[ExI] eroei forward for kennedy, p.e.

[Dan]

On Sunday, December 23, 2012 7:27 PM spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> On Sunday, December 23, 2012 3:15 PM Jeff Davis <jrd1415 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>… It's all a load of politicized baloney being exploited by the
>>> aforementioned scaremongers (and others) for the benefit of
>>> their own bottom line.
>>
>> …I don't believe every last person pushing the doom and gloom
>> line here has a pecuniary interest or that merely money grabbing
>> motivates them. …Dan
>
> Or another case: money grabbing motives them (as it does me)
> but not in this particular case. Money grabbing always motivates
> me, I love the stuff.  Money is good, the more the better.  I will
> grab any that is grabbable.  Grable?

I like the stuff it can buy... But you know what I meant: that they were pushing views they knew were false (or maybe didn't care one way or the other) but that would make them money. You know, I have nothing against someone wanting money, but I do have something against the confidence artist and fraudster.

> However, in this particular case, what I am really doing is imagining
> a long term future in the event that the singularity doesn’t occur,
> that there is a still-unknown reason why it cannot, in the form in
> which it has commonly been envisioned.  This is a possibility, do
> think it over.  Then what if all our thorium plants and so forth never
> come to fruition, by completely foreseeable reasons: they are crushed
> dead by political forces which turn out to be greater obstacles than
> technical ones.

I think it's not a bad thing, in itself, to speculate on. I think, though, one has to worry that some of the doom and gloom stuff -- maybe much of it -- is wrongly placed. As Bryan Caplan calls it, there's a pessimistic bias: people expect things to get worse even when reams of data and their personal experience should lead them to believe otherwise. And in energy, we've seen this before. The classic example is Jevons predicting coal would run out early in the 20th century because Britain's economy would continue to grow exponentially and it ran on the stuff. I don't think Jevons, though I don't know for sure, really didn't believe this line, but published it merely because it would increase his book sales. :) (I do think, though, that the media, in general, has a bias toward gloom and doom: it will attract more attention if you can bring up some gloom and doom story than, say, a story pointing out things ain't so bad and unlikely to get too much worse.)

> Then, over the long haul, oil reserves will dwindle, even if we drill
> baby drill.  Eventually that wonderful resource does decline, even
> with optimistic assumptions.  The oil shale lasts a long time, but
> not forever.  Even for those of us who do not believe CO2 is a primary
> driver in global warming, we acknowledge that it is a contributor,
> and that eventually global warming is actually a bad thing, even if
> not at first.  Oil shale dumps enormous amounts of CO2 for the amount
> of energy it extracts and delivers.  Space based solar might work out,
> but it might not.
>
> After all that is taken into account, ground-based solar for all its
> shortcomings and expense looks to me like a long term major contributor.
>  Wind powered biomass to liquid fuels will be a big contributor.  Finding
> some alternate means of converting biomass to food will be a huge
> contributor.  Reducing the absurd level of energy waste looks to me like
> the greatest contributor.  All these solutions are scalable and require
> little if any government intervention.

If you make enough assumptions, you can, I trust, get about any outcome you want, no? :) But, seriously, I can see that happening. I don't think government intervention is necessary in those areas. In fact, it might be harmful as it might pick winners too early in the process who have a vested interest in pursuing the wrong technologies in the wrong way or in prolonging bad policies. One thing that does happen often enough -- one need only look at the finanical industry -- is that when the government supports some business, that business then clamours for more support whenever it's under stress and then will argue it's essential, strategically important, or "too big to fail." I think what we need in the energy business is actually the opposite: a much more free market, where failure is an option and is very likely, all too weed out the wrong approaches.

Regards,

Dan

"If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough." -- Milton Friedman (someone I normally don't quote:)
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