CapitalistImperialistPig

All organized activity, notably including life and civilization, depends on thermodynamic free energy , sometimes known as negative entropy. Plants get it from the Sun, heterotrophs (like you, reader, and I) depend on the foods we eat, and civilizations, increasing depend on fuel, especially fossil fuel. The industrial revolution and the relative prosperity it brought were bought with fossil fuel and the free energy it supplied. Of course we are finding out that that free energy did not come cheaply. The fossil fuels are a finite resource, and their use imposes costs on the planet. Coal is the most abundant such fuel and it's also the cheapest. King Coal made and ruled the industrial revolution but it also brought bitter consequences. The great London Smog of December 1952 killed 4,000-12,000 people and cows in their farm fields. It was a wake up moment for action against air pollution and cities in Europe and the Americas gradually cleaned up their acts. Most of the environ...

For pessimists only. As of 2013, solar power provided about 0.24% of all energy consumed in the world.

People, and Governments, do a lot of dumb things to fool themselves into thinking they are doing something other than what they are actually doing. I've probably mentioned before how idiotic I think it is to protest against the Keystone pipeline. Preventing the pipeline from being built will not prevent the Athabasca tar sands from being exploited or reduce global carbon emissions. It will, in all likelihood, increase them by the amount of energy required to transport the oil across the ocean. Via Marginal Revolution, Valery Karplus writes in the New York Times about the similar stupidity of CAFE standards on fuel economy. Her studies, and those of her MIT colleagues, indicate that reducing emissions through CAFE standards costs the economy at least six times as much (likely more) than a similar reduction achieved through higher energy taxes. The way to reduce carbon emissions is to tax carbon emission (or extraction). Every other way is just a gimmick to avoid revealing the ...

Raypierre at Real Climate looks at the so-called Keystone XL pipeline and consequences for global warming. This pipeline is aimed at transporting oil from the Athabasca tar sands to Texas for refining, and is important because that tar sands is one of the worlds largest pools of hydrocarbons - large enough that its full exploitation is likely to tip the world over the 1 trillion tons of carbon injected into the atmosphere mark - enough, says Raypierre, to warm the Earth by about 2 degrees C. This has provoked some resistance by anti-AGW activists, but it's just a tactical battle in the larger fight against carbon. The other obvious energy source is coal. I hate to say it, but I think that these battles are lost. Billions of people are not going to choose starvation today, or even giving up their cars and private jets, because of warming a hundred or even twenty years from now. The world needs energy and wants it even more. The only ways to provide it without pumping far more...

From the Lumonator: It's organic and carbon is cheaper than silicon because you don't have to deconstruct anyone's microprocessors or artificial breasts to get the stuff. Lubos is talking about solar panels made of rubrene and being funny, but in fact silicon, despite being quite a bit less abundant in the larger universe than carbon, is several hundred times more abundant in the Earth's crust than carbon, and dirt, or at least sand, cheap. Nice pure crystals for optimal solar panels are not so cheap to manufacture of course. As a person who has recently considered equipping my house with solar panels I do have to say that efficiency can be an important concern. My roof has a limited amount of real estate suitable for mounting solar panels, so to get the optimal amount of energy I need high efficiency panels even here in relentlessly sunny New Mexico.

OK, Craig Venter is the wizard who won the contest to sequence a human genome (his own), but I have got to call bullshit on this story: A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page. "We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock." You can't use CO2 as fuel - fuel has to supply free energy, and CO2 can't do that. We already have organisms that convert CO2 to fuel - we call them plants...