Powerless?

There’s widespread agreement around the world that we need to act quickly to prevent a bit of a catastrophe that’s looming and that it’s highly probable that we caused. You know the one – getting warmer, weather getting wilder, storms doom gloom and damnation to follow.

As to whether we’re wrecking weather with warming (yeah alliteration, the scourge of journalism – and blogging – but I can get away with it as a hobbyist so nyahh!) I won’t get involved in that argument, to me the significant detail is that the climate currently IS warming and causing storms and floods and wildfires, and we all have to deal with that no matter who we think caused it.

One of those methods is to replace the source of energy we use. Because another fact is that we will continue to increase our use of energy no matter what else happens, right up to the point where humanity has been all but extinguished by the whole situation.

(URL links will be in the article shortly, it just didn’t make sense to introduce them first in this situation.)

What to do, what to do…

There are a few things that cause most of the climate-altering gases we emit. They are shipping and goods transport, aviation, electricity generation for industry, electricity generation for domestic use, private vehicles, and a growing collection of things like mining, farming, animal farts, methane being released by melting permafrosts and ice sheets, volcanoes etc.

We’re in the process of fixing the electricity generation issues. Solar and wind energy are providing near-100% coverage for electric energy in some countries, and most developed countries are in the process of adding solar and wind (and increasingly, tidal) power to their energy mix with the hope of reducing fossil fuel use to near-zero in the very near future.

Vehicles and marine vessels to some degrees, aircraft, and trains, trucks transporting cargo, and a variety of domestic uses – are all being changed over to electricity or hydrogen power. If we replace all those, we’ll have replaced over half the fossil fuel use on the planet.

And it won’t do us one watt of use because our power generation platforms are still mostly coal, oil/diesel, or gas powered…

Generating power from wind and solar is currently the most pressing issue facing us. There may be fusion energy one day but there’s “been going to be” fusion energy for the last thirty years now, and also fusion power still GENERATES heat whereas solar ABSORBS the heat from the photons the sun emits and wind absorbs the energy present in the air currents around the planet. The same is true for nuclear fission power to some extent, and fission is still a powerful pollutant when you come down to it/

And yet again, converting every source of electricity to solar and wind and tidal and geothermal won’t do us a watt of good either, because once everything else converts to electric power, you have to increase the rating of the power grid wiring, and extend it, and that takes time and resources too. Not the least of which will be the labour needed.

Hydrogen power will only need a fleet of H2 tanker trucks and ships to be built to transport, but also need distribution at the destination.

And of all of these, the labour is going to be the biggest bottleneck. In a perfect storm, we aren’t able to train enough people in the correct and safe installation of wind turbines or solar panel installation, we don’t have enough HV electrical lines workers and tradespeople, nowhere near enough specialists for rigging and erecting, and not enough general electrical trade workers to upgrade homes and so forth.

Materials too are going to be needed to be manufactured into turbine towers, pylons, transformers, switchboards and control gear. We’re talking billions of dollars worldwide needing to be spent.

So we have skills, materials, and time against us. Not just in Australia but in the whole world. And even then, that’s not the only big problem we face.

NIMBYism

You’ve seen and heard the outcries from people who don’t want wind farms in their line of sight, or who hate desalination plant operating nearby, etc. Now imagine the people who’ll need to have huge powerline pylons erected near them or even through their backyards, farms, entertainment complexes, and so forth . . .

Europe is solving this problem by using incentives, and Eminent Domain if that doesn’t work. As the article says, it’s politically dangerous but necessary if we want to speed up the end of fossil fuels and slow down the current warming.

The better news

According to a sort of quasi-real, quasi-weird things called the “100th Monkey Effect” and a closely-related one called “Simultaneous Invention Hypothesis” or “Parallel/Multiple Discovery Hypothesis” there seem to be times when, for lack of a better way to say it, the time is ripe for a particular idea to flourish.

We’ve seen this in action with things like smoking – one minute everyone’s a smoker, the next smoking is a mode of suicide no longer chosen by people . . . TV and radio were each invented by several individuals with years and sometimes only weeks between them but located on different continents or in different countries.

We call some of them fads and blame the media or social media but many are propagated by we know not what. And many of the things we say are fads are actually the results of evolving of the culture. How many years ago was it okay for “the man of the house” to lay down the law and the rest of the family to just accept it? And so on . . .

More recently we’ve seen things like the Occupy movement, the Me Too movement, and other such rebellions against the status quo. We saw them happening and then seemingly vanishing – but no – they’ve just quietly woven themselves into the culture. And our multiple cultures around the planet, they’re merging around the edges, taking from other cultures what’s useful or just or beneficial.

The most important thing to note there is that some changes are extremely fast-moving and wide-spread. If we talk to our circle of family and friends about it, and share things like this post, we’re helping that change to propagate.

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