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Palace of Hate posted:got any sources on those prophecies for the the future and foolishly simple sweeping statements If you're having trouble believing that a grid can be engineered to use significantly more renewables in the US, I'd recommend reading the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's works (http://www.nrel.gov). They do a lot of the foundational research into the complex problems of integrating large scale renewable projects. They've developed several of the best models for grid planning and integration of renewables into grid plans. That'd be a good place to start. To be fair, my knowledge of energy infrastructure is woefully US-centric, and energy is a geographic problem in many ways that makes the decision about grid planning specific to the grids in question. (Ymmv, South Africa.  )
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Apr 28, 2015 20:07
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Nintendo Kid posted:Yeah the thing is like almost nobody gets coal delivered for heating these days, and oil heat is also totally on the way out. I should have been clearer, biomass powerplants (as opposed to biomass heating) are what would have to tide an all renewable country over a calm night. Trabisnikof posted:Yes, no single renewable will ever replace all of coal's power generation. The solution is using them together to fill in each other's gaps. New biomass and existing hydro can provide essential supply reserves for a more dynamic grid. quote:Anything that replaces coal is good for the climate and good for the land around said coal plant.
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Apr 28, 2015 20:18
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:Ten different kinds of power that use too much land will still use too much land. Is this actually a problem, at least in the US?
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Apr 28, 2015 21:28
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Kaal posted:Coal is used for electrical generation, and a lot of electricity is used to heat houses during the winter. In those older houses where biomass is used to heat instead of central heating, biomass directly replaces that energy cost (and in a much more efficient way than electrical room heaters). I think that you might be surprised at how many normal, residential houses still use wood fireplaces and pellet stoves. Wood fireplaces are terrible for heating. Most of the heat goes right up the chimney, and the warm air that goes out is replaced by colder air being drawn in from outside the house. No way is that more efficient than electrical room heaters. Modern wood stoves, properly installed, are useful. But fireplaces are pretty much awful.
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Apr 28, 2015 21:33
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silence_kit posted:Is this actually a problem, at least in the US? It is always a problem, unless your country is already an agricultural hellscape with no marginal areas that could still be ruined by planting Miscanthus, Arundo donax, or some fast growing shrub. e: the species area relationship is A Thing, and if anything we should be reducing area use and encourage urbanisation and super-intensive farming (e.g. vertical farming) where possible rather than adding more cultured area because it allows someone's bright idea to become ~carbon neutral~ when there are alternatives. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 21:33
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Yeah, habitat destruction is always a bad thing, and returning previously cultivated or human-used land back to nature is very good. Ideally we'd be living in huge dense atomic powered cities that grew all their food in vast hydroponic facilities and meat-factories while our farms, open pit mines, tar sands, and suburban sprawl returned to nature.
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Apr 28, 2015 21:38
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blowfish posted:It is always a problem, unless your country is already an agricultural hellscape with no marginal areas that could still be ruined by planting Miscanthus, Arundo donax, or some fast growing shrub. I'm not really buying your explanation. While it is better to be energy dense than to not be energy dense, you haven't really shown that the energy density of solar, wind, etc., is actually a problem, especially given that there is a ton of land in the United States, and some energy generation technologies, notably flat plate solar photovoltaic and wind, can coexist with other uses of the land. Edit: VVVVVVVVVVVVV That's not what I said. I said that it could be compatible with other uses of the land, not necessarily that it could co-exist with a natural habitat. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 21:41
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silence_kit posted:I'm not really buying your explanation. While it is better to be energy dense than to not be energy dense, you haven't really shown that the energy density of solar, wind, etc., is actually a problem, especially given that there is a ton of land in the United States, and some energy generation technologies, notable flat plate solar photovoltaic and wind, can coexist with other uses of the land. Wind does not coexist with intact habitats. I will go make a ballpark estimate of area required for biomass crops to fuel the US cars and maybe 1/3 of the US electricity consumptions when I have time, afaik it's not pretty. In Germany, we would need to cover like 10% of the country in oil crops to run our cars, so even in a less densely populated country like the US it's going to take up quite a lot of space. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 21:42
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah, habitat destruction is always a bad thing, and returning previously cultivated or human-used land back to nature is very good. Though that does raise the question of what you do with all the people who don't fit in the city, or how you deal with the psychological issues of that sort of population density, or where you get the resources from to build the city, or where you put all the waste that the city produces. Unless you have star trek technology it would appear that distributed living, taking advantage of the natural processes which aid in the growth of food, provision of materials, and processing of waste, would be preferable? A big untouched wilderness isn't really worth anything if all the humans are stuck in hellhole megacities which are polluted to gently caress and back.
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Apr 28, 2015 21:44
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blowfish posted:Wind does not coexist with intact habitats. Don't worry, if we wait on the *perfect solution* long enough, we won't have to worry about intact habitats anymore! Or we could put wind turbines over pasture land or cotton farms....
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Apr 28, 2015 21:46
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OwlFancier posted:A big untouched wilderness isn't really worth anything if all the humans are stuck in hellhole megacities which are polluted to gently caress and back.
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Apr 28, 2015 21:47
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OwlFancier posted:Though that does raise the question of what you do with all the people who don't fit in the city, or how you deal with the psychological issues of that sort of population density, or where you get the resources from to build the city, or where you put all the waste that the city produces. Why do they need to be polluted to gently caress and back? Put a big reactor a few km away from the city, electrify transportation, and put a bunch of vertical farms with conveniently-contained emissions of anything on the outskirts. The city also doesn't have to consist of a solid concrete wall of brutalist skyscraper-bunkers, a loosely-built-up city with green spaces is still better than putting everyone in small villages and farm estates or suburban McMansions.
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Apr 28, 2015 21:48
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silence_kit posted:I'm not really buying your explanation. While it is better to be energy dense than to not be energy dense, you haven't really shown that the energy density of solar, wind, etc., is actually a problem, especially given that there is a ton of land in the United States, and some energy generation technologies, notable flat plate solar photovoltaic and wind, can coexist with other uses of the land. Mass habitat destruction would probably be a bad thing. Just because land is empty of humans doesn't mean it's a sterile wasteland! OwlFancier posted:Unless you have star trek technology it would appear that distributed living, taking advantage of the natural processes which aid in the growth of food, provision of materials, and processing of waste, would be preferable? A big untouched wilderness isn't really worth anything if all the humans are stuck in hellhole megacities which are polluted to gently caress and back. It's interesting that you assume a high population city has to be polluted as hell. But I am to understand that your home country did get sued in a European high court over willfully ignoring of emissions standards. http://www.clientearth.org/news/press-releases/supreme-court-rules-uk-government-is-breaking-air-pollution-laws-2170 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/17/air-pollution-quality-laws-uk-government-supreme-court
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Apr 28, 2015 21:49
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Trabisnikof posted:Don't worry, if we wait on the *perfect solution* long enough, we won't have to worry about intact habitats anymore! I hear wind power does best in places with lots of wind, such as hilltops if any are around (hills are more likely to be covered in sort of ok habitat compared to the surrounding flat land and valleys)
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Apr 28, 2015 21:50
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blowfish posted:I hear wind power does best in places with lots of wind, such as hilltops if any are around (hills are more likely to be covered in sort of ok habitat compared to the surrounding flat land and valleys) Yes, wind power does great where there is lots of wind. Luckily the entire middle of the US is windy as gently caress and also fairly flat.  Notice all that sweet sweet wind action up in corn country? 
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Apr 28, 2015 22:00
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Trabisnikof posted:Notice all that sweet sweet wind action up in corn country? Edit: Flying into Copenhagen and seeing those turbines cutting through the fog is one of the coolest things ever. Rent-A-Cop fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 22:04
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Trabisnikof posted:Yes, wind power does great where there is lots of wind. Luckily the entire middle of the US is windy as gently caress and also fairly flat. Lots of that windy as gently caress territory has a terrible habit of being struck by tornados. Windmills generally don't like that.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:06
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blowfish posted:Why do they need to be polluted to gently caress and back? Put a big reactor a few km away from the city, electrify transportation, and put a bunch of vertical farms with conveniently-contained emissions of anything on the outskirts. The city also doesn't have to consist of a solid concrete wall of brutalist skyscraper-bunkers, a loosely-built-up city with green spaces is still better than putting everyone in small villages and farm estates or suburban McMansions. Yeah, a lot of green types don't understand nothing is more ecological than a dense city. Where do they get their resources? Where do they put their waste? The same places people living in the country do, but at vastly lower rates. Cities use less physical and energy resources and emit less waste per capita than rural areas. The absolute worst thing this planet could endure is a bunch of idiot hippies going off and living in "earth ships", the planet can't support us all living like that. The best thing humans can do is leave nature alone, not try to "integrate" with it. Also the denser your city, the shorter your distance to real nature or countryside is. Want to go camping? Or to a cabin? Or just hike around all day? It's a very short trip away because you don't have endless sprawl and lovely exurbs to get through. Properly grown cities should be pleasant places anyways. They don't have to be Dredd hellscapes, they can follow traditional design guidelines and end up looking like walkable human-scale paradises like Prague or Vienna. You don't even really need to go over 6 stories. Most pollution in cities comes from suburbanites driving in. Eliminate the sprawl, eliminate most of the cars, and you've both saved a ton on energy/fuel and also drastically improved your air quality. Hell it isn't even about the total population, it's more just about the compactness, the efficiency. You can absolutely have compact efficient small towns and villages, I've been to many. Places not even a kilometer wide, places that don't even need transit because you can get anywhere within a 10min walk. The key is that most of the buildings share walls and of are a similar massing, and close together to keep travel times short. 500 year old villages know whats up. Everyone doesn't need their own huge lawn because you walk in any direction for a few min and you're in stunning countryside. Don't like the crowds? Go ramble.  Just stick a little reactor under town square. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 22:07
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Nintendo Kid posted:Mass habitat destruction would probably be a bad thing. Just because land is empty of humans doesn't mean it's a sterile wasteland! Yes, I get it--all other things being equal, it is better to have an energy generation source which is more energy dense. You still haven't shown that the worse energy density of renewable energy sources is actually a problem. This is not to mention that new installed flat plate solar photovoltaic and wind power doesn't necessarily have to displace natural habitats and can be installed on land which is already used for another purpose. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 22:09
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silence_kit posted:Yes, I get it--all other things being equal, it is better to have an energy generation source which is more energy dense. You still haven't shown that the worse energy density of renewable energy sources is actually a problem. This is not to mention that flat plate solar photovoltaic and wind power can be installed on land which is already used for another purpose. so do you think that a fully functioning and intact ecological community is less capable of remediating carbon dioxide than a lovely slash burned invasive grass field with solar panels manufactured in the dirtiest of chinese industrial centers edit: mentioning your non mention, your non mention refers to land of a description which doesn't exist Dairy Days fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 22:20
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blowfish posted:Why do they need to be polluted to gently caress and back? Put a big reactor a few km away from the city, electrify transportation, and put a bunch of vertical farms with conveniently-contained emissions of anything on the outskirts. The city also doesn't have to consist of a solid concrete wall of brutalist skyscraper-bunkers, a loosely-built-up city with green spaces is still better than putting everyone in small villages and farm estates or suburban McMansions. Because what do you do with all the waste? Humans poo poo, piss, throw away food, machinery, packaging, parts. Dense cities produce a shitload of waste that has to go somewhere. The planet is fairly good at handing a thin smattering of various kinds of waste, but piling it all together requires more human investment in high-density processing solutions for that waste. You can't just contain everything indefinitely, because then you just end up with a container full of horrible poo poo you then need to put somewhere. Nuclear energy is certainly good on the dense-waste-storage front but I don't know what you're going to do with all the industrial waste produced in the building and running of the city, or all the waste produced by things that can't be run on nuclear power (like the people living in it).
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Apr 28, 2015 22:27
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Palace of Hate posted:so do you think that a fully functioning and intact ecological community is less capable of remediating carbon dioxide than a lovely slash burned invasive grass field with I'm sounding like a broken record here, but all you are pointing out is that the worse energy density of solar cells means that if you were to install them in native forest (which you don't necessarily have to do in the United States, but whatever), you'd have to cut down more forest than if you were to build a nuclear plant in the native forest. Is the magnitude of forest needed to cut down sizeable? Does it actually matter? No one is answering the question. Palace of Hate posted:solar panels manufactured in the dirtiest of chinese industrial centers Just pointing out that solar cell manufacturing generates pollution isn't really much of an argument. Obviously, solar photovoltaic cells are manufactured using an industrial process that creates pollution. Does the manufacturing of the cell actually create that much pollution compared to the pollution generated by other sources? Does it necessarily have to create that much pollution? Edit: Palace of Hate posted:edit: mentioning your non mention, your non mention refers to land of a description which doesn't exist Wind can be installed in agricultural areas and flat plate solar photovoltaic can be installed in a ton of places. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 22:30
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OwlFancier posted:Because what do you do with all the waste? Humans poo poo, piss, throw away food, machinery, packaging, parts. Is this a joke? Like, did you just show up here from 1850 London? Waste disposal and sewage treatment exist and have been used for a very long time. Rome managed to keep itself reasonably clean with a million people way back 2000 odd years ago.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:31
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And how did ancient Rome manage that? I assume they didn't magic all the waste away, they probably took it somewhere and dumped it.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:32
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OwlFancier posted:And how did ancient Rome manage that? I assume they didn't magic all the waste away, they probably took it somewhere and dumped it. Which you also have to do if everyone lives in hobbit holes or whatever the gently caress. It's in no way an unsolvable problem.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:34
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OwlFancier posted:And how did ancient Rome manage that? I assume they didn't magic all the waste away, they probably took it somewhere and dumped it. Ancient waste dumps are some of the best places for archaeologists.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:34
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blowfish posted:The main reasonable objection to biomass is land use and conservation problems inherent therein. Getting the biomass to the power station is another massive problem. Its energy density is something like 2/3 of the GJ/tonne that you get from coal (c. 16 vs. c. 24), which means you need more ships and more trains to get it to where it's needed.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:36
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silence_kit posted:I'm sounding like a broken record here, but all you are pointing out is that the worse energy density of solar cells means that if you were to install them in native forest (which you don't necessarily have to do in the United States, but whatever), you'd have to cut down more forest than if you were to build a nuclear plant in the native forest. Is the magnitude of forest needed to cut down sizeable? Does it actually matter? No one is answering the question. silence_kit posted:Just pointing out that solar cell manufacturing generates pollution isn't really much of an argument. Obviously, solar photovoltaic cells are manufactured using an industrial process that creates pollution. Does the manufacturing of the cell actually create that much pollution compared to the pollution generated by other sources? Does it necessarily have to create that much pollution?
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Apr 28, 2015 22:37
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RDevz posted:Getting the biomass to the power station is another massive problem. Its energy density is something like 2/3 of the GJ/tonne that you get from coal (c. 16 vs. c. 24), which means you need more ships and more trains to get it to where it's needed. The energy cost to ship something in bulk by train can be pretty low. But then again, most of the time you mine-mouth that poo poo and site your Ag based biomass facility in Ag country and your city-dump based biogas facility near the city dump.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:38
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this is not to mention that a non trivial amount of people fall of a building and die per kilowatt hour of solar power
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Apr 28, 2015 22:39
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Nintendo Kid posted:Which you also have to do if everyone lives in hobbit holes or whatever the gently caress. It's in no way an unsolvable problem. Of course it isn't, but my point is that if you are trying to avoid high levels of pollution, you're going to need to dump your poo poo somewhere. If you're trying to let nature return to greenery, that seems somewhat incompatible with dumping poo poo all over it, not to mention the increased transport costs of moving all the poo poo out of your backyard to somewhere else. Essentially I don't really see how building massive vertical aeroponics farms, desalinisation plants, waste processing plants, and high density cities is better than spreading people out further. If you spread people out enough then you can use naturally occuring water sources, farmland, and even biodegradation to take care of some of the waste without wrecking the shop. The planet is capable of providing some of the important bases for human life but stuff like dustbowls and droughts and pollution generally occur as a result of excessive human population density, not low population density. I guess I can understand the logic of stacking people up like jenga blocks because that gives you more space to spread out your farmland and stuff, but the idea of people living in dense cities with nothing outside but woodland seems a bit... weird? People still need feeding and watering which is probably going to take a lot of space. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 22:39
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OwlFancier posted:Of course it isn't, but my point is that if you are trying to avoid high levels of pollution, you're going to need to dump your poo poo somewhere. If you're trying to let nature return to greenery, that seems somewhat incompatible with dumping poo poo all over it, not to mention the increased transport costs of moving all the poo poo out of your backyard to somewhere else. if you spread all the people out you can't collect all their poo poo and put it through the waste processing plant numbnuts
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Apr 28, 2015 22:45
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Palace of Hate posted:if you spread all the people out you can't collect all their poo poo and put it through the waste processing plant numbnuts I think generally the method for disposing of waste with a distributed population is to bury it just out of sight and wait for it to rot, then plant trees on it. Which works fairly well assuming you don't bury a shitload of it at once in the same place and the stuff is actually biodegradable, but the excess of human produced nonbiodegradable waste is sort of a separate problem, though you could work around it I imagine, presumably with greater ease than trying to feed and water millions of people without building farms or relying on natural water sources.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:47
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OwlFancier posted:Of course it isn't, but my point is that if you are trying to avoid high levels of pollution, you're going to need to dump your poo poo somewhere. If you're trying to let nature return to greenery, that seems somewhat incompatible with dumping poo poo all over it, not to mention the increased transport costs of moving all the poo poo out of your backyard to somewhere else. And modern cities do that, like this is a Solved Problem. You only need a few dozen square miles excavated and lined to say 500 feet deep and you'd be surprised how much unrecyclable waste you can fit in there. And the transport costs are still lesser than attempting to move everything around more to widely spread settlements. Spreading people out further requires a lot more energy usage. Again I get that you're from the land of criminally polluting cities where there's also barely any vertical development comparatively, but it works quite well in other places! For example, residents of NYC are close enough in that the majority of residents do not own cars, and that combined with other efficiencies like the steam system that heats AND cools much of Manhattan results in the city's residents causing only 30% of the carbon emissions of the average American. They also use less than half the electricity per capita of the country at large. OwlFancier posted:I think generally the method for disposing of waste with a distributed population is to bury it just out of sight and wait for it to rot, then plant trees on it. Which is hella wasteful because it reduces recycling and reuse efficiency.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:48
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OwlFancier posted:Of course it isn't, but my point is that if you are trying to avoid high levels of pollution, you're going to need to dump your poo poo somewhere. If you have a million people's worth of poo poo, you have to dump that poo poo somewhere. If you have a million people spread out over an area the side of Texas, you have to dump that poo poo somewhere. If you have a million people spread out over an area the size of 1/12th of Mumbai, you have to dump that poo poo somewhere. In both cases, you have the same amount of poo poo to dispose of. In one case, it's already all in a very centralized location. In the other case, it's spread out all over the place. quote:If you're trying to let nature return to greenery, that seems somewhat incompatible with dumping poo poo all over it, not to mention the increased transport costs of moving all the poo poo out of your backyard to somewhere else. See above. Same amount of poo poo to get rid of. You think getting rid of it from a much smaller centralized location takes *more* resources than getting rid of it from a much larger area? Or is what you're thinking is that a million people in Texas can each just dig a hole in their back yard and poo poo into it and that doesn't really count as pollution?
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Apr 28, 2015 22:51
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Not with three hundred million fat Americans living out in the sticks though. The ecological footprint of a person is lower in urban areas, and the whole point of the exercise is that it's more acceptable to gently caress up limited areas and manage their ecosystems purely to service humans while leaving the rest intact, instead of loving all the area slightly less (but still enough to ruin it).
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Apr 28, 2015 22:52
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Phanatic posted:See above. Same amount of poo poo to get rid of. You think getting rid of it from a much smaller centralized location takes *more* resources than getting rid of it from a much larger area? Or is what you're thinking is that a million people in Texas can each just dig a hole in their back yard and poo poo into it and that doesn't really count as pollution? Depends on the poo poo. That's literally how most of the world used to do it for a long time. It works less the higher the population density goes, and the greater portion of the waste is nonbiodegradable. I wouldn't advise doing it with your washing machine but it works quite well for food and human waste so far as I know, though the food would work better as compost. And again, it's not just about waste, water and food are also far easier to get from a distributed area than from a very small space. How do you feed a city without large amounts of surrounding farmland?
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Apr 28, 2015 22:54
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OwlFancier posted:Depends on the poo poo. That's literally how most of the world used to do it for a long time. It works less the higher the population density goes, and the greater portion of the waste is nonbiodegradable. I wouldn't advise doing it with your washing machine but it works quite well for food and human waste so far as I know, though the food would work better as compost. large amounts of surrounding farmland != suburban hellscape dotted with farms
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Apr 28, 2015 22:56
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Palace of Hate posted:large amounts of surrounding farmland != suburban hellscape dotted with farms Dibs on being a farmer then. Though actually, being a farmer or living in a city sounds like a horrible set of options.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:58
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Nintendo Kid posted:Is this a joke? Like, did you just show up here from 1850 London? People confuse density with population as well. If everyone lived at rural densities the earth would be a blasted hellscape. What matters is both the total waste/garbage/pollution created and the per-capita rates of course. But some people equate low population densities with low populations. They picture the countryside and think "if we all lived like this the earth would be better" but what they are actually think is "if there were way less people the earth would be better". Yeah, if we reduced the earth's population 90% we would drastically cut our energy use and amount of waste we create, but massive global genocide isn't really a great option. What we can and should do is look at what styles of living generate the least waste per-person, which forms of land-use need the least amount of energy, land, and resources per-person. The answer is: cities. Of course that's not the only answer, a bad city is a bad city and there's a million other social and economic policies that are important too.
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Apr 28, 2015 22:58
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