mindstalk | Entries tagged with energy

Okay, people. That "100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions" thing that you keep sharing? That's so misleading that it might as well be a big lie. Those are *fossil fuel* companies. Coal and oil and natural gas companies. They're not producing the emissions, they're providing the fuel for *you* to produce the emissions. They're not dwarfing the contributions of your car or your transatlantic tourism or your single family home, letting you off the environmental moral hook; they're *providing* the fuel for your car, plane, energy-intensive house, etc.

It's a comforting narrative. "Just a few big businesses are to blame. It's not my fault!" But it's wrong. Your car and your coal- or gas-powered electricity and your gas-heated hot water are still the bulk of the emissions.

Source: I'm looking at the actual report.

The report

And US energy use. I'm pretty sure most of "transportation" is private cars, since most US oil is turned to gasoline rather than diesel or jet fuel.

Crossposts: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/507985.html

Look at the red line.

From 1974-1986, high prices, with cliffs on both sides. Ignoring the OPEC (and post OPEC?) shenanigans, I eyeball $20-25/barrel before 1974, and $25-30 from 1986 to 2002. Some higher, some lower, but mostly in that range. Since then, though... can't quite call it a steady climb, since there's the huge swing around 2008, and the line of the past few years looks disconnected from the previous line. That said, it does look like a robust and ongoing increase, with current real gas prices being at least 3x the 1990s average, and 5x the 1960s average. And the price has roughly tripled in roughly 10 years. If the trend continues, we could expect maybe $180/barrel in 2020, or $270.

It seems a failure of governance, and cultural self-preservation, that this graph isn't more widely known or salient. Granted, people care more about pump gasoline prices:

which have been a lot more stable, and quite low in the 1990s. That said, they've climbed rapidly since -- competitive with OPEC crisis peaks, and higher than historical levels since the 1930s.

"The average price of a gallon of gas from 1918 to the present is $2.60 in June 2013 inflation adjusted dollars."

The site also compares oil and gas prices directly

Looks like gas prices haven't kept up with crude oil prices, suggesting either a coming crash in oil prices, a rapid catchup in gas prices to $7-8/gallon, or some mechanism keeping them separate now.

Some other inflation charts while we're here: college costs (up nearly 3x since 1985, if I divided things properly), electricity (only since 1990, but once again 2000-2002 was a golden age of low prices, but the variation is about 10%) and gold (as I type this, gold is $1220/oz; we could still see prices fall nearly in half.)

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/409971.html

Privilege as difficulty level: straight white male is playing life in easy mode
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

Argument that libertarians should be friendly to train, which were fine and profitable until crushed by government subsidies of roads and airports. It notes a 1935 law barring US electric utilities from owning streetcars, despite their natural connection.
http://keephoustonhouston.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/all-good-libertarians-are-pro-transit/
Tangentially, I've amused myself for a long time with the thought that US libertarians tend to be rural or suburbanites fantasizing about dispersed living, but actual 'Libertopia' would look like a handful of zoning-free megacities with few and expensive services in the rural hinterlands.

me on libertarian countries
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/05/the-administrative-state-vs-the-soc
ial-insurance-state/#comment-529769358

On balance bikes. Also links to an old book on bicycle and tricycle designs, and bicycle physics. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2012/05/training_wheels_don_t_work_balance_bikes_teach_children_how_to_ride_.single.html

witch fighting fertility cult
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benandanti

George Lucas to build low income housing in revenge
http://www.movies.com/movie-news/george-lucas-grady-ranch/7883

lighting efficiency
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/05/spectral-extravaganza-the-ultimate-l
ight/

break up sitting
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2012/02/22/dc11-1931.abstract

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/325499.html

The Do The Math blog has been going through the numbers on various forms of alternative energy, mostly with an eye to how abundant they are, e.g. solar is abundant, wind is useful, tides are niche (locally useful, globally irrelevant.) I'd been planning on summarizing and linking at some point -- but he went and did it himself, with table and links:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/

His whole schtick, by the way, is back of the envelope calculations on growth, energy, and sustainability issues, fed by and sometimes checked against looked up facts. It's all pretty near. And depressing/alarming. Posts outside this series have included "if exponential economic growth continued, what would that mean?" and "is there enough lead to power the US for a week from lead-acid batteries"?

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/309725.html

Do The Math looks at pumped hydro power. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

He has his math; I'll try mine.

( Mercy cut )

Conclusion: I'm not sure power storage is impossible or impractical, but it's at the least epic. Pure iron-based storage for a week is, it's just too expensive. Concrete based is sort of doable, so the dirt and water scheme might be as well. There's also a question of whether we need 1e6 seconds of storage -- though as Murphy points you, you don't need to think of that as a week and a half of no renewable input at all, it could be 3 weeks of 50% sunlight and wind for some reason. And sunlight varies with the year, going down right when heating needs go up -- so a high-latitude solar powered economy could probably be thinking about months of storage, not weeks.

Crossposts: http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/301997.html

* SF geek: Animation of multiple-star systems. (From a Firefly thread.) How to show time-lagged STL comms on screen.
* Cute studies: Children of lesbian mothers less susceptible to mental illness. Take with as much salt as a single study deserves, but cute result anyway given the debates.
* Politics geek: Overseas departments of France. Unlike the American empire, or the American capital, they get representation in the legislature.
* Hope: Confucian enviornmentalism?
* Less Hope: Spain limits universal jurisdiction.
* Tech: Bicycle cars!
* Human interest: Gay Iraqi Jew Israeli who helps Palestinians.
* Current events: Honduran 'coup'. You've probably seen the standard version (military coup!), see the other side. I've been looking at bad translations of the Honduran Constitution (Google Translate is a bit less bad than Babelfish) and yeah, it *does* look like the President disqualified himself from office -- and that there's no formal impeachment mechanism. Noel Maurer
* RPG geek: 4e D&D for taking a shit
* Rainbow flag: not just for gays
* "Gayby boom": the wave of kids who've grown up with gay parents.
* How the media incorporates blogs on Iran.
* Corporate crooks: travel protection fraud. Bankrupted with health insurance.
* Freedom, Environment: now legal to collect rainwater in Colorado
* Mad Science!: hot rock projects underway, and causing earthquakes. Geo-engineering. The global ant super-colony.
* Retro-tech: 13 year old experiences Walkman.
* Interrogating Saddam Hussein
* Gay sex decriminalized in India for now. Illegal (10 years in prison) under British colonial law; Delhi High Court has overturned. Religious leaders object; case may be appealed to the Supreme Court.
* Forced marriages and Britain
* CBO analyzes plan with public option, hey, this time it works. President of the AMA comes out in support, sort of.
* Swine flu: US deaths (updated Fridays). Spread in Argentina.

* That commie rag The Economist calls for higher taxes on the rich, suggests a financial-transactions tax, and various pragmatic and moral justifications. Actually it's a hosted debate, I'm not sure if the Economist is taking a stand, though "this house..." suggests that. Proposer is from CPER, a rare progressive think-tank; defender is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, the attacker is from Cato, one of the right-wing's hydra of think-tanks.
* The trials of having only $250,000 a year (probably an ephemeral link)

* Torture memo fun: NYTimes, and long term effects.
* The pirate economy: Why the US Navy can't win
* 10 year anniversay: the myths of Columbine

* Christianity Today article defending belief in God; I link to page 2 for the lols. The article starts by claiming a renaissance of Christian philosophy... and starts with a poor form of the cosmological argument. Page 3 invokes Roger Penrose as supposedly launching "powerful arguments against any appeal to a multiverse as a way of explaining away fine-tuning." but does not even hint as to the arguments. Then the moral argument, and the ontological argument. "Most philosophers would agree that if God's existence is even possible, then he must exist."

* 1960s D&D. Pretty awesome.
* Roman socks with sandals. The article makes fun of them, rather than wondering if sartorial fashion maybe isn't a universal absolute.

* Cheap solar methane?

Assuming the same # of miles will be driven, is it better to spend $X to increase an individual vehicle's mileage from 10 to 20 miles per gallon, 20 to 30 mpg, 20 to 40, 20 to 50, 20 to 100, or 20 to 1000?

Space for you to ponder in...

( Answer! )

(Hey,

mrs_feltner, behold the power of MATH!)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080524/ap_on_bi_ge/money_in_the_tank_12

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1436

http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2008/04/energy-scene-in-india.html

Right as I got to Samira to meet lyceum, I got a mystery call. Turned out to be from some Comcast employee (exec?) in Pennsylvania, who'd seen my earlier LJ complaint, and was calling to see if he could help. That's kind of neat. Not as neat as an actually smooth changeover system, but still.

Samira buffet: still tasty. Best parts for me are the chicken -- especially fatty skin bits that have fallen off bigger pieces -- and the cucumberish salad. For the first time, I saw smaller chuncks of chicken in with the fried pieces, yellow mild curry things.

Real sunken continents! Zealandia and Kerguelen.

Administration claims immunity to the 4th Amendment. Can I start talking about traitors yet?

Pharyngula coins an acronym: SIWOTI syndrome.

Article on the farm bill and a (foo) Dakota family that avoided the temptation of subsidized corn.

There may be a bottleneck in building top quality nuclear reactors. Unlike a_steep_hill, I don't see that as a good thing.

Me on how I'd be happier if a lot of "science fiction" was called something else. Or if I thought of space opera as its own genre, not a flawed subgenre of science fiction.

59% of US doctors favor national health insurance.

I could do better, but something I wrote about why I like the Exalted setting.

A one-way mirrored public toilet

Ancient Mideast water delivery and storage and air conditioning tech.

There's an awesome picture of where our energy comes from and goes, here:
http://trinifar.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/high-carbon-economy/
Also has another picture, with numbers (though not indication of non-fuel uses of oil, as the first one does.) It's shocking how much is lost as waste. It looks like we could more than double our available energy -- especially in transportation -- through conservation!

Of course, physics may get in the way; I assume a lot of that waste is dictated by the thermodynamics of Carnot heat engines. Oil could be used more efficiently in central plants, perhaps, but transporting the electricity isn't lossless... though it looks better than burning in cars.

And what, New Yorkers were said to use one-third of the American average per capita?