(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)
Objection: The kind of drastic actions required to mitigate global warming risk the destruction of the global economy and the deaths of potentially billions of people.
Answer: Is this supposed to mean the theory of anthropogenic global warming must be wrong? You can not come to a rational decision about the reality of a danger by considering how hard it might be to avoid. First things first: understand that the problem is real and present.
Once you acknowledge the necessity of addressing the problem, taking action suddenly become less daunting. There is no point in discussing the best solutions or the cost of those solutions with someone who does not yet acknowledge the problem.
But even if mitigating global warming would be harmful, given that famine, droughts, disease, loss of major coastal cities, and a tremendous mass extinction event are on the table as possible consequences of doing nothing, it may well be we are faced with a choice between the lesser of two evils. I challenge anyone to conclusively demonstrate that such catastrophes as listed above await us if we try to reduce fossil fuel use.
Now, in terms of conservation and a global switch over to alternative fuels, the people who oppose doing this for climate change mitigation are forgetting something rather important. Fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource, and as such we have to make this global economic transformation regardless, whether now or a bit later. Many bright minds inside the industry think we are already at peak oil. So even if it turned out that climate mitigation was unnecessary, we would still be in a better place as a global society by making the coming switch sooner rather than later.
Seems like a win-win situation to me.
The new Senate global warming deniers
20 climate experts call for aggressive U.S. action
Do as Heartland says, not as it does
Comments View as Flat
Nucbuddy Posted 6:08 am
25 Jan 2007
Low-energy-use societies vs nature's tests
Coby Beck wrote:
Limiting growth in energy use lowers the extinction-event survival-potential of the human species.
personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga
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Palaces Posted 8:20 pm
25 Jan 2007
The Math of Replacing Carbon With PV in 10-Years
The financial cost of electricity can be figured out. American homes use 24 kWhs a day on average, more in the South, less in the Northeast. Say a dime a kWh, over the 25 year warranty of PV panels is:
$0.10 x 24 x 365 x 25 = $21,900. That's the cost of doing nothing, business as usual. It also assumes no inflation or price increases for 25 years.
The cost of PV is currently price-fixed by a global cartel, and the market is rigged. Every so often somebody writes a book about it, and we have a 30 year track record of those books and magazines reports. A few examples from the past decades:
http://ScienceCop.info/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=TheSunBet...
http://sciencecop.info/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=TheCarbon...
http://sciencecop.info/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Cartel+So...
Rationally, the cost of PV is somewhat the same as the cost of beer cans and beer bottles, as they are made from the same starting raw materials and go through equally complex industrial machines and processes. Picture beer cans and bottles melted down to a puddle the thickness of a business card. How much materials is that?
Generously, with a fat profit margin built in, that solidified puddle one foot square should cost no more than 30 cents installed on the rooftop and making 12 watts of electricity each bright sunny hour.
That is of course not today's price. Chevron execs bragged that they made retail-ready PV for $1/watt several years ago. That would make that square foot of PV $12 at their manufacturing costs. The difference between $12 and $0.30 is 40 multiples of 30 cents.
There's a transitionary time between $1/watt and 30 cents a dozen. Stern intolerance of delays by corporations who have already delayed it for 30 years will shorten that transition time. The public must inform itself on how PV is made sufficiently to be able to make it if the corporations will not.
It seems terribly bold, but a PV casting furnace is the heart of PV. Seven wheelbarrows of sand processed yesterday becomes four wheelbarrows of sand then becomes 2 wheelbarrows of polycrystal PV cast ingots (12 cubic feet) in one 24 hour day in one furnace. The technology uses three expired-patent public domain processes.
http://h2-pv.us/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Bulk_Sand
http://h2-pv.us/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=4457903
...
Like drug patents that expire, it is natural that the price will crash.
The incentive for businesses to enter the field are the high prices set by the price-fixer cartel. $3/watt PV would be bargains snapped up in today's market. That one day's operation of furnace consuming 7 wheelbarrows of PV can ultimately become 12 cubic feet of polycrystal silicon ingot that is sliced into 600 meters squared of PV cell wafers.
At a wholesale value of $1/watt in today's rigged price structure, one furnace makes $78,000 worth per day of wholesale product with small machinery investments and fairly low materials consumables costs.
Because this operation can happen in small compact spaces, the barriers to entry are few, and many small operations can begin in the not distant future. Even buying electric power for the furnaces at retail rates of 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, the daily power bill to crystalize 720 kilograms of silicon is only $864, to make $78,000 of product per day.
Theoretically extrapolating from these numbers it takes 4,317 furnace-days to make one square mile of PV cell surfaces. That would be twelve years for one furnace alone to make one square mile of PV.
Because the value is high and the price of materials is low the early adopters will profit fast, easily adding on more furnaces, and inspiring others to do likewise. One furnace making $78K gross per day would make $2,340,000 worth of product per month.
A minimal ten year goal would be 5,381 square miles of residential rooftops, every detached home in America.
While trees shade some and others have bad slopes facing the wrong way, just for argument purposes I am projecting the rooftop electric production of the 75,000,000 single family detached homes with average 2,000 square feet of roof surfaces. It comes out to the number above, 5,381 square miles.
If we know that it takes 12 furnace years per mile, we can compute the number of furnaces needed to complete the 5,381 square miles in different lengths of time. All this is 1st approximation and can be refined later for closer numbers.
There are 64,572 furnace years required to roof America in Blue PV. If there are multi-furnace operations, say 5 furnace per plant, then the number of businesses come to 12,915 if you want to complete the job in one year, or 2,583 if you want to complete the job in 5 years, 1,292 if the job takes ten years. That averages 26 factories per state spread over the country.
Each furnace costs like a Lexus, expensive yes, but they pay off fast.
Naturally the price must decrease as the supply increases, so that the last to enter the business do not make the fortunes of the early adopters.
78,000 watts daily production at $1/watt falling to 30 cents a watt, reduces the value per day to $23,400.
By the tail end of the gold rush when PV is a penny a watt in the cast ingot state, the value per day per furnace is $780/day. That's less than the day's electricity used to cost at a dime a kilowatt-hour, but then electricity won't cost that much to people who make PV -- for them it will be practically free. Somewhere before that moment there will be consolidation in the industry and larger operations will buy up or push out smaller players.
As long as there are millions to be made per month from operations not greatly different in scale from a Pizza Hut or dry cleaners, The independents can own the market.
So this is a rightwinger's dream of free-market enterprise, hardly something they can be against unless they are paid to badmouth it.
Here's the facts that you need to arm yourself against phoney argument that America will be in economic chaos.
Assume 2.5 cents/kWh in 2016 from universal PV.
Assume 5,381 square miles of residential rooftops = 75m x 2,000 sq.ft.
Assume each home uses 24 kWh/day, x 365 days x 75m/homes = 657,000,000 kWhs.
Assume all US homes have blue PV rooftops, which costs the same as the cheapest grade of composition asphalt shingles.
Assume 3,613,500,000,000 kilowatt hours total annual electricity production from residential rooftops alone. (75m homes x 2000 sq.ft/home. x 12 watts/sq.ft. x 5.5 peak hours average daily sun x 365/days per year).
https:/cia.gov/ciapublications/factbook/geos/us.html
Electricity - consumption: 3.717 trillion kWh (2004)
Total: 3.717 trillion kWh
Roofs: 3.6135 trillion kWh
These figures have not included the other 30 million housing units in apartment blocks and multifamily structures. Then start roofing the factories, offices, schools, stadiums, car ports over mall parking lots.
The only losers are those who bet on dirty pollution, and that is poetic justice the way it is supposed to be.
What's the cost? Everybody need a new roof anyway every 30 years or so, so 1/3rd is the cost that would have been spent. At 2.5 cents sq.ft. that saves $30,112,500,000 of the cost right off the bat. The balance of costs is $60.225 billion, a couple of month's of Bush-Exxon's Steal Iraq Oil War.
$60 billion divided by 300,000,000 Americans = $200. You pay $200 per person and never see a utility bill for the next 25 years. That's a dollar a day for seven months. Compare that to the $21,900 that the average family would otherwise pay in retail utility rates.
The production figures given, 3.6135 trillion kWh from PV roofs is not only residential. It includes EVERYTHING: all factories, all elevators, all malls, schools, streetlights, military, hospitals, weather radar, everything.
There is no financial collapses, no chaos. Just orderly making, selling, installing PV that creates thousands of brand new jobs. When the buildings are all blue rooftop PV there is ten times that amount of PV needed for the hydrogen side of H2-PV. The H2 part of H2-PV needs to start immediately as the PV part starts because energy storage makes PV more valuable. Without the storage we need carbon-power longer. Maybe put 30 factories per state, 50 factories. There's millions and millions of dollars to be made and people can start reaping the gold without delay.
Global Warming is called off. Make it happen in ten years.
Drop by http:H2-PV.us/wiki to learn more.
http:ecosyn.us PALACES for the People, H2-PV, PV-Breeders acres of PV, tons of Hydrogen
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Fixsen Posted 11:14 am
09 Jan 2008
Math of PV cells
Wow, is this guy optimistic! First, his comment that a PV cell is no more complicated than a beer can suggests that a computer is no more complicated than a block of plastic. In fact the price ratio is about a factor of 1000. The PV cell is probably close to as cheap as it's going to get.
Second, he ignores the interest on the PV cell which must be paid while the PV cell is cranking out the electricity. This will tend to double the effective price of the PV cell.
Third, he ignores the price of installation. Suppose that the PV cells are free (Slightly less optimistic than Grist). Assume that the PV cells are twice as expensive as shingles to install (about 3K$ per roof). So 6K$ per roof will cost ~600$/yr interest. So this eats up most of the price of electricity.
Fourth, he is overly optimistic on how much electricity one can get. If the PV cells are optimally placed, with no clouds, you get 25% (i.. 6 hours per day); with clouds and random placement, 7% is more likely, or about 1.7 hours not 5.5. This, of course, multiplies all of the costs, so the cost of installation is too high.
Fifth, he ignores the chemicals needed to process the PV cells. If we get the cells down to 1 mm thick, that's about 1000 lbs. per house, x 100,000,000 or 50 MT of cells. That probably is at least 100 MT of chemicals....
Sixth, he ignores the problem of storing that electricity. For a small fraction (maybe 20%) of the electricity, that is not a big problem in that the use of electricity is higher during the day, and also higher in the summer (air conditioning), but PV for all electricity is MUCH harder.
Dale Fixsen
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Cacaoatl Posted 12:30 pm
05 Jun 2008
Some Values Can't Be Measured In Economic Terms
There are just some values that can't be measured in economic or financial terms. Theodore Roosevelt realized this when he created the National Park System, co-founded the American Bison Society, urged Congress to create the Forest Service, created the first National Bird Preserve (precursor of the National Wild Life Refuge), and stopped industrial concerns from using Niagra Falls to generate power for factories.
He believed that human beings could use natural resources with an eye to the future. He believed that it was possible to have a high standard of living without using up all our resources and destroying the wilderness in the process.
Stopping global warming may be economically difficult but in the end will have greater benefits for our species and the planet than any temporary hardships that may arise from switching to more sustainable sources of energy and wiser use of our resources. Denying global warming is nothing more than rationalization of selfishness. Our generation doesn't own this planet, we're just borrowing it from the next one.
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brownbat Posted 7:26 pm
17 Jun 2008
If climate mitigation was unnecessary...
"...even if it turned out that climate mitigation was unnecessary, we would still be in a better place as a global society by making the coming switch sooner rather than later."
That's not necessarily true, it depends on the costs of energy sources and the time value of money.
Might be true, just ain't necessarily so, depends on the numbers.
Might be oil saves you a dollar today, but switching to solar today saves you a dollar tomorrow. If climate mitigation was unnecessary, then save the dollar today, even if just to put it in the bank for a year and give the interest to your favorite charity.
Course, might be that oil saves you a dollar today, but solar saves you ten dollars next week. The ten dollars is almost certainly a better deal.
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brownbat Posted 4:58 am
23 Jun 2008
Peak Oil
This is a bit off topic, but responds to something raised in the initial post, the idea that we are on the verge of running out of oil.
Nobel winning economist Gary Becker is skeptical of Peak Oil. While consensus is mixed, other commentators have speculated a retreat in oil prices over the next few years.
Just because a resource is non-renewable, it doesn't mean that a peak price situation is inevitable in the short term. Tungsten isn't renewable, and the world consumes tens of thousands of tons each year. It has unique properties in hardness at high temperatures, making substitutes far less viable than our current substitutes for oil (which are simply a little more expensive). All the same, I don't lose much sleep over peak tungsten.
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