Re: Energy article from BBC news

Bill Hamilton <williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com> 07/28/04 8:47 AM wrote:

This articleappeared in BBC news yesterday.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3930245.stm

Interesting that the country that hit on the "bonanza" of North Sea oil
a few
years ago is now looking to ways to burn coal and contemplating more
nuclear.
Clearly North Sea oil is running out. It's also interesting that with
its huge
reserves, Russia is planning to ramp up nuclear.

AK: One of the central issues in energy extraction is that the costs of
coal, nuclear, wind, solar, biomass, etc will all rise as the price of
oil and natural gas rises. The machines that mine the coal and the
trains that transport it will cost more to run. The cost of extracting
and processing uranium and the cost of building the nuclear plant itself
will also rise. Solar panels will cost more to build, windmills will
cost more to construct. And the infrastructure to support these
alternatives will cost more than they would if manufactured with cheap
oil today. The question that no one seems to have a good grasp on is:
To what price level will these alternatives to oil and gas rise as oil
and gas prices go up. This has some of the characteristics of a dog
chasing her tail and concerns most of those who recognize the situation.

So the question becomes: What can be done. With that in mind Richard
Heinberg, author of The Party's Over has written Powerdown: Options and
Actions for a Post Carbon-World, which is available soon at Amazon.
Heinberg posted the introduction of this book at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/60562

I found his writing rather engaging and well worth reading.

A couple of excerpts:

Everyone knows the classic scene from a dozen Westerns: a self-reliant,
grizzled old geezer is taken to see a doctor, perhaps for the first time
in
his life. He knows the prognosis intuitively and is prepared for the
worst.
"Tell me the truth, Doc."

That's how some of us feel when we read about climate change or the
ongoing
degradation of the world's coral reefs. Give it to me straight: I'd
rather
know than live in denial.

But most of the leaders of government and industry feel differently.
They
are more like the character Colonel Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, in
A
Few Good Men (1992). In that film's climactic courtroom scene,
Lieutenant
Kaffee (Tom Cruise), cross-examining Jessup, insists, "I want the
truth."
Jessup shouts back, "You can't handle the truth!"

Nor, it seems, can we - at least in the estimation of the masters of the
corporate media. And so we tend to receive only sanitized versions of
the
news about our world. Occasionally, disturbing information does appear
on
television or in the newspapers, but the offending story usually shows
up
buried in the same broadcast, or on the same page, as others about
relatively ephemeral political developments, local murders, the lives of
entertainment stars, or scores in sports games.

and

We get plenty of help in this regard from the relentlessly cheery
entertainment industry, but also from politicians of every stripe.
Trying to
tell the public truly awful news is considered impolite - unless it is
news
about something that can be blamed on an opposing political group or
some
foreign enemy. While leftists sometimes highlight certain ecological
crises
as a way of blaming corporations and right-wing governments, they often
make
sure to frame their complaints in a way that suggests that the problems
can
be solved by implementing a plan being put forward by liberal
politicians or
NGOs. Meanwhile, commentators on the political right revile
"environmental
alarmists" for allegedly exaggerating the seriousness of ecological
dilemmas
to suit ideological purposes.

So, as the leftists make skewed and half-hearted attempts to discuss
ecological crises, the attacks from the right have their intended
chilling
effect. Mainstream environmentalists these days often tend reflexively
to
pull their punches and temper their warnings. There are serious problems
facing us, they say again and again, but if we just make the right
choices
those problems will painlessly vanish. When they are at their most
baleful,
environmental scientists tell us that we have the current decade in
which to
make fundamental changes; if we don't, then the slide into ecological
collapse will be irreversible. On the first Earth Day we were told we
had
the decade of the 1970s in which to change course; but for the most part
we
didn't. Then we had the '80s . . . ditto. During the 1992 Earth Summit
in
Rio we heard that humanity had the '90s to reform itself; after that,
there
might be no turning back. There was still no fundamental change in
direction, and here we are a dozen years on. I expect any day now to
read an
official pronouncement to the effect that we have the remainder of the
first
decade of the new century in which to make changes, or else. How many
warnings do we get? Isn't it reasonable by now to assume that we are
living
on borrowed time?

Read the rest at the above URL.

Al Koop
Received on Thu Jul 29 11:36:02 2004