[extropy-chat] Energy & Global Warming [was: Partisans and EP]

[Robert Bradbury]

On 2/10/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote:

> I am really annoyed at scientology distracting me at this time.  In the
> process of writing a novel set a hundred years in the future, I had to come
> up with a way the energy and carbon crisis was solved.  That led to notes so
> extensive as to almost constitute a business plan.


I'm not so sure there is the "energy" crisis that people typically think
there is.  The U.S., Europe, Russia, China, and India all have the
technology to go nuclear.  Newer reactor designs are safer.  Reactors to
breed U or fuel recycling could provide a multi-hundred year source of
non-global warming electricity.  Atomic based electricity can give you
hydrogen even if you don't want to go solar.  Where nanotech (or
bionanotech) really helps is allowing you to do low cost pure isotopic
separation to allow inexpensive nuclear transmutation of radioactive
isotopes into stable isotopes (making the "waste" problem disappear).

The same is true with solar electric.  We have the technology now to do 35+%
efficient conversion and universities are being funded to push this to
~50%.  What we lack is sufficient factory production of solar panels to make
the costs low enough and the conversion process fast enough for it to happen
in less than a few decades.

While SPS are a good idea it is a much more expensive technology until you
have the factories available to manufacture the required quantities of
carbon nanotubes *cheaply*.  For the next several decades, I would expect
the costs of the factories to build the nanotubes would significantly exeed
the costs of factories to build the solar electric or solar thermal cells.
Interesting numbers to know would be the tons of CNT required for a space
elevator vs. tons of Si+Ge+As (or CdS) required to have ground based solar
cells.  It is also true that for SPS you are going to need the solar cell
manufacturing capacity *anyway* because going into space is only going to
buy you a factor of 2-3 in solar energy availability [1].

France has already shown you can go nuclear electric (if you have the
political will to do so).  Brazil has shown you can go ethanol fuel.  Spain
appears to be going in the direction of wind electric. If you look at the
economic shifts that Britain and the U.S. underwent in WWII it is clear that
emphasis could be shifted very rapidly if there were a political commitment
to do so.  The "energy crisis" is is a political *leadership* problem.  (If
you look at recent proposals to ban incandescent bulbs entirely in CA and in
state buildings in NJ you can see some law makers are starting to see the
light.)

If I were a VC looking at a business plan for SPS vs. ground based solar I'd
want to see an analysis of the costs of building the CNT factories + space
solar cell factories vs. the costs of ground based solar cell factories to
accomplish converting the U.S. totally to solar electric in 20 years.

Now, this leaves aside that the U.S. could become significantly more energy
efficient than it currently is.  The NY Times had a recent article comparing
U.S. per capita energy consumption with Japan's and we could make a
significant improvement simply becoming more energy conscious (as many
European nations are).

I stopped paying any attention to the "global warming" problem after I
realized that you could solve it seemed that you could solve it simply by
fertilizing the oceans [2].  So one would want to compare costs between
fertilizing the oceans and pumping the CO2 from coal or gas based power
plants back underground (and the costs of space elevators & SPS).  As an
important general rule, I would argue that any system of energy production
that is based on self-replicating nanosystems (corn, switchgrass, oceanic
bacteria, solar ponds + synthetic biology based bacteria) is going to be
significantly cheaper than any system that does *not* rely on extremely high
levels of automation to produce the required infrastructure.  (And designing
that automated production infrastructure usually requires a lot of human
intelligence in up-front costs.)

That *still* doesn't solve the vehicle fuel problem unless you convert all
of the vehicles to electric (which we appear to have the technology to do
currently but not cheaply enough to make it acceptable).  Or as Brazil has
shown you could convert to a sustainable fuel supply for vehicles which
relies on taking carbon out of the atmosphere and returning the carbon to
the atmosphere rather than on non-sustainable methods based on harvesting
the resources resulting from ancient solar energy and the activity of plants
and bacteria producing hydrocarbons that are now either underground or on
the ocean floor.

I would also note, that while there are clear solutions to the energy needs,
and there is an argument that global warming would actually make *more* land
area available for human habitation, there are less clear solutions for
world hunger [3] (which is the cause of millions of deaths annually).  SPS
are *not* going to do anything to solve that problem unless you
simultaneously intend to use all of that excess electricity to illuminate
farms at night or produce synthetic food using the electricity they would
provide.

In contrast, the systems *are* already in place to take advantage of ocean
fertilization because an increase in oceanic bacterial numbers translates
into increased numbers of larger organisms that can be used to feed more
people cheaply (we already have infrastructure to harvest the oceans which
tends to sit idle due to the problem of overfishing).

Robert

1. I think solar insolation is ~1300 W/m^2 above the atmosphere and more
like 400-500 W/m^2 at the Earth's surface (largely because the UV and IR are
aborbed).  Whether you could take advantage of the UV & IR in space is an
open question because more complex cell designs would probably be required.
2. "Global Warming is a Red Herring" (2002)
http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/Papers/GWiaRH.html<http://http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/%7Ebradbury/Papers/GWiaRH.html>
(It should be updated, but it makes lays out the approach.)
3. http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-international.html
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