fuel with an efficiency of
well under 1%. Compute the solar energy incident on the field for the time
to grow a crop, compare that with the energy yield of the plant.
These are fundamental problems. I don't see that they
will ever go away. There is a slightly better case to made for cellulosic
gasoline, which use less water, but this is a technology that has never been
demonstrated outside of lab scale concepts.
In the near term, I'd argue that solar photo-voltaic
and a crash program to build a LOT of 1,000 megawatt nukes makes much more
sense. Combined with plug-in hybrid electric cars, this could make a
measurable dent in our oil imports.
Chuck
P.S. I did these number quickly, on a laptop from a
beach house, so some of them may be wrong, but I've roughed out these
numbers before and always reached the same conclusions...
They don't look to be out of line. One of the
problems of alternate energy schemes is that they assume that capitalists
didn't look at them before: if there were quick and cheap sustainable
energy sources, they'd have been exploited in a war, or during an oil
shortage, or whenever oil got expensive. Now it's true that oil prices
fluctuate in an effort to keep alternatives from being built, but they
can't do that perfectly.
It's possible there are low cost alternative
sustainables, but it's not all that likely.
==
Chuck's recent letter
Chuck wrote '...Ethanol production CONSUMES energy to
produce ethanol. Corn-based ethanol is a barely break even process....
"...it has been argued that switchgrass has a negative ethanol fuel energy
balance, requiring 45 percent more fossil energy to create switchgrass into
a biofuel than is produced..."...I'd conservatively guess that we could hope
that a 1 BTU of energy into the production might yield 2 BTU out...'
Actually, those figures aren't for the technological
and physical constraints on the entire production process taken as a whole,
they are for the distorted and subsidised approach used now. That involves
getting fertiliser from chemical plants, running farm and processing
equipment on regular fuel, and so on. It's physically possible to improve
the ratios by switching to crop rotation instead of artificial fertilizer,
running equipment with gasifiers burning crop waste or even reverting to
draught animals, then returning the end waste to the fields, etc. But that
highlights where the bottleneck really is: in the greater amount and the
kind of land and labour that would be needed - the USA would probably get
hungry, for instance (the 19th century economist Nassau Senior even covered
the case of machines that competed for food in his work on wages, concluding
that it would hurt but that it wasn't happening then!). It's still totally
unrealistic for most countries, but it's not the Energy Return On Input (EROI)
that's the problem. You can push that arbitrarily high, at the cost of
agricultural land and labour which aren't there.
Yours sincerely,
P.M.Lawrence
And again: In some circumstances biomass can be a
marginal addition to an energy budget. It won't be the major energy source
of a high energy economy. Like all alternative and sustainables, it can be
useful but you don't base your economic health on it.
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Chinese Warships Sail to Pirate-Infested Gulf of Aden,
Jerry
"In China's first modern deployment of battle-ready
warships beyond the Pacific, a naval task force set out Friday to begin
escorts and patrols in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden . . . the primary
mission of the destroyers, which carry helicopters, would be to protect
Chinese merchant ships, especially tankers with crude oil, that traverse the
gulf:"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/asia/27navy.html
Notice whose ships they are protecting.
Ed
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A replacement for the abominable autoscribe?
"The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social
Communications is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes application created by
a technologically savvy Italian priest, the Rev. Paolo Padrini, and an
Italian Web designer."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/
20081222/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_iphones
-Joe
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