gene90 said:
An environmental geology textbook would be a start...
Interestingly, your posts here give me the feeling that as opposed to me you have never read one!
That there are a lot of negative social, environmental, and economic effects with "renewable" or "green" energy isn't exactly a secret.
Yep - far fewer than with a massive climate change, acid rain and NOx from fossil fules. You will have to show that your claim 'alternative energies are
worse' is true, not that 'alternative energies also have negative aspects'. nobody doubts the later, but you claimed the former!
(nice try at a strawman, btw)
Solar is going to require processing thousands of tons of arsenic and gallium, plus paving over Arizona with solar cells, destroying habitat. I hope you have some really good liners in your landfill when those panels' power productivity gradually degrade to the point of having to be replaced, because you don't want them in contact with your water supply. Of course, they eventually will be in contact with your groundwater. Something to think about before you order it, I would say. Oh, and like wind power below, solar plants in Arizona have been proven to kill Federally protected species. This time, it's tortoises.
You're not up to date on the recent solar cell research @ e.g. the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Institute in Stuttgart. Did i say 'recent'? Heck, the stuff has been published like 5 years ago........ and you still tlak about the silicon wafer cells here..... doh!
Wind power is going to kill millions of migratory birds (including Federal protected endangered species) and take up significant parts of the Midwest. Like solar, it will be an eyesore upon the land. That part about Federal protection? It means that if you build a windplant, and it kills certain species, you are subject to criminal prosecution. Which is not my kind of encouragement to develop the resource. Also, like solar, it will have all the maintenance costs of millions of dollars' worth of equipment permanently exposed to degradation the open environment. And unlike solar, it will have moving parts. Which will mean maintenance costs, metal fatigue, and replacement. Which means mining and landfill space. But at least you won't get poisoned by them, although they have been implicated as the cause of some brush fires.
Funny, wind plants in germany totally fail to kill birds. Must be those inferior dumb US birds.....
Maintenance is indeed up - but it does a lot less damage than mining coal.
Nice try here, comparing a COMPLETE system (wind plant including prod&repair) wiht a PARTIAL system (cola plant, no mine, no landfill for it). Sadly, I recognized your trick - poor gene!
Hydro disrupts riparian ecology and all the good dam sites are taken in the US. In fact, the American environmental movement is calling for dismantlement of several dams because of their environmental impact. It also can be somewhat hazardous for people who live downstream. Hope that the site geologists catch every fault in the walls, and that reservoir-induced seismicity will be light.
Smaller, more dispersend, some (simple) rules about the % of water damed - and again you end up with less damage then from cola mines. Not to talk about cola ruining our climate.
All three of the above choices will make our society more vulnerable to climatic fluctuations (natural or human induced). Hydro power production decreased by 25% in the West during the 1980s as a result of prolonged drought.
but your sentence shouldn't end here: ........prolonged drought due to global climate change, caused by fossil fuel use!
Geothermal isn't subject to environmental fluctuations as long as you supply your own water. It is, however, essentially a nonrenewable resource once your rocks cool down. Power production capacity at The Geysers in California dropped in half in ten years. It turns out that rock makes a really great insulator. Once the surfaces that were exposed to the pipes were cooled, it would take great lengths of time for the rock to warm back up to its original temperature. Large parts of the system had to be shut down indefinately. Then you have all the cost of drilling, all the cost of corrosion, and the threat of contamination (there's some nasty natural substances in a lot of those thermal waters, heavy metals and the like).
Yes, look at the one surefire-shortterm geothermal thingy and then dismiss the entire thing.
If you are smart, look @ Iceland's experiences with geothermal energy.
All of the above energy sources are site-specific. That means that instead of being able to place the plant close to the end-user, you have to place them wherever the resource is and run lines to the end user. You lose a lot of energy that way, and with solar and wind your lines always have to big enough to carry maximum capacity--even though the plants actually run at that capacity at very little of the time.
True, whihc is why plastering prt of the sahara with solar cells and using them to produce H2 from water looks so attractive
Oh, and since we're talking about the future...according to USGS projections (2000), the global copper reserve runs out in...oh...about 15 years.
No you open a can of worms that will get your hands quite dirty: you rely on prictions that have in past shown a very steady record of being utterly totally wrong! Read up on past predictions..... Always totally off!
The rise in cost will allow more mines to open on less economically feasible deposits and will generate less return for greater investment, so there will still be copper. BUT it will be expensive. Be sure and factor that in with your cost projection, unless you want to relocate New York City to Nebraska.
First of all - that prediction is (as usual) not worth the paper it was written on. IIRC, there was, by the same guys, a prediction we'd be out of oil in 2000.
Second, you seem to value slightly lower costs (coal plant power must be distributed as well) a lot higher than a stable climate... What will it cost if the entire midwest turns desert? What will it cost if NY slowly sinks into the ocean, getting hit by more and more and larger and larger storms? What will it cost then large areas of Canada and the northern US states get so badly blizzarded that the cost of clearing one road to each town will increase tenfold compared to today?
Because, if you will excuse me for making the personification, they are bad. In some cases, just unwise, but in some cases, very bad.
If you classify them as 'bad', then I cannot help but extend that system of classification to fossil fuels.
Well, let's look at them: mines ruin the landscape, require massive landfills, pollute the ground water, lead to groud settling with massiv damage to the surface (roads, houses etc.), coal plants produce huge amounts of SOx, NOx etc that require very expensive filtering, are ineffective below a certain size due to heat loss, convert only a tiny fraction of the energy in the coal into electrical power, and
worst of all singificantly screw up our climate!
I'd classify that in your scheme as 'so horribly bad that they are inacceptable'
There is more to environmental quality than gas emissions!
True - but before I worry about a few birds I worry about the global ecosystems!
Repeat:
There is more to environmental quality than gas emissions!
Repeat: there is no environmental quality if all ecosystems in the world get turned upside down. Where it hte quality in Denver, CO, if the surroundign landscape is a desert? Where is the environmental quality?
All participants in the renewable energy debate need to know that and understand it intuitively.
They do - you chose the lesser of two evils! And the lesser one happenes to be the non-fossil-fuel one.
And despite what government agencies and certain environmentalist groups are telling you, installing renewable energy sources isn't going to cost a lot,
get your grammar straight.
bring society into harmony with nature, and save endangered species.
Continued unchecked use of fossil fuels will definately totally ruin OUR world. Period.
Which of the two do you want?
Instead it's going to cost a lot, make us more subject to nature's whims (climatically),
eh, how so, compared to a global temp increase of several degrees?????
and drive numerous species to extinction. In the process we will will mine hundreds of millions of tons of metals, lime, and aggregates that could have been conserved.
Uh, care to compare that to a massive global climate shift? THAT will kill MILLIONS of species!
We will be processing on a grand scale toxins that should be left in their mineral states in the ground. And we will be scarring the landscape.
Oh, are you talking about the massive amounts of toxins needed to get so-called 'clean coal' energy?
In fact, this comes down entirely to CO2. On every other environmental parameter, modern coal plants win as being greener than what activists are trying to pass off as 'green'.
True, they have mad advances. the problem is indeed that they release vast amounts of 'fossil' CO2.
If there's a dangerous level of gallium in my drinking water, I don't care about CO2.
Abolish cars and watches and space research - THAT's what's giving you hgih levels......
but, I doubt you will have drinking water at all in 100 years if the CO2 levels go up as they do now.
I'd prefer some sulfur dioxide in the air to millions of square miles of giant bird-killing turbines in the air that are noisy and unpredictable enough that some days I don't even have power.
Have you ever seen one? It seems not.
Research Clean Coal Technology.
Yep, we need that, until we can get away from coal.
By the way, I hope you like stripmining because with solar and wind we're going to be doing a lot of it.
nonsense! You'll have to back this absrud claim up a lot!
@ gothmog!
