Since we are watching the plight of the Thompsons in Australia over cow manure, this submission titled “Unsustainable cow manure” on sustainable energy sent to me by Paul Driessen seemed appropriate. I put solar on my own home and a school in my school district. Without “OPM”, they would not have been viable, so he has a point- Anthony
Sustainable, affordable, eco-friendly renewable energy, my eye
Paul Driessen
Seek a sustainable future! Wind, solar and biofuels will ensure an eco-friendly, climate-protecting, planet-saving, sustainable inheritance for our children. Or so we are told by activists and politicians intent on enacting new renewable energy standards, mandates and subsidies during a lame duck session. It may be useful to address some basic issues, before going further down the road to Renewable Utopia.
First, when exactly is something not sustainable? When known deposits (proven reserves) may be depleted in ten years? 50? 100? What if looming depletion results from government policies that forbid access to lands that might contain new deposits – as with US onshore and offshore prospects for oil, gas, coal, uranium, rare earth minerals and other vital resources?
Rising prices, new theories about mineral formation, and improved discovery and extraction technologies and techniques typically expand energy and mineral reserves – postponing depletion by years or decades, as in the case of oil and natural gas. But legislation, regulation, taxation and litigation prevent these processes from working properly, hasten depletion, and make “sustainability” an even more politicized, manipulated and meaningless concept.
Second, should the quest for mandated “sustainable” technologies be based on real, immediate threats – or will imaginary or exaggerated crises suffice? Dangerous manmade global cooling morphed into dangerous manmade global warming, then into “global climate disruption” – driven by computer models and disaster scenarios, doctored temperature data, manipulated peer reviews, and bogus claims about melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Shouldn’t policies that replace reliable, affordable energy with expensive, intermittent, land-intensive, subsidized sources be based on solid, replicable science?
Third, shouldn’t inconvenient sustainability issues be resolved before we proceed any further, by applying the same guidelines to renewable energy as courts, regulators and eco-activists apply to petroleum?
Most oil, gas, coal and uranium operations impact limited acreage for limited times – and affected areas must be restored to natural conditions when production ends. Effects on air and water quality, habitats and protected species are addressed through regulations, lease restrictions and fines. The operations generate vast amounts of affordable, reliable energy from relatively small tracts of land, and substantial revenues.
Wind turbines generate small amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity from gargantuan installations on thousands of acres. Turbines and their associated transmission lines dominate scenic vistas, disrupt habitats and migratory routes, affect water drainage patterns, impede crop dusting and other activities, and kill bats, raptors and other birds, including endangered species that would bring major fines if the corporate killers were oil or mining companies. And yet, wind operators receive exemptions from environmental review, biodiversity and endangered species laws that traditional energy companies must follow – on the ground that such rules would raise costs and delay construction of “eco-friendly” projects.
Kentucky’s Cardinal coal mine alone produces 75% of the Btu energy generated by all the wind turbines and solar panels in the USA, Power Hungry author Robert Bryce calculates. Unspoiled vistas, rural and maritime tranquility, and bald eagles will all be endangered if 20% wind power mandates are enacted.
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station near Phoenix generates nearly 900 times more electricity than Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base photovoltaic panels, on less land, for 1/15 the cost per kWh – and does it 90% of the time, versus 30% of the time for the Nellis array. Generating Palo Verde’s electrical output via Nellis technology would require solar arrays across an area ten times larger than Washington, DC.
Building enough photovoltaic arrays to power Los Angeles would mean blanketing thousands of square miles of desert habitat. Once built, solar and wind systems will be there just this side of forever, since there will be no energy production if we let them decay, after shutting down whatever hydrocarbon operations aren’t needed to fuel backup generators that keep wind and solar facilities operational.
Wind and solar power also mean there is a sudden demand for tons of rare earth elements that weren’t terribly important a decade ago. They exist in very low concentrations, require mining and milling massive amounts of rock and ore to get the needed minerals, and thus impose huge ecological impacts.
If mountaintop removal to extract high quality coal at reduced risk to miners is unacceptable and unsustainable – how is it eco-friendly and sustainable to clear-cut mountain vistas for wind turbines? Blanket thousands of square miles with habitat-suffocating solar panels? Or remove mountains of rock to mine low-grade rare earth mineral deposits for solar panel films, hybrid batteries and turbine magnets?
Since any undiscovered US rare earth deposits are likely locked up in wilderness and other restricted land use areas, virtually no exploration or development will take place here. We will thus be dependent on foreign suppliers, like China, which are using them in their own manufacturing operations – and selling us finished wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid car batteries. The United States will thus be dependent on foreign suppliers for renewable energy, just as we rely on foreign countries for oil and uranium.
To claim any of this is ecologically or economically sustainable strains credulity.
Green jobs will mostly be overseas, subsidized by US tax and energy dollars – other people’s money (OPM). Indeed, Americans have already spent over $20 billion in stimulus money on “green” energy projects. However, 80% of the funding for some of them went to China, India, South Korea and Spain, and three-fourth of the turbines for eleven US wind projects were made overseas. This is intolerable, indefensible and unsustainable. But it gets worse.
Denver’s Nature and Science Museum used $720,000 in stimulus money to install photovoltaic panels and reduce its electricity bills by 20 percent. The panels may last 25 years, whereas it will take 110 years to save enough on those bills to pay for the panels – and by then four more sets of panels will be needed.
As to biofuels, the US Navy recently waxed ecstatic over its success with camellia-based eco-fuel in fighter jets. But the PC biofuel costs $67.50 per gallon, versus $5.00 per gallon for commercial jet fuel.
To meet the 36-billion-gallons-a-year-by-2022 federal ethanol diktat, we would have to grow corn on cropland and wildlife habitat the size of Georgia, to get 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol – plus switchgrass on farmlands and habitats the size of South Carolina, to produce 21 billion gallons of “advanced biofuel.” By contrast, we could produce 670 billion gallons of oil from frozen tundra equal to 1/20 of Washington, DC, if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge weren’t off limits.
OPM-subsidized ethanol also means a few corn growers and ethanol refiners make hefty profits. But chicken and beef producers, manufacturers that need corn syrup, and families of all stripes get pounded by soaring costs, to generate a fuel that gets one-third less mileage per tank than gasoline.
Hydrocarbons fueled the most amazing and sustained progress in human history. Rejecting further progress – in the name of sustainability or climate protection – requires solid evidence that we face catastrophes if we don’t switch to “sustainable” alternatives. Computer-generated disaster scenarios and bald assertions by Al Gore, Harry Reid, John Holdren and President Obama just don’t make the grade.
We need to improve energy efficiency and conserve resources. Science and technology will continue the great strides we have made in that regard. Politically motivated mandates will impose huge costs for few benefits. Sustainability claims will simply redistribute smaller shares of a shrinking economic pie.
“Renewable” energy subsidies may sustain the jobs of lobbyists, activists, politicians, bureaucrats and politically connected companies. But they will kill millions of other people’s jobs.
Let’s be sure to remind our elected officials of this along their campaign trails – and on November 2.
No, Curious, I Did Not forget the nitrogen in the fertilizer. It “in” there. 5,500 btus/gal for That. I did not however, include the $10’s of Billions of environmental damage caused by oil spills, or the 4,000 American Troops killed in Iraq.
As for Oil Companies: Exxon, in spite of $39 Billion in Profits, did not pay a single, solitary dime in Federal Income Taxes in 2009. Not. A. Dime.
James Sexton says:
September 21, 2010 at 2:25 pm
You’re correct, but it isn’t just the supply that is cut off. They have shut out refineries and power plants as well. It is an attempt to shut down the country.
@ur momisugly Jeff
Ever heard of M King Hubbert? you are aware that US oil production peaked around 1971 or so and has been declining at about 3% per year ever since? has nothing to do with politics, just geology and physics and it was even predicted ahead of time with pretty amazing accuracy considering. This method also does not even get into politics, it assumes unrestricted drilling and usage. The same methods can be applied to the world and have been, those too are proving to be pretty accurate. The same can be done for most any mined resource. US coal production measured in btu’s peaked back in the late 1990’s and the US has far less left than many assume. All this info is readily available even at places like wikipedia, plus there are blogs similar to this one just focused on energy supplies. Might be worth your time to read about it.
At any rate the US is down to about 21 billion barrels of conventional oil in reserve(2009) and currently produces roughly 5.3 million barrels per day while importing about 10 million barrels per day of conventional oil. The rest is various liquid fuels. Those numbers are at the USGS and EIA websites. US at its peak produced about 9 million barrels per day of conv oil and about 11 million barrels per day total liquids. All of this is part of US history, nothing secret here. The US could once again unleash unrestricted drilling and the fact is unless it stops using so much oil then oil independence is impossible and it isn’t even close. There is no way it is going to go from 5 million barrels per day to 18 plus million barrels per day and that’s without even factoring in the existing decline rate. Oil fields deplete and we have done a remarkable job using our endowment of it up. Finding more reserves really changes nothing, quality of reserves and flow rate from them are really the key factors. The good stuff that is easy to get and flows at high rates tends to be first and that is true with just about any mined resource. Our discoveries have been lagging our consumption for a long long time while the quality and flow rate of new sources continues to drop. Nature of the beast. Domestic coal is in basically the same situation. We used up most of the anthracite and now we use the dirty hard to get grades we use to just discard or ignore as a waste of time. It is increasingly getting harder to get more and more coal while the quality and heat content slowly drops off.
“The most painful combination is what will happen in a BAU scenario – drastic increase in death rates …”
Like the drastic increase in death rates in Africa we saw the last time we listened to a noisy gang of “green” ideologues and banned the most effective anti-malaria agent? If you really want to reduce the population, that’s the way to do it; you are now at tens of millions and counting.
“… combined with a drastic decrease in per capita consumption levels, all of that accompanied with a serious decrease of the long-term carrying capacity of the planet.”
Like the decrease in future per-capita consumption that the African mother can look forward to, since she won’t be able to progress from living in the choking smoke of the dung fire over which she cooks the family dinner (since the delightfully renewable woods of the area were denuded generations ago for fuel) to cleaner electric heat, and perhaps eventually running water with electric pumps and refrigeration for her food — or at least for the medicines her children need. She will get, at best, the lunatic expensive skittering power of wind and the silly trickle of solar, which of course goes off right when her children need light in the hut to do their homework.
“I think the choice is clear to anyone with two functioning neurons in their brain.”
Yes, those of us who lived through the imbecile nonsense of 1970s Malthusian propaganda would agree completely.
For my own views on wind, click the link above.
GM says:
September 21, 2010 at 2:50 pm
“…..The most painful combination is what will happen in a BAU scenario – drastic increase in death rates combined with a drastic decrease in per capita consumption levels,….”
The proposed solutions today, include both scenarios. Changing food to less efficient internal combustion engine fuel, helps how? Planting windmills to substitute for more cost efficient, reliable energy in place of food producing land, helps how? Solar panels are ludicrous.
Of course, as mentioned earlier in this thread, we could try to figure out a way to harness the methane in the seas as a power source, but we choose not to. Why? Or, and possibly in addition too, we could look towards all of the available hydrogen as energy sources. Hydrogen is a proven, plentiful energy source, yet, we have people like you pronouncing doom and gloom and death and limited energy uses. Why?
GM, this is why I find people like you objectionable. Obviously, you’re sharp enough to understand problems. And sharp enough to understand the needs for solutions. But not sharp enough to see the solutions that are all but slapping us in the face?
You say, we are consuming too much. I say, mankind cannot create matter, ergo, mankind cannot destroy matter. We simply move the state of matter. What constituted the earth still constitutes the earth. We haven’t changed the earth in any significant, lasting way. An element is still an element. We haven’t changed the processes, either. What made oil in the past is still occurring or will occur again.
It should be apparent by anyone who has ever read and understood history of humanity, we are beings of action and animation! Civilizations have perished because of lethargy. It is through action, activity and animation that man progresses. We are built for action! Only through consumption of energy are we able to achieve activity.
So, we change our source of energies. We do not limit our energies. To do so would sentence mankind to lethargy and spell the very doom we seek to avoid.
So GM what are you doing about sustainability personally? How about a link to pictures showing how you live completely off grid with no carbon source of energy. How about pictures of you bicycling or walking to work. No buses or trains since they use non sustainable energy sources. Otherwise you are just being hypocritical with your posts and you could do us all a favor by not wasting the energy in the electrons used to post your rants.
Sustainable energy: GM and the like.
From Pimental and Patzek: BTU input per gallon of ethanol produced.
Corn Production 37,860
Corn Transportation 4,834
Ethanol Conversion 56,399
Energy Input (Total) 99,093
Coproduct Value -6,680
Total Net 92,413
BTU/ Gal Ethanol 77,011
Net Energy balance -15,402
The USDA uses very suspicious numbers and came up with a net total of +30,527. So if we average the two we get +7,516 Net BTU/Gal ethanol. For comparison a gallon of refined gasoline has 115,000 BTU/Gal. All energy used to produce the product comes from the product. If you produced the millions of gallons of ethanol using ethanol as the energy source, you would plant millions of acres of corn to power the tractors, the refinery, the Ag-Chems and the transportation, but NO ethanol would come out of the system. However the system might be sustainable.
GM, we will find out what the carrying capacity of the Earth is in good time so stop worrying about, otherwise calculate the number of nukes you need to reduce the population to your desired level. The sooner we use up all the oil, coal and natural gas, the sooner we will have to figure out some sustainable solution or return to the cave, where it seems to me you want us to go to now.
Larry Geiger>
Europeans have a similar standard of living on less energy, honestly. What people neglect to mention is that we don’t need air-con in most of Europe. The other big difference is that we drive more fuel efficient vehicles.
One of the things that annoys me about the whole global warming malarkey is that there are actually lots of sensible savings of energy that we could make without bothering anyone very much at all. The stupidly huge US trucks are one of those things, I reckon. Then again, the big cars over here with just the driver inside are nearly as bad.
“”” Dave says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Larry Geiger>
Europeans have a similar standard of living on less energy, honestly. What people neglect to mention is that we don’t need air-con in most of Europe. The other big difference is that we drive more fuel efficient vehicles. “””
Well Europeans have the luxury of having had train systems for ages; whereas in the USA there’s hardly anything much you can call public transportation.
Anything that is operated by public employees who can go on strike; is by definition NOT a transportation system. When I drive to my house in California’s central valley, it would take me across four countires in Most of Europe.
But I’m in agreement that we still could do betetr than we do.
Over here in the usa, trains do not go where people want to go.
So how come those efficient Europeans are not way out in front of the inefficient USA; maybe its those 30 hour work weeks.
A lot of European cars won’t pass California pollution requirements; so we can’t import them here.
GM says:
September 21, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Layne Blanchard says:
September 21, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Justa Joe says:
September 21, 2010 at 2:20 pm
“Well, if dying of something completely preventable because you can’t afford to pay for healthcare, eating like pig until your arteries burst or you can’t move from obesity ………”
=======================================================
It is called freedom. It’s a hard concept. Freedom allows for success, but also for failure. Our right to choose. I prefer freedom over mandated mediocrity and subservience. I believe freedom has served us well over the past couple of centuries and believe it will continue to do so. There will be hard times,(especially when we re-assert the concepts of freedom) but, that’s the price. And that is why me and mine are here, today. And will be tomorrow. Does that precious “standard of living” understand the precepts and concepts of freedom?
In my mind, humanity isn’t worth a shit without freedom.
GM quotes the article “Yet one kind of energy–fossil fuels–actually increases the carrying capacity of the Earth.”
Then asks: “Yes, for how long?”
Long answer: until the market brings us a new source. The government heavily taxes conventional energy to fund various boondoggles. The energy business has some of the biggest financial risks of any industry, except perhaps chip fabs, but chips aren’t government’s cash cow. The government doesn’t run a strategic silicon wafer reserve. The government does it’s very best to increase the risks and costs of energy.
Short answer: until the government gets in the way of the market.
“… accompanied with a serious decrease of the long-term carrying capacity of the planet.”
Comparable to, for example, the “decrease of the long-term carrying capacity of the planet” due to the European Union ban on genetically-modified foods?
Since EU food imports are mostly from Africa, and since “greens” and European farm lobbyists have spread hysteria about GM produce and even produce that might be cross-pollinated from neighboring GM fields, Africa profits little from technology that increases yields dramatically through disease and drought resistance. Not to mention that some new strains, such as Golden Rice, could relieve serious dietary deficiencies throughout the continent. This anti-scientific “green” hysteria is indeed reducing the “long-term carrying capacity of the planet.” Congratulations; you are reducing the terrible human load on the environment at a marvelous rate.
Now when will you volunteer?
Dave says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:05 pm
“Europeans have a similar standard of living on less energy, honestly. What people neglect to mention is that we don’t need air-con in most of Europe. The other big difference is that we drive more fuel efficient vehicles.”
========================================================
Yes, also, they are more compact, hence, less necessity for fuel. I live 30 miles from the nearest town of 1000 people. On dirt/gravel roads. I once bought my daughter a Yugo under similar circumstances. It lasted 4 months. Not wrecked, just beat to death from the wear and tear of the elements. I doubt an Audi would last much longer. Its an apples to oranges comparison. I lived in Germany for a while, and been to several other nations in Europe. Its like me going from NY to Jersey here. That’s significantly different than going from the Arkansas hills to Arizona.
Do people know what it takes in some places in Europe to even own a gun, much less hunt? Try throwing your pole in a pond. Better standard of living my ass! IT’S NOT THE SAME!!!!!
It isn’t about matter, yes matter moves from one state to another and is not lost, those phosphorus atoms we take out of rocks and eventually dissolve in the sea while passing them through agriculture and our guts in the process aren’t lost; energy does that too. However, it is entropy that really matters, not energy or matter, we just like to talk about energy and resource because they are more immediate and tangible and because most people are too illiterate to understand entropy anyway. The human body exists in a very low entropy state, human civilization exists in a very low entropy state (think about all those buildings and infrastructure), so you need constant external source of negative entropy to keep things going (this is why the discussion of EROEI is so important BTW). The highest entropy state the planet can be in (without breaking up atoms or anything like that) is a homogeneous mass of elements with equal concentration everywhere. The planet doesn’t exist in such a state, there are pockets of rock with much higher concentrations of certain elements, which what we call ores. Those are in a low entropy state which we can input more negative entropy into and take them to an even lower entropy state of near purity. However, when we use them up and they end up in the ocean, their concentration decreases greatly, and their entropy goes up. To get them back to a low entropy state that’s useful for us, or to use lower grade (higher entropy) ores you need a lot of negative entropy, much more than you would need for high grade ores.
Ultimately, the only reliable source of negative entropy we have (unless a technological miracle occurs very soon) is the sun, but the flow is very limited and diffuse. So things like infinite economic growth are absolutely impossible, and it doesn’t take much knowledge or understanding to figure that out, yet the people (usually economists) who like to talk about the “base of the resource pyramid” don’t possess even that rudimentary understanding of things
I’ve never had a car, I live 500m from work so I don’t have to even use the bus, I walk everywhere. You can probably call me a hypocrite because all of the above is completely negated by the several flights I make to go to meetings and conferences, but I can’t do much about that.
It has to be said that I am not for getting us back to the stone age, neither is anyone who is seriously concerned about the future and expresses a position similar to mine., The goal is precisely not to have humanity back to the stone age (from which there will be no return back to a state of high technological development this time because all the resources will have been used up). Why is that so hard to understand?
But you can’t have your cake (billions of people) and eat it too (at a high level of resource consumption). There are laws of physics after all.
Dave, Larry G., others
Did I notice anyone mention geography? Think distance, population density, timing of historical development and related issues (technology at time of settlement) as you compare Europe and North America.
So why exactly are you saying this to me????
Based on all the things I have posted so far, what made you think I am not aware of negative EROEI of ethanol when I have repeatedly mentioned that in my posts??
You could only post this if you haven’t understood absolutely anything of what I said…
Need to wreck a planet but don’t know how?
Farm organically everywhere by law. Enforce localism and make quaintness compulsory. Come up with a word like, I dunno, “sustainability” to justify all the stuff that doesn’t work properly. Any money that might be spent on newer and cleaner tech must be sequestered for the experimental and unworkable – stuff like cycleways people don’t use because of helmet laws, wind turbines that have to be made and supported by burning lots of coal, feeble cisterns you flush five times instead of once etc. How do you know if something is a turkey? Easy! Look for the government subsidy and the word “sustainability”.
Work quickly, because the jaded middle classes of inner cities and the Green-voting doctors’ wives will soon yearn for a bit of good old jading. (It’s like that feeling you get after staying an hour too long at a weekend market with lots of feel-good and incense.)
So work quickly. The middle classes who are briefly flirtatious with your “sustainability” will soon discover it’s them, not faraway Tasmanian pulp-mill employees, you’re trying to eliminate this time.
Once you’ve got that pesky middle class out of the way, we can all be one big Africa. Then look out planet!
GM:
Or, GM, “we” could proceed as we have to proceed anyway, that is sans an iron fisted World domination by people like you to “help” us – which on a National level never has, and which will not happen any time soon at a whole World level, regardless, thank God – and thus continue our struggle as is; with the anticipation that there are going to be winners and losers on a National level as determined especially by the efficacy of different political systems – Socialism/Communism being abject failures, for example; and with the anticipation that the development of amazing new technologies will not suddenly cease as you appear to presume, thus increasing the World’s “carrying capacity” in ways that Malthus, Erlich, enc., certainly were unable to imagine, as proven.
I tend to believe in competition as a determinant as to the question of who and what Political System will survive and adequately prosper and who and what System or Nation won’t do so well. In addition, there is no way that the development of the human mind can be simply declared “over”, something which you seem to have also done.
In other words, GM, I believe in the overarching idea of “Evolution” of some sort as being a process still at work when it comes to the question of Humanity’s survival and progression. Don’t you?
Or, GM, are you going to claim that you and your grandiose schema for saving Humanity and the World from your allegedly necessary apocalypse – which does in fact require World domination to effect – will work this time when it never has when attempted on a National level in the past, and that thus you just happen to be the ultimate form of Man in being certainly able to pull it off this time- instead of being a mere “throwback”?
Ted Patzek is an oil company activist (worked 7 years for Shell, founded the Southern California Oil Consortium.) Pimental is pushing coal to ethanol. Their numbers were horrible. NO ONE pays any attention to them.
An ex: A modern dry grind ethanol refinery will use from 16,000 to 25,000 btus of nat gas per gallon of ethanol, Not 56,000. They made assumptions such as Buying the Very Biggest Farm Equipment to farm small farms, and building sheds to house them. At one point they were even using the “solar” energy that fell on the field.
Just silliness.
Dave says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Larry Geiger>
“Europeans have a similar standard of living on less energy, honestly. What people neglect to mention is that we don’t need air-con in most of Europe. The other big difference is that we drive more fuel efficient vehicles.”
————————
Dave, I ‘ve been to Europe for my job (UK, France, Hungary). Americans on average have more material wealth than Euros relative to their economic class. I’m not saying that that is good or bad. I’m not assigning any moral judgement to that as so-called greens would. It’s just a fact. When you see some guy in what you refer to as a stupidly huge truck. It is quite likely that that individual has determined that he needs that vehicle to tow his camper, race car, drag boat, motorcycles etc around. Anyway he paid for the vehicle and he pays for the fuel. When that vehicle is no longer viable he’ll unload it in a heartbeat.
I’m not going to look it up, but I’m going to assume that Americans live in larger dwellings on average than Euros, and I know for a fact that we live more spread out. Those factors contribute to ones econmic standard of living. I would say generally a higher standard of living is going to correlate to more energy use. Just ask Algore.
Probably if you take an area like the New York metro area where population is quite dense. You’ll get per capita energy consumption levels closer to those Euros.
Kum,
You might want to correct your erroneous statement that ExxonMobil did not pay income tax in 2009.
The following URL explains how this erroneous info was spread in the anti business blogs:
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/04/exxon-mobil-paid-zero-income-tax-offshore%20shelter-wal-mart-general-electric-forbes
“[Update: Alan Jeffers, ExxonMobil’s media relations manager, contacted Mother Jones to respond to this story, confirming that he had submitted a signed comment on this Web page (see way below). He first sent us an email, which states:
It is incorrect to say that ExxonMobil did not pay any U.S. income tax in 2009. In fact, we expect a significant U.S. federal income tax liability for 2009, although our tax return will not be filed until later this year. Our tax installments overpaid our 2008 U.S. federal income taxes and we used that excess in part to pay our 2009 estimated taxes. The amount stated in our 10-K filing with the SEC, which Chris [Christopher Helman, who originally reported on this story for Forbes] told me he based his story on, includes expenses or credits recorded during 2009, and can represent items from previous years or expectations for subsequent years. It is not our actual tax bill.
In a subsequent phone conversation, Jeffers told Mother Jones he “really had to dig in with our tax guys just to really explain what was going on here.” He stressed that “the activity in that report”—referring to the 10-K, an annual summary of company activity that must be submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission—”does not represent our tax bill,” which has not been settled, since the company has not yet filed its 2009 IRS return. He added that, just as an individual might see a refund or not have to pay additional income taxes when they file, the firm could conceivably show a surplus or a zero on the “total income tax” line. When an individual gets a refund from the IRS, that doesn’t mean she got off scot-free: It means she overpaid her taxes throughout the year. Jeffers said the same principle operates for ExxonMobil.”
GM says:
September 21, 2010 at 12:11 pm
There is no need for lowering per capita energy consumption if you lower the number of people in the right proportion.
And exactly how would you do that? Who would decide what the right proportion should be? Is that you, a tiny fraction as smart as you think you are? Looks like just another twist of the same old Lebensraum meme.
The problem with you guys is lack of imagination. People are a resource, not a drain. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the European pension crisis.
The Uranium-Thorium breeder cycle has the capacity to provide all the necessary energy for billions of years with no long term accumulation of nuclear waste whatsoever. For that matter, we also have this huge fusion reactor nearby with a 3.8×1026 W electromagnetic power output, it’s not even figured out how to turn it off yet. However, burning good public money via pathetic solar panels of the day is not an option.
Obviously we should go for molecular nanotechnology first. With the capacity of 40% economic growth in a day and using advanced storage of energy and retrieval on demand, atmospheric CO2 is turned into a readily available resource instead of a nuisance. Our biggest problem would be how to replenish it in quantity, not how to get rid of it (hint: reprocess some limestone).
With energy in plenty, raw materials are also available with no visible upper bound. It’s elementary thermodynamics. The energy needed to extract any raw material is proportional to the logarithm of its primary concentration, that is, negligible even if the ore is poor. With the right technology, of course.
It is a very small life you are aiming for.
@ur momisugly GM,
I’d copy and paste, but it would be too lengthy for anyone to read.
I agree with almost everything you stated. When you talk of entropy, I’m assuming you’re speaking of entropy as a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work. I disagree that this can happen. There are two reasons for my assertion. One is, there is an infinite way we can imagine extracting resources. The second is, Nature continually provides resources of energy. Do you seriously believe the earth will stop rotating because it doesn’t have oil?
What I believe you are saying, is that our consumption of energy will exceed Nature’s production of energy.
GM, we are not locked in a time static continuum. We progress. We learn. We achieve. This is our nature.
At a time not so distant past, the primary source of heat was wood. If all we knew and understood was wood, then it would be conceivable to regard trees as a treasured source of energy that we should take care not to consume. (We still should regard trees, only they are not our primary source of heat.) I find your perception of oil in the same fashion. Yet, we’ve progressed and you are assuming we will not progress any further. I see where you haven’t addressed the methane or hydrogen as sources of energy as I have mentioned. Do you believe this may carry us a couple of millennium or so? What after that that we can tap into the geothermal core of the earth? GM, the earth is still bountiful, full of energy and resources for us to use. In a twinkle of an eye, we’ll have other planets to use as resources. All at the same time, the earth will renew itself again. We’re fine, your distress is distressing.
The simplest easiest cheapest fastest and most environment friendly solution is geothermal.
1. Tap Iceland and Yellowstone Park
2. Lay some large capacity DC power cables
3. Link them to existing distribution grids
4. Expand almost infinitely
5. Built is safety as hot tends to cold thus possibly reducing eruptive potential
6. Place expensive infrastructure in secure places or make it mobile (cheaply)
7. provides continuous and very cheap power
Plus these are a lot of other places that can do it and be linked cost effectively.
Why does nobody want to discuss it let alone implement it