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energy efficiency — karl stone

:snicker:

How about this idea? We construct a big kite and fly it high above the earth's atmosphere to collect energy from the solar wind, just like Ben Franklin is said to have done with lightening.

I think the biggest problem is that there are too many human beings on the earth. Cultures of living creatures who thrive tend to keep expanding until they wallow in their on waste where it inevitably extinguishes them. Human beings might think that they are special, but they're not. A few may escape or something might evolve to adapt to the polluted environment. One being's waste is another's nutrition.

Human beings might think that they are special, but they're not. — Metaphysician Undercover

The only thing different between animals and humans is that the latter can alter their perspective on life but the former can't.

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Optimistic perhaps, but I see no magical thinking in these proposals — karl stone

The 'magic' isn't in the basic technology. There's no 'magic' in the physics and chemistry of using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons. The 'magic' lies in the human part of the equation, in supposing that the truly massive investment in fossil fuels can or will be switched to an equally massive investment in hydrogen or geothermal (magma) in a relatively short period of time. Oil companies have sunk petawads of money in drilling holes in the ocean to suck up toxic sludge; it takes a lot of magic to suppose that the whole fossil fuel industry and its millions of investors and billions of consumers can or will switch to anything else in the near future.

My reading of the global warming situation is that time will run out before we can make sufficient adaptation (like using hydrogen, reducing population, sequestering CO2, etc.). "Time running out" means that the heat gains will begin to unravel the economic fabric of the world's economies. Without robust economies, we're pretty much dead in the water.

Major industrial or technological changes take time to implement, usually 40 years, +/-. In the 75 years since it's arrival, nuclear fission has has not been fully implemented. The infrastructure for ever higher volume data transmission through the Internet is still being implemented, never mind fully developed. Computers, in all their various and sundry forms are still being developed and integrated, and that's around 75 years.

If it takes 50-60 years to implement hydrogen, along with geothermal, we are out to 2070-80, by which time the chickens of global warming will be home and roosting. There is absolutely no guarantee that we will convert to hydrogen. Supposing that we will have done so is where the magic comes in.

Demographers have said the 2100 population will be around 11 billion. Gaining 3 billion people, coping (or not coping) with at least a 2ºC global temperature rise, and the consequent increasing competition for food, water, and livable environment looks to me more like an end game than anything else.

Look, I hope we get our collective acts together to solve our various big problems. It just doesn't seem like we are going to be successful or quick enough.

I don't know what this means. I don't speak emoji, and don't know where these two words are removed from, nor to what they refer. But thank you for your interest. — karl stone

:ok:

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The question is how does this scale up fast enough to replace fossil fuels before climate spirals out of control?

Geothermal is good for what, not even 0.5% of world energy generation at this moment? Do we even have enough engineering and building capacity to build what we need in any reasonable timeframe?

Pointing to a theoretical possibility means nothing if it isn't practically feasible. The practical details are exactly what matter here. We do need to do the math in this debate, otherwise it is magical thinking.

Similar exercises have been done with solar, wind and nuclear, and ridicules amounts of facilities need to build to be carbon free by 2050, and those are technologies that don't need any R&D anymore, and we could implement everywhere right away.

Bitter Crank, and authors like Vaclav Smil, are absolutely right to be sceptical about these kinds of proposals, if one looks at the numbers.

I think the biggest problem is that there are too many human beings on the earth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Raise the standard of living and the people having so many children will rapidly diminish.

And the interesting fact: Japan hasn't had an economic crash or societal collapse. So a World with a diminishing global population might not be so bad after all.

That was a good read, Bitter Crank. Thanks.

The only thing different between animals and humans is that the latter can alter their perspective on life but the former can't. — Agent Smith

Or, is it that we think we can alter our perspective on life, when we really cannot. In that case, the difference might be that we're the only animals capable of self-deception.

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Returning to nature seems the only option left. Letting go of all unnecessary materialities. To say bye-bye to technology and material wealth is hard though, as it seems that's all what western man has to cling to.

What magma energy mining does is puncturing the crust. Can you imagine what happens, apart from taking energy? Dante's peak?

What if there's not enough time? Would you regret the wasted effort? — karl stone

Well yes, assuming financial, human and material resources are finite... we do have to make choices between what kind of things we will prioritize.

If it turns out geothermal doesn't get there in time, and the earth overheats, and societies collapse because climate change stresses get to much, then investments into geothermal, and mitigation in general, maybe could be better spend (at least for some part) on adapting to climate change instead.

If the whole thing goes south we presumably would have little use for high-technology energy sources.

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That's a truism, I suppose. I'm not sure it's a matter of having endless potential solutions waiting to go, and only the time and resources to develop one, but okay, sure - tell me, why would a nasa approved technology with the potential to provide near limitless clean energy, not be a priority? — karl stone

Every country has to come up with a plan to scale down use of fossil fuels and retain energy security at the same time. There's were the agency is at for the energy-transition (and that will probably not change any time soon), and also the bottlenecks for political will, budget and resources.... To make that plan they need to figure out their equation about cost, security and pollution of different energy-sources.

From what I gathered geothermal seems to make a lot of sense if you're close to continental plate fault lines. For other locations you need to drill a lot deeper, figure out how you get hot water out without causing seismic activity etc... I assume there's a reason it's still in a development-fase in a lot of countries where hot water doesn't literally gush out of the ground like in Iceland.

So the reasons for some countries not making it a priority would be costs of building the plants, research cost and time, and security issues etc... It might make more sense to build nuclear plants for instance. But look I'm no specialist and one does have to look at the numbers, case by case probably.

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I know there's a lot of heat under the earths crust, just not how easy it is to be turned into usable energy. NASA's estimates are theoretical I presume? How practical is it to tap into it, what is the technology and engineering needed to do this? And especially, how much does it cost? There's always a cost to extract the energy, if possible at all. That's what is needed in this debated, you can't just say magma energy solves all the problems and expect everybody to take your word on it.

Dante's peak prick? — Landoma1

:snicker:

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Also I don't agree that we are already "at the despair". You may be: I think promoting magical thinking might be a symptom. — Janus

Our inaction speaks to our despair. We face an existential threat the likes of which humanity has never experienced, and we avert our gaze. What is this, if not despair?

It would be great if we could confront the problem rationally. But how do we get there? I don't think we can, there is too much magical thinking already. The magical thinking we require is, "we can succeed, if only we give it absolutely everything". This may involve trying everything feasible, even the doomed solutions.

But I agree, it is certainly best to avoid solutions which likely make the problem worse, like perhaps biofuel. My take though of the op was that it was "magical thinking" to pursue mere partial solutions. On the contrary, we need all the partial solutions we can think of.

Our inaction speaks to our despair. We face an existential threat the likes of which humanity has never experienced, and we avert our gaze. What is this, if not despair? — hypericin

Complacency. A sense of powerlessness; an inability to unite with others in effective coordinated action.

The magical thinking we require is, "we can succeed, if only we give it absolutely everything". — hypericin

I don't see it that way. In my view, we should think that we may be able to make things better if we are willing to sacrifice a good deal of our comfort and accustomed lifestyles. The problem is that only a small proportion of the population cares enough to educate themselves about the issues. Most people are all about the sound bites and virtue signalling.

No that's right, I don't expect an answer right here, but those are the type of questions one needs an answer to to be able to settle the debate.... If not, then one does seem to engage in something akin to magical thinking as per title of the thread.

The sheer scale of the energy available changes the equation in a most unexpected way; and that's what I'm trying to communicate. I assumed for a long time that sustainability required sacrifice, and couldn't see past that - but because of magma energy, I don't believe that's true, nor is it the right approach. The best and right approach to climate change is to have massively more clean energy to spend; not slightly less similarly polluting energy. That way leads to madness! — karl stone

I will say, even if we assume energy to be nigh unlimited and free of carbon, that doesn't mean we have reached sustainability. Energy and climate change is what is focused on most of the time, but that's only one of the major issues we are dealing with at the moment. There are also other, material and bio-physical limits we run into now, and if not now, eventually.... More energy let's us kick the can a bit further ahead of us, but at some point we will have deal with it. I tend to agree that we need more energy right now, because the alternative isn't very appealing (to understate how dire things could get), but I wouldn't presume we solved everything with that.

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May I direct you to NASA's final report on the magma energy project. I'm sure that will answer many of your questions. It's too much here. No magical thinking though. NASA don't go in for that sort of thing.

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6588943 — karl stone

It is, like I thought, 'theoretical' though, in that its aim was to only research scientific feasibility. There's still a big gap between showing something to work in a research project and unlocking the technology on a large scale in an existing energy market. Costs for instance typically are no factor in a science project, because the are subsidized and economic feasibility is not the aim of the research.

Resources are a function of the energy available to create them. Given limitless clean energy to spend there is no bottleneck in humankind's foreseeable future. We are not running out of anything; except perhaps helium - which I think can be manufactured given enough energy. — karl stone

This is not entirely right. Raw resources like all kinds of metals, are not created, save in rather rare events like supernovae or the big bangs. We have to do with what has been given us on earth for the most part.

Energy is a factor in the sense that you need energy for mining, and thus more energy lets you mine more. But this isn't free by no means. It"s typically a highly ecologically damaging activity, and not only because of burning fossil fuels, but mainly because of destroyed ecosystems.

The density of needed resources is diminishing over the years. We used to find copper in big lumps scattered across the land, now it's typically only a small percentage of the mined rock. This has been fine because mining technology coupled with dirt cheap fossil fuels let us grind through tons of material at relative little financial cost... but at the cost of larger and larger areas being mined.

So 'limitless energy' only get's you so far, if we assume we have limitless energy to begin with, which i would doubt. To begin with there's no such thing as limitless energy in physics, and even though theoretically the heat of the earth would be limitless for our intents and purposes, I highly doubt that we can turn that into limitless usable energy. The same thing can be said about solar energy, theoretically more energy than we could ever use, shines on the earth every day, for a couple of billion years still. But in practice it turns out photovoltaic cells can only turn a small percentage of that into electricity, we need to much of certain materials to build the panels and the batteries to scale them up, they wear off over time, you end up with a lot waste etc etc...

Nothing is free, to make energy usable for us you need to build all kinds of facilities and machinery, which makes that you run into all kinds of practical limits if you want to scale it up. For magma-geothermal we, I guess, don't know what the real costs are because it hasn't been deployed on a large enough scale. And that is by itself already a big issue because we need to decarbonise right now ideally. We have little time to put our hope in future technologies.

Looked at in this way, it follows that limits to growth is the consequence of a misapplication of technology. No-one need have a carbon footprint. I'm not claiming magma energy would solve everything right away, but abundant clean energy gives subsequent generations the best shot at a decent future. And limitless clean energy changes the calulus of economic rationality; allowing for recycling for example, or desalination and irrigation. The increase in downstream value will sustain civilisation. — karl stone

Carbon is hardly the only thing that matters. There are definitely limits, it's just not clear where they exactly lie. Waste heat of continued increase in energy use alone would fry the earth eventually.... But anyway, I do agree with the sentiment that we should give future generations a decent shot by finding the best way to generate energy.

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