Re: Re: Domestic wind turbine

["Mark Harrison (Groups)" <mph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 00:22 +0100, Mal Lansell wrote:
> A typical left-wing response - attack the person rather than the
> argument.
>
> Just because I happen to take a pragmatic scientific viewpoint,
> rather
> than swallowing the media/environmentalist hysteria, doesn't make me
> a
> troll.  My posting history would show I'm nothing of the sort..
>
> Regards
>
> Mal
>

Mal,

I have no intention of making any kind of ad hominem attack on you. I
have been reading your posts for a long while, and consider you to be
intelligent and articulate, with fewer obvious personality flaws than
some UKHAers like myself :-)

However, I'd like to play devil's advocate with your arguments.

You may consider the arguments below a bit "Polyanna meets Adam
Smith",
and they are deliberately "big picture" and there will be real
subtlety
in the detail that I don't understand, however, here's a go:

You take a view point that I am understanding as "whether it's 100 or
200 years, it's all irrelevant in the long term." Please correct me if
I'm mis-representing you. (I may be slightly exaggerating your views.)

The point I would make is that 100 years ago, we were in 1905. The
internal combustion engine was just coming into use in thousands rather
than hundreds of vehicles. Edison had only invented the light bulb less
than 30 years earlier,  and the tungsten filament was still 5 years away
from its invention.

In the last 100 years, we have seen massive changes in technology, that
have entirely obsoleted many ways of doing things (gas street lights to
pick the obvious example.)

In the next 100 years, we can reasonably expect to see changes in
technology that are a similar order of magnitude in breadth to those of
the 20th century. Already many South American cars run on
"biodiesel",
which is processed directly from plant material rather than fossil
fuels. Whether this will become big enough to dramatically reduce the
amount of fossil fuels extracted within the next 100 years, I have no
idea. However, it was one concept currently in production that sprang to
mind immediately.

Likewise, hybrid cars that run on electricity in traffic and fossil
fuels on the fast roads are already in use - I know of at least one
UKHAer who drives one! I personally am pro nuclear, although the
cultural Imperialism of the US in building their dated "domestic"
designs instead of some of the newer, cleaner, safer Canadian models is
a bit scarey, to say the least.

It strikes me as possible that within the next 100 years, we will have
supplanted fossil fuels for 90% of their current uses, which would mean
that the outstanding reserves last for a further 4-500 years from that
point.

The difference between 100 and 200 years is significant to me in terms
of the time it gives to research and refine further alternatives. I can
easily see hybrid vehicles that run on nuclear-generated electricity at
low to medium (say, 50 mph) speeds, and rely on biodiesel above that.

I can also see the real chance that, in the next 100-200 years, there
will be sufficient advances in biotech to have opposite processes at
different parts of the carbon cycle, engineered to refix atmospheric CO2
back into plants genetically engineered to be efficient for biodiesel.

What will drive this will, as ever, be economics. It's my belief that
fossil fuels will become more expensive each decade at a rate that far
outpaces other types of inflation. That will tilt the economic balance
in favour of other types of "fuel" gradually, and make the
decision to
cut over more likely for more consumers each and every year. It may be
that by next year, we only have 2 UKHAers with hybrid cars rather than
the 1 I know of at the moment... it may be, however, that by 2020, we
have 50% of the group running such vehicles. (It may be, that rather
more than 1 already does!)

Regards,

Mark