Disorganized thoughts on personal responsibility and other stuff

[mousme]

I have been doing far more thinking than is probably good for me in the past month or two. Some of this has revolved around the spiritual aspect of my life, and a lot of it has revolved around my sense of personal and civic responsibility: namely, what kind of responsibility should I take upon myself in the face of the problems I can see facing both myself and society as I know it.

Allow me to ramble a bit about the environmental and social crises which have me the most concerned. This is not meant to be an exhaustive essay, so there will be no documentation to back up what I'm saying. Nor is this meant to be a politcal post, so even if you think I'm spouting a bunch of liberal rhetorical garbage, while you are welcome to your opinion, bear in mind that I'm not going to engage in debate with you on the topic. Just sayin'.

The environment is in crisis. In fact, the earth is in crisis. The whole planet is warming up at an alarming rate, the weather has gone batshit crazy, the icebergs are melting faster than a snow cone in Arizona in July, there are smog alerts everywhere you turn, oil slicks on the oceans hundreds of kilometers wide, and every day hundreds of species of animals and insects of which we've never even heard go exinct.

If I say the words "peak oil," I know that a good number of the people on my flist will roll their eyes heavenwords and call me an alarmist freak. I don't think I am, though. We're running out of our main source of fuel and energy production, and when I think of all the things we have and do that are directly dependent on petroleum products, my mind boggles: food, water, transportation, everyday household appliances, computers, telephones, hell, even our clothes, all either contain some sort of petroleum product, or are produced using petroleum.

Factor in that, with the arrival of China on the car market, we're adding about half a billion extra cars to the world, which will require oil to make, maintain, and to run, and we've got ourselves one hell of an interesting product.

In another few years, we'll be 7.5 billion people on this planet. The words "carrying capacity" are also the words of alarmist freaks, but I'm not so sure the concept can be so easily dismissed. Our current mode of production, complete with waste and overconsumption in industrialized countries, is going to get us into trouble sooner rather than later.


Which brings me back to, well, me. Here I am, puttering along, only now truly starting to be ecologically responsible, trying to reduce my ecological footprint, etc. So far, so good. I'm still driving a car many days of the week, and I daresay that most of my lifestyle is probably hell on the environment, in spite of my efforts to recycle, to compost, to whatever.

Apart from personally becoming a hippy freak (and I mean that in the kindest way possible), I'm worried that I'm really not doing enough. In essence, I'm not doing my part at all. It won't matter in two years that I've been recycling and walking and composting. Not if the entire world carries on as it has been up until now. Leading through example is great, but it's not enough.

As someone said the other day, it would take internation cooperation at the same level as that seen during World War II to make sure we don't destroy ourselves. Whether it's in two years or ten or even twenty, I am pretty sure that we're seeing the end of the world as we know it (not in an Armaggedon sense, but in a society-can't-carry-on-this-way sense). In our lifetime, society is going to change irrevocably, and right now our chances of surviving that change don't look good.

A few of my friends share this opinion. A few are putting together a contingency plan, to make sure we get through the bad times. I wonder, though, if it's not somewhat selfish of me not to try to raise the alarms elsewhere: to send letters and make phone calls to all the Candian political parties, to ring the bells and at least *try* to make things better. To participate in grassroots movements. To do something, anything, that might work. I can't and don't want to bury my head in the sand, and hope that the political leaders of Canada will somehow fix it. For all of Dion's pretty speeches, it's going to take consensus from all the parties, and all the provinces, that we need to make drastic changes to how this country is run, if we (and the rest of the world) are to have a fighting chance.

The problem is figuring out where to start.

Comments

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Yep. And with the emergence of *huge* new markets for oil (China among the foremost), we're going to run out much sooner than we think.

[the-adzo.livejournal.com]

Well the Chinese government is seriously looking at putting in place hydrogen fuel stations, and making a decided green approach. I believe they have a target that started last year, with something like 100 of a new green car, and for 1000 this year, and 10,000 next year, then 100,000 the next year. I was listening to it on CBC Radio.

It's very smart, start viral and make sure you build up the infrastructure to properly support it. It's also the fundamental reason why the Americans aren't in the green game, at least not in any fashion that seems to garner any respect. Gotta want to use what you sell to have integrity.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

That's very, very interesting about China. See, I know for a fact every automobile manufacturer in the world is very aggressively targeting China and the Asian market in general in order to sell more cars and give a boost to what is essentially a dying industry.

Have you got any sources where I can go read up on this?

[the-adzo.livejournal.com]

I think this article (http://www.energybulletin.net/18066.html) that I just found is related.

[ulvain.livejournal.com]

hydrogen is probably the most ridiculous alternative to fossil fuel out there, and has such a low chance to ever threaten the oil industry that it's the focus of all their efforts at "alternatives".

The reason why it's ridiculous? Hydrogen is not naturally found in a compressed, pure liquid form. It's usually part of something else, mostly water. And it needs to be separated from the oxygen in the water to be used.

And the basic fact will always remain that the sheer amount of energy necessary to the breaking of the water molecule into hydrogen is higher than the energy provided by those very hydrogen atoms. Period. There will always be what's called an energy sync. And that energy we take to make the division, how is it made? Through hydro, wind, solar, fossil or nuclear. In other term, we've not fixed anything.

Worst still, hydrogen is a very small atom. In other term, you need a particularly tight and special - and expensive - type of container to transport it. And it's very, very explosive - if they make the crashtests, I don't wnant to be near, let alone be in one when I get an actual accident.

The whole hydrogen alternative is bogus, it abuses our credulity.

http://www.energybulletin.net/4541.html

[the-adzo.livejournal.com]

From what I've been reading in the past couple of weeks, a number of these concerns either have been or are in the process of being addressed.

The key reason for hydrogen is that it can be produced via solar, wind or hydro-power in one place, then shipped and consumed in another, with relatively low loss. There are several good books on the subject and the innovations needed to make it completely viable.

The oil industry is competing with this, actively, with a biofuels move. If you look at the purchases of Exxon and other oil companies over the past several years, you'll notice how many acres of corn fields they've bought.

[ulvain.livejournal.com]

I wish what you say could be true - that those issues will ever be resolved. But I seriously doubt it.

Of course, producing hydrogen from solar or hydro is feasable. The energy produced will be below the energy taken by the process, that's physics, in I don't remember which law of thermodynamics : every conversion of energy represents an energy loss.

But the real problem is not only the loss. It's the sheer quantity of energy needed. In order to refit the car industry, the energy industry, and the refueling infrastructure, we need trillions of dollar's worth of energy. Then, we need everyone to buy a new car or to have their car refitted. And then, we need solar and wind power to create hydrogen for 700 million vehicules, and that's without planning for any significant augmentation in the number of vehicules in the following years. WITHOUT the significant energy loss, we'd need over 220,000 square kilometers of solar panels. That's covering the state of ohio with solar panels.

Just to give you an approximation, according to David Goodstein, author of "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil", all the solar panels ever produced would cover about 10 square kilometers.
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4287300/)

Wind power? Alone, it would never be enough, and combined with solar, you just cut by a certain percentage the figures above.

According to Paul Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power · Black Death, it would take all of
California's 13,000 wind turbines to generate as much electricity as a single 555-megawatt natural gas fired power plant.
(http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/driessen012905.htm)

We're better to think of something else fast... :)

[elanya.livejournal.com]

So, here is a question from someone who knows very little about it - ignoring the lack of infrastructure problem (which is possibly mostly true for even gas powered cars in most of China, anyway), is there more or less of a loss of energy for creating/converting hydrogen to fuel than is currently involved in the extraction and refinement of fossil fuels?

[ulvain.livejournal.com]

Well, the traditional way of extracting oil is pumping. Typical process will be pumping, transporataion, refining, and more transportation. That will weild an Energetic Return on Energetic Investment (EROEI) of about 30 to 1. (1 invested unit of energy for 30 units of energy gained)

To give you an example, when they extract oil from the oil sands in northern alberta, the end-product has a 2 to 1 EROEI ratio, that's 1 unit of energy invested for every 2 units gained.

Hydrogen, on the other hand, takes *more* energy to invest that what is gained. It's got a *negative* EROEI. And that's without counting the energetic costs of transporting the hydrogen, of putting it in a transportable form, of distributing it, of mass-producing the hydrogen equipment, of the hydrogen fuel cells which, for the moment, cost about 1 million $ a piece, and the high dangers of the highly explosive hydrogen bomb you'd have in every car.

With oil, you extract it as it is in the earth, so at a very loc energetic cost, and when reffined, it will produce energy. Hydrogen will take energy to bring in a consumable form, and weild less energy than it took to make.

I'll try a money-related analogy. You need money. Money is like energy. You can either get your money from right on your nightsand (it's easy to access, it doesn't cost you much to access it), or you can withdraw from the atm (like the oil sands, it takes more moeny, but you still withdraw more than you pay in transaction fee).

Hydrogen is like having to pay - say... - 150% of the amount you withdraw in transaction fees, whatever the amount you withdraw. So for every 20$ you withdraw, you give the bank 30$!


...

Hmm, do you feel I've answered your question ok? Don't hesitate to ask more if I wasn't clear enough, or didn't answer exactly what you wanted to know... :)

[ai731.livejournal.com]

There's only one major problem with biofuels. Producing biofuels requires intensive industrial agriculture methods that depend on massive amount of chemical fertilizer input. A significant portion of these chemical fertilizers are petroleum based... So if we're running out of oil, how are we going to produce the fertilizer to grow the biofeuls?

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Also, as I understand it, the corn-based biofuels are made from a hybrid kind of corn that very rapidly depletes the earth of its nutrients, thus necessitating the use of even more land, and leaving behind what is essentially a wasteland where nothing can grow for years.

Not a good alternative, if you ask me.