Very often discussions about renewable energy focus on solar and wind power, and other sources fall into the background. To be sure, these two will form a significant part of the new system, but they are not all there is. Aside from geothermal energy, tidal energy, and various forms of crop-based biofuels, we also have an abundant form of energy available that is directly proportional to the number of people living nearby.
Sewage.
Case in point: Advanced Rail Energy Storage – a company that stores energy by moving heavy trains uphill when there’s excess power, and letting them roll downhill again when more power is needed.
And there’s a LOT of political action needed. Our government’s policy, on the whole, is still in limbo on what’s happening in our climate, with one of the two parties in power having denial as a crucial part of its science platform.
Conventional wisdom is that if we can threaten their ability to get re-elected, the Republicans will come around on the issue, and it seems likely that that’s the case. Gingrich, Romney, Bush, McCain, and many others have all acknowledged the reality of our warming climate at one point or another, so it’s clear that at least some members of the GOP are aware of what’s going on. What’s less clear is how long it will take for public pressure to override the flood of money unleashed by recent relaxations in campaign finance laws.
In time, however, we will get there. In time, and with continued pressure and protests, we will come to a national recognition that there is a problem, and that we have put it off too long for anything but drastic measures to be taken. In time, we will begin the work, as a nation, of dealing with global climate change.
And here is where climate change differs from every other important issue in history. With labor laws, there was a long, hard fight, lives were lost, livelihoods destroyed, and in the end, the battle was won, laws were passed, and employers were required to treat their workers with a minimum amount of respect and dignity. With Segregation, the battle was won, and laws were passed changing how humans were allowed to treat each other, and providing legal frameworks to give some power to those who had none, and some defense to the defenseless. With leaded gasoline, there was a nasty political fight with powerful, wealthy corporations misleading the public and politicians alike, but in time, laws were passed, tetraethyl lead was banned, and the amount of lead we were exposed to began to fall almost immediately.
On many of the problems we’ve solved there is still much work to be done, both in America and in the rest of the world, but in the end, as tangled and complex as human interaction is, these problems all improve as people stop taking certain actions. On the surface, global climate change may seem the same. If we stop burning fossil fuels, we will have “solved” the problem, right?
Wrong.
If we had addressed global warming in the 1980’s, a couple decades after the first warnings came, or even in the 1990’s, after it became unequivocal that the planet was warming and humans were to blame, then we might have been able to follow the old model. We could have passed laws, phased out fossil fuels, and been done.
Now, in 2014, it’s too late for that. The amount of CO2 we’ve added to the atmosphere would keep warming the planet for another 20 years or so even if we stopped adding to it today, but even that isn’t the whole story. The heat we’ve already added to the planet has been enough to trigger a number of feedback loops that are increasing the rate at which the planet warms. Lowered albedo, melting of the permafrost, increased evaporation through higher temperatures, and decreased photosynthesis through heatwaves and droughts – all of these may to be enough to drive continual warming for centuries to come.
So, if the protest movement is successful, and the problem is acknowledged, what comes next? If we can’t stop the warming, then is there any point in trying?
In a word, yes. There is a point. But the goal has changed. We are no longer fighting to stop the warming, we’re fighting for the long-term survival of our species, and of our civilization.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about what that means, the kinds of action we can take, and the sort of changes we need to make in how we think as a society. In this series, I’m going to cover topics like food production, energy generation, energy storage, water use, disaster preparedness, and the art of thinking generations ahead.
Posted in Building the future we want, Off the Deep End: An Inexpert Guide to Dealing With Global Climate Change.
Tagged 350, climate action, climate change, climate march, cost benefit, doom, feedback loop, future, global climate change, global warming, green energy, issues, long-term, long-term thinking, net zero, new york, people's climate march, planning, planning for the future, progressive action, progressive behavior, progressive thinking, renewable energy, social issues, societal change, stop, thinking ahead, warming, what's next?
I ordered the three main components on Amazon:
The PV panel is a Renology 50w “solar starter kit” at $126.99 This comes with a charge controller, mounting brackets and screws, and 20 feet of cable to run from the panel to the charge controller. The 100w kit would have been a better deal per watt at $172.99, but it would not fit in my skylight, so that wasn’t an option for me.
The battery is a generic-seeming 12v battery (billed for scooters, wheelchairs, emergency lighting, and other stuff) at $74.90. This comes with a battery. Electricity goes in, electricity goes out.
The inverter was $65.99, and provides me with two standard U.S. three-prong outlets.
Shipping on all three items was free (the battery and panel advertise free shipping, and the inverter was free thanks to Amazon prime).
I bought these based on no knowledge whatsoever, other than that Amazon said they are frequently bought together.
My goal is to have this be as simple and painless as possible, since I’m not interested in becoming an electrician at the moment.
The immediate dilemma facing me at this point in time is the materials I still need to get, and the particulars of making all the connections. That, and ensuring that there is no way for the household animals (cat and dog) to zap themselves.
In addition to what I have, currently, I need cables to connect the charge controller to the battery, and cables to connect the charge controller to the inverter.
I’m going to seek advice on this, but the inverter DID come with a cigarette lighter adapter to take power from a car, and feed it to the inverter. Given that I do not have a car, and I hope never to have one in the near future, I may cannibalize that adapter to connect the controller to the inverter, but we shall see.
Total cost so far: $266.99
The panel has arrived, along with a battery and an inverter so I can plug appliances into it.
Over the next few months, I’m going to document my experience using this system, what I use it for, what I CAN’T use it for, what the ups and downs are, and how I can use it as a platform from which to make other improvements.
I’ll use photos, review the individual pieces, and post exact prices of how much all this costs me so any readers can, if they want, figure out what’s worth copying, and what they could do better or cheaper.
Politics, in America, are daunting, to say the least. We live in an increasingly plutocratic society, in which the majority of legislators are far wealthier than the average American, and the cost of running for office seems to get higher with every election. So how can one person, or even a handful of people, make a difference in this arena?
There are a lot of possible answers to that question, so I’m going to start (as is my wont) with my own experience. Continue reading
It assumes that “compromise” means “industry gets what industry wants” and the only question is what the price is.
It means, by default, the every single human, every single living organism, and every single part of the world has a price – a point at which its destruction is worth the monetary gain.
It reduces all of us, and everything around us, to either resources, products, or obstacles to development. Nothing more.
In my last post, I linked to a video that basically contained a video reprisal of the worst-case scenario voiced in the opening statement of this blog. It’s a bleak picture, and all the more so because it’s an accurate statement of the danger we face.
This post is the first of a series designed to provide an antidote, of sorts for the fear and despair that can so easily rise up when faced with the realities of global climate change. As I said in my last post, I wholeheartedly believe that we can deal with this problem and rise above it to create a civilization that will make our current existence look downright primitive. That belief is, I think, a reasonable one. We have the ability to power our society with renewable energy many times over, and there are many ways to generate, harness, and use energy that we simply don’t exploit. Some of my thoughts on this can be found in the section called “building the future we want“.
My goal in writing this series of blog posts is not only to have you believe that such a future is technically possible, but also to have you share the vision that drives me. My goal is to take the spirit of the quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry at the head of this blog, and apply it to the Great Work that is responding to the threat of man-made global climate change. I don’t want people working on this because they feel obligated to (although that’s better than nothing), I’d like people working on it because they’re excited about the future we’re working to create.
In this series, I will cover a number of topics, ranging from the grand scale (working on national policy) to the small scale (one step beyond changing your lightbulbs). I will research the topics as thoroughly as I am able to do, in order to present a useful guide to responding to global warming at whatever level you are able. Part of this will be about dealing with the emotional and psychological burden. Part of it will be about looking at the world we have today and seeing the world it could become. The bulk of this series will be about working to bring about the world you want to live in.
I haven’t decided what the first installment will be, but whichever it is, I will have it available by Monday morning on January 20, 2014. Tune in then, and let’s see what we can get done.
So, this hockey stick thing from god knows how many years ago that nobody apart from friends of the authors has been able to reproduce.
This is false. It has been false for years. This is why I get pissed off when I’m talking to deniers.
This is why I CALL them deniers – they keep repeating the same claims over and over again no matter what happens. It’s dismissing of evidence.
It’s the parable of the duck all over again.
If you see someone making this claim, or talking about “the hockey stick” calling it broken, or debunked, or whatever – they are either lying or they have been lied to. Either way, you have my full permission to copy and paste this post. If I find more articles, I’ll add them in and re-post.
Enough already.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.full : Reinforces Mann’s original finding that recent warming is unusual over a period of 11,300 years.
Supplementary info here:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/03/07/339.6124.1198.DC1/Marcott.SM.pdf
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009JD012603.pdf : Finds the same pattern from research in South America.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010GL044771/abstract : Corroborates Mann’s finding that recent warming is unprecedented for last 1,000 years.
http://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/846/arctic-warming-overtakes-2000-years-natural-cooling :UCAR gets the same pattern from the arctic
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/Goosseetal-CD06.pdf : Another group (yes, it includes Mann) gets the same pattern with numerous datasets.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n6/abs/ngeo865.html Surface temperatures on Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania since 500 AD.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/full/ngeo1797.html : Same bloody pattern.
Posted in Discussions, Rants and Musings
Tagged arguing, bad arguments, climate change, global warming, no hypothesis, rhetoric, sea ice
Oceanoxia 