Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Who is spending ONE TRILLION DOLLARS a year of our last remaining life savings, that we’ll never see again, on Global Wars of Oil Terror?

Not the Saudis! AfghanistanPetroleum.com

Gosh, I sure hope they find a way to make nuclear powered B-2 bombers, so we don’t run out of ways to subjugate the 3W, once US:EU burns up all the oil.

Humans are the problem in that equation. Its not CO2
(which has been recently so low that c-4 grasses
evolved, look them up) that will run out. Its
energy or food or medicine or water.

Ammo, there’s plenty of.

The nuke thing is interesting. Stewart Brand has also been pushing nuclear. The main problem, however, seems to that building up nuclear takes a long time and is amazingly expensive. Every decade or so someone comes along and says this one will really work – it’s different!, we mean it this time. (The latest edition of that is in Finland – it’s a couple years late and a couple billion over budget. Bummer, that.)

Here’s Amory Lovin’s take on the issue:

http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths.pdf

To repeat – nukes would be great if they were cheaper and more scalable. But they’re not. And there’s all this other stuff that is – right now.

(Ask yourselves the following question – if wind and solar aren’t the next big thing, why is China so determined to own the market?)

And one thing you don’t mention is what he said (if anything) about cap & trade or carbon taxes? The way to tell the difference between people peddling tech as a distraction from actually doing anything is what they say about market incentives. No incentives = no sincerity. (The whole hydrogen economy scam, for example, was a massively expensive delaying action against fuel efficiency that nearly resulted in the destruction of the US auto industry. Ooops.)

We’ve had nuclear fission for 50 years, had massive government investment in it in some big countries, and it’s still an expensive, dangerous, failure.

It also doesn’t sound like a global solution. (Will this work in Iran, for example? Would we want it to?)

Better to invest in technologies that have been steadily proving themselves over the past 20 years (ie. wind, solar and efficiency).

Still, it’s good to see the people like Gates starting to think serriously about this stuff.

If Bill Gates is half the supervillain that the world thinks he is then the factor he’ll try to reduce to zero is “World Population.”

The key concept, which is not stated clearly above, is that by using a type of reactor that can convert non-fissile u238 or th232 to fissile isotopes Pu239 or U233, you make available approximately 500 times as much energy as in u235 based nuclear energy (the current type). This would increase the energy ROI of harvesting uranium from seawater to the point that it appears feasible. That energy source is practically limitless, we will kill ourselves some other way before that runs out. This conversion of isotopes to being fissile has the unfortunately sorta-scary name of “breeding”. Whether we breed u238 or th232, either way can be made to work, though thorium is preferred by many for reasons too technical to get into here.

Don’t take my word for it, take Alvin Weinberg’s, former head of Oak Ridge National Lab. He pretty much called the whole coal/nuclear/GHG thing back in 1974 after inventing the light water (u235) reactor. He was “let go” while attempting to get thorium breeder work funded to completion.

The waste issue is a complicated but if we stop pretending that reprocessing spent fuel causes people elsewhere to build bombs, then totally game-changing options come up. There is so much nonsense surrounding this issue, it makes me want to cry. To get an idea of this, learn about the radioactivity of potassium.

Also Mackay’s excellent book Without Hot Air is available for free. It is excellent and also notes that a fleet a breeder reactors, if safe/etc. would be said miracle.

This is addressed in the final chapter of Super Freak Economics. The best idea the guys at IV came up with is to pump a bunch of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere (a la a giant volcanoe eruption).

Hardly!

My argument is NOT “all we need to do is invent non-existant technology X, and we’ll all be fine.”

My argument is: “We already have the technology. Science says that the longer we wait, the worse the problem becomes. We should implement the technology, and now!”

What follows naturally is population DECLINE. That’s a move in the right direction. Do I want or need it to be 0 population, no. But increasing population is destined for failure and that’s the path we are on right now.

Unfortunately economic growth is predicated on population growth. At least in the resource constrained worlds of food and energy. And businesses have developed lots of methods to keep you consuming. Advertising works. In fact look at it – even though we are at 100% satiation, we are encouraged to eat several times more calories than we need. If this were not true we would not be overweight.

That said who cares – just educate women. And get rid of religion (this comes from educating women, ps) – we don’t need 7 babies per woman.

W

Have to object to the wording there. A service is something you order to the back door when you feel like it. Something that you can do without if you can’t afford it. Food, water and heat are in a category of things called “life support”, because you need a constant supply, and you die if the line breaks.

Only a miracle will sustain our hungry civilisation.

Nuclear energy of some sort is the only immediately viable solution.

The alternative is radical social and political change, such as the collapse of the military-industrial complex, after massive devastation, and basically a forced change in lifestyle, which means no more hi-tech gadgets and no more of many of the technological comforts us here in the west have grown used to. It won’t be pretty.

We are in a situation of an artificially induced overpopulation. The vast majority of people will not remove themselves from the planet voluntarily, nor do they seem willing to relinquish things like cheap electricity.

Alternative energy simply doesn’t cut it for our massive consumption levels, solar panels take a lot of energy and materials to manufacture, etc etc…

This leaves us with either waiting for a miracle or going for an improved nuclear technology.

PS: Bill has got that Windoze XP aesthetic down to a T, check the mic taped to his cheek, which patch is this?

For everyone, amen. More “Shop Class as Soulcraft”. Puts all kinds of learning in a practical and powerful context.

I am a huge fan of Grandin’s philosophy and wise advocacy for the non-neurotypical, but I wish she would stop making everyone all soft-eyed and romantic about CAFOs. It’s as if we all conveniently forgot that CAFOs are the epicenters of myriad ethical issues with food because Grandin’s work a chance to see someone we’d otherwise consider an underdog succeed. Just because the cow doesn’t mind being fed down the chute anymore doesn’t make CAFOs part of a the better world she wishes to create, and for all her work, I’ve never heard her address those other problems.

Now having Grandin work with a rancher like Joel Salatin, there’s a recipe for raising the best meat possible!

I think we should kill all the cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry; then people would have to be vegans…sorry, meant to say that we’d reduce the CO2 emmisions by 18%.

Hmmmm, I wonder how many tons of CO2 each human produces; if we got rid of the humans…strike that, bad idea.

First and foremost – your technological saviors (like hybrids) are hardly the solution as they are now…so we are pending more (wait for it) technological improvements in that area.

Also, how is thorium nuclear energy a non-existent technology? It’s ready, the 1960s era anti-nuke people aren’t. I don’t mean to imply that the paranoia is 100% unwarranted, but since nuclear is clearly where we’re going – the sooner the better.