I stumbled across a great article this morning. The Truth About Fossil Fuels and Renewable Energy (Part II)
The first reality we must square is our love of our way of life with our environmental goals. We take for granted the freedom to drive to work, fly to meetings, visit friends and family no matter how far-flung, and drive to the mountains, the beach or other weekend and vacation destinations. We want to leave our computers on standby for ease of starting up the next morning, to keep our homes warm in winter and cool in summer, and to enjoy our flat screen TVs, electric blenders, Wii devices, and so much more. Don’t look now, but what we have is exactly what 1 billion Indians and 1.3 billion Chinese and another 3 or 4 billion people across the planet want.
No joke! Well said.
Here are some hard economic facts. To replace one 1,000 MW gas-fired power plant, you’d need 500 state of the art wind turbines spread across 40,000 acres or 250 high-efficiency solar facilities taking up some 20,000 acres. Why are gas, oil and coal so much more efficient, needing just a few acres to produce all that energy? Thank Mother Nature. Think of fossil fuels as giant “batteries.” They’ve been compressed for eons by Mother Nature into compact pools, pockets, mounds, shale and bitumen (also called tar sands or oil sands.)To try to turn something as scattered as photons in sunlight or the kinetic and capricious energy of wind requires colossal investment to concentrate that energy as efficiently as Mother Nature has already done with fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are batteries. Every time. They work. In compact form.
I think you would need more turbines and solar facilities than that, just because we do not have efficient enough batteries right now to keep the supply constant.
He did awesome on all the energy stuff, and then he has to blow it with “organic” gardening, and population control. Sorry, but the way we preserve our produce has saved millions of lives. To go organic would kill a lot of people. Look into what banning DDT did to the world.
My opinion: Build American nuclear plants, switch as much as possible to American natural gas, and use American coal for the rest. Reforest wherever possible to create carbon sinks that attract and convert these emissions, and use regenerative agricultural practices to sequester even more carbon. According to an article in Soil Science here, soil – plain old earth, dirt, terra firma – is a great carbon storage medium, and contains more carbon than all terrestrial vegetation and the atmosphere combined. For this last, we must change our agricultural practices to be more in line with organic gardening precepts but the health benefits would probably, coincidentally, save us a few hundred billion in health care costs, as well! And finally, after using more US natural gas and US/North American uranium; less but still significant US coal; continuing research and buildout in renewables like solar, wind and geothermal; and reforestation and natural sequestration; a little population control wouldn’t hurt, either.
