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Overview
Simple Solutions: For Planet Earth is a scientific book written in a popular style for the average reader. You have read about Peak Oil and Global Climate Warming, and complained about $4/gallon gasoline, but how really serious are these headlines and annoyances? The author has worked his entire career on: the science, technology, education, administration and politics of these subjects, and crystallizes this complex field into understandable elements, providing simple solutions for humanity.
Does it make sense for the renewable energy budget of the Federal Government to be about $1 billion/year when:
o Annual tax incentives and government programs for the oil industry are supposedly in the range between $38 billion and $115 billion, although Lester Brown says $210 billion in 2005.
o Farm subsidies alone in 2004 cost taxpayers $16.2 billion.
o Our country spends $12 billion a month, or $144 billion/year, on the
The author’s long experience with the Greenhouse Effect has led him to believe that methane, not carbon dioxide, could well be the critical gas of concern, for there is potential for global warming to cascade into, what he terms, the Venus Syndrome. The closing chapter speculates on a hypothesis regarding mega-tsunamis (100 meter waves) from landslides.
While simple solutions are suggested, the problem is the inability of our civilization to agree on a workable strategy, which is further weakened by the lack of will on part of the general populace. Thus, the reader is urged to help make that crucial difference. Instructions and examples are provided on how to attain Rainbow Vision to carry out this mission for a better Planet Earth. The simplest solution is for everyone to join in on the effort.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781467821650 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 960 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Simple Solutions For Planet Earth
By PATRICK KENJI TAKAHASHI AuthorHouse Copyright © 2007 Patrick Kenji Takahashi
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4343-2754-3
Chapter One BLACK ENERGY
Why Start with Energy?
It all began with the Big Bang. We would not be here if not for that massive explosion of energy. Then came stars, and, 7 billion or so years later, our planet. Life on Earth might have all started with a lightening bolt a couple of billion years later, or, maybe a conjunction of organic molecules on a zeolite (hydrous silicate used in ion-exchange, a subject matter that won me a science fair award when I was in high school) surface, and since then, some form of energy, primarily from our Sun, has been required to nurture and maintain life. While it is possible, too, that chemical energy initiated life in some aqueous environment, the Sun eventually became the dominant factor in supporting the evolutionary process leading to us. Fire was discovered as accidental biomass combustion. Then came the wheel and agriculture, which led to horsepower, slaves, steam engines, airplanes, nuclear weapons and the genome table.
In these later stages we began to get, maybe, too productive, and, perhaps, dangerous. Population increased, manufacturing offered cheaper goods, wars got more sophisticated, and we became addicted to fossil fuels. How much do you use? The average person keeps alive by generating enough power for a large light bulb. The amount of energy we use amounts to 300 slaves. Thus, if each slave is worth, say, $5/hour, we should rightfully be paying $10,000 per day ... per day, to maintain our lifestyle. You might eat a couple of pounds of food, but the average American consumes 62 pounds of fossil fuels/day. Much of this becomes carbon dioxide. One can be proud of this consumption or bemoan the unfairness, but each American uses about five times more energy than the average world citizen.
Our society consumes on an annual basis what the Sun provides (amount striking our planet) in about an hour. Another way of looking at this is that if we can only cleanly and sustainably harvest 0.01%, or one hundredth of one percent, of the 100,000,000,000,000,000 watts of sunlight which continuously shine on our planet, we can maintain our current way of life.
The danger of energy usage, it is becoming obvious, is in how much more we use each passing year. In 1970, before the energy crisis, the world used 61,000 trillion watt-hours of energy (61 petawatt-hours-see next section). This doubled to 121 PWh in 2002, and is expected to grow another 68 PWh to 189 PWh by 2025, which would be three times more than when I was close to my PhD degree in graduate school.
The combustion of fossil fuel dominates, adding enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since my birth in 1940, both population and energy consumption have exponentially grown, but the population of our planet has "only" tripled, while energy use has gone up by about 6, so there are variations in something called exponential growth, with energy use growing faster than the number of people.
A Very Short Lesson in Large Numbers
I hesitate doing this, for, as I earlier said, this is not a textbook. However, who knows what PWh means, or how much energy that really is. I recently saw a teacher on the TV program, "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader," and, while she was a spelling bee champion in her youth, she did not know how to convert two and a half yards into feet. Worse yet, her 5th grade partner thought it was 78 feet. If you, too, don't know the answer, well, we might be in trouble.
So, with considerable trepidation, I will attempt my version of a simple explanation. Some of you might want to tab this page, just in case you might later wish to refer back, that is, get a better sense of what all those statistics and numbers mean, and how relative they are to reality. We only need to know the difference between energy and power, and their assorted dimensions in various forms:
Heat is a form of energy, and it is measured in something termed a calorie, where one cal is the energy to warm one gram of water one degree Celsius (°C). A kilocalorie (kcal, or also Cal), 1000 cal, is the energy to heat a liter (1000 grams or 1000 cubic centimeters) of water 1°C. You eat around 2,300 Cal/day. Then there is the English system, where 1 British Thermal Unit (BTU) is the energy to warm 1 pound of water 1°F. One BTU is equal to 0.252 kcal, or, approximately, 1 Cal = 1 kcal = 4 BTU. But energy can also be work, so if some force is applied to move something, one joule (J) is the work done or energy expended in applying 1 Newton (force to move 1 kg, 1 meter, in 1 second) to an object of 1 kilogram mass over a distance of 1 meter. Conveniently enough, 1 BTU is about 1 kJ. Heat, energy and work are of the same dimension. This is about as complicated as it is going to get! In fact, the rest of the tutorial will begin to make a lot more sense.
Power (watt, W) is the rate of using energy, or 1 W = 1 J/second. Thus, 1 kW is the power to move 1,000 grams 1 meter in 1 second. The English measure of power is the horsepower (hp), where 1hp = 0.746 kW. Thus, if you multiply power by the time used, you get energy consumed, or burning a 100 watt light bulb for one hour consumes 100 watt-hours, or 0.1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity. If electricity costs 10o per kWh, you would pay the utility company 1o while using your 100 watt lamp for 1 hour. Surely, this is all beginning to make some sense, I hope.
Let us next get to the really big numbers used for world energy usage:
* k kilo 1000 1 thousand * M mega 1,000,000 1 million * G giga 1,000,000,000 1 billion * T tera [10.sup.12] (twelve zeros) 1 trillion * P peta [10.sup.15] (fifteen zeros) 1 quadrillion * E exa [10.sup.18] (eighteen zeros) 1 quintillion
Therefore, a one thousand megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant is the power producing equivalent of a 1 GW facility, and is about the size of an average nuclear facility. One quadrillion BTUs is termed a Quad (Q), as, for some reason, P is usually not used, except just above, when PWh was suddenly inserted by convention for that application. A good equivalent to remember is between 1 quintillion (E) Joules and a Quad (Q), where, again, conveniently enough, 1Q = 1 EJ. In the United States, we use 100 Q/year or 100 EJ/year. The World consumes around 450 Q/year. The Sun each year provides 10,000,000 Qs of energy to Planet Earth. Thus, if we someday double our energy consumption, but utilize only 1 / 10,000 of the sunlight, we can become energy self-sufficient.
Thus, the relative amount of energy can be seen by the following:
* Energy to lift a 2.2 pound (1 kg) weight 1 meter (3.2 feet) 1 joule * One gallon of gasoline [10.sup.8] J * Apollo rocket [10.sup.13] J * Hurricane [10.sup.15] J * Richter 9 earthquake [10.sup.18] J * World energy consumption 4.5x[10.sup.20] J * Sun energy on Earth per year [10.sup.25] J
In terms of equivalent energy (oil and petroleum can be considered to be the same):
* 1 barrel oil = 0.23 ton coal = 5,640 [ft.sup.3] natural gas = 0.37 ton wood * 1 ton coal = 1.6 ton wood = 4.3 bbl of petroleum = 24,250 [ft.sup.3] NG
One kilogram (2.2 pounds) of the following fuels has an energy worth of:
* Bread 1.0 x [10.sup.7] joules * Wood 1.4 x [10.sup.7] J * Coal 1.9 x [10.sup.7] J * Butter 3.3 x [10.sup.7] J * Petroleum 4.3 x [10.sup.7] J * Uranium 235 8.0 x [10.sup.13] J (or 8,000,000x[10.sup.7] J)
A human being needs about 2,300,000 calories or 2,300 Cal per day. Okay, one calorie is equal to 4.1868 joules, so 2,300,000 calories is equal to 0.96x[10.sup.7] J, about two loaves of one pound bread/day.
The average person in the U.S. uses 170,000 Cal/day of energy, or 75 times more than the body requires. Remember the 300 slave discussion earlier? Well, this calculation says there are only 75 slaves, so it is a matter of how you conduct the analysis. In any case, we do have at least 75 slaves working for us each day. The 170,000 Cal equates to 1.7 gallons of gasoline, that is, only a cost of $5/day, or if these slave energies are converted to electricity, the cost would be about $8/day. This is why we use so much energy. We can afford it. Maybe we need an Energy Emancipation Proclamation!
Just about the time the Cold War ended, eliminating prospects for the sudden end of Civilization-for now, at least-global climate warming and the genome table emerged, as covered in Chapter 5 (The Venus Syndrome) and Book 2. The signals were pretty obvious: reduce the use of fossil fuels, be careful about nuclear energy and find ways to intelligently apply genetic engineering and the Sun, also highlighted in Chapters 2 and 3. But let's start with the beginning of human life.
History of Energy
Throughout the book are discussions on human evolution. Ape-like creatures only began to walk upright about 6 million years ago, and homo (person) sapiens (intelligent) sapiens (not quite sure why we need both, but that is the correct usage), us, only spun off, about, 200,000 years ago. In fact, checking the molecular clock through mitochondrial DNA (DNA outside the nucleus), it appears that we all link back to an African Eve 150,000 years in the past. As a species, we survived, but about 74,000 years ago, an earlier Sumatran cataclysm, volcano Toba, erupted, keeping the sky dark for 6 years. Our world population is said to have dropped to 2,000, or maybe as much as 15,000, but certainly worthy of being placed on the endangered list.
From that precarious point of near extinction, we slowly recovered up to 5 million in 8,000 B.C., when agriculture was invented, and humans began to prosper. By the time of Jesus Christ, our population was up to, oh, 250 million. When Columbus discovered America, the total was still less than half a billion, reaching one billion in 1850 and 2 billion in 1930.
In mid-2007, the world population raced passed 6.6 billion (www.census.gov/main/ www/popclock.html). The United States reached 300 million in 2006. China is #1 at 1.3 billion and India joined the billion club in 1999, with an expectation of passing China as early as 2035. The peak, yes, there will be no population bomb explosion, will occur sometime in the 2040 to 2050 period at between 7.5 billion and 9 billion. But, like biblical historians to be teased in Book 2, modern day population experts, also, just don't know.
In 1975 the mean global age was 22. In 2050, it will be 38. In 1900, Europe had 25% of the world population and three times that of Africa. Today, Europe represents 7%, and in 2050, Africa will have three times the population of Europe. These demographic patterns are important considerations in a discussion of future energy.
Japan actually shrank in 2005, and if the current drop rate continues, its population in the Year 3000 will be 500. Around 60% of kindergarten children in South Korea are now males, all because of abortion and cultural beliefs. China's one child policy is somewhat flexible, but it is still not uncommon for two or three year old daughters to be terminated if a mother is soon to bear a son.
Each Spanish female will produce 1.07 children. However, the fertility rate was 2.8 just two decades ago, and a figure of 2.1 is needed to maintain zero population growth. Why the drop? Pure economics: high unemployment, low salaries and unaffordable housing. Why doesn't this work for India? Read Book 2.
In determining energy use increase over time, clearly, the regions of concern have to do with developing countries, for it is said that if the per capita use of resources today is equal to that of the United States, we would need six more Planet Earths. This more unfortunate half of the world lives on $2/day. In this group, half a billion women die each year in childbirth. One billion are totally illiterate.
With the increasing numbers come the need for more food. For every calorie of any food grain consumed, up to ten calories of fossil fuel are expended, as for example, a farmer uses up to 2,790 calories to power machinery and apply fertilizer/pesticides to produce one can of corn containing 270 calories. Worse yet, kernel corn is the feedstock currently used by industry to produce ethanol for transportation, resulting in further inefficiencies. David Pimental, a critic of bio-ethanol, who reappears later in the debate about biofuels, in 1996 said, by 2040 we will need to triple the global food supply, requiring a 1,000 percentage increase in the total energy expended in food production. In those days, the prediction was for world population to reach eleven billion, but, the figures remain staggering.
What have food and population to do with energy? Everything! The energy problem involves demographics, education, agriculture, international politics and more and more. There is no attempt here to solve all these areas with simple solutions, so let me deal only with energy.
Conventional Energy Today
Fossil fuels dominate. About 85% of world energy, and that of the U.S., consists of oil, coal and natural gas. When burned, carbon dioxide and heat are produced. Carbon dioxide causes a Greenhouse Effect, further warming the surface of our planet.
A recent book on the subject is the Dictionary of Energy, 512 pages for $85. It is not a real dictionary and has no table of contents, but it does feature energy snippets written by those who are associated with the subject, such as Charles Keeling on atmospheric carbon dioxide. I certainly do not want this chapter to be encyclopedic, so, if you desire the brutal truth in gory detail, go to this publication. In this book I am weaving my life into what I feel are pearls of wisdom and distillates of fascinating information leading to simple solutions.
Such as, the First Energy Crisis in 1973 changed the world forever. Soon after Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays, the price of oil doubled to $5/barrel. President Richard Nixon reacted by proposing a $2.2 billion aid package for Israel, which infuriated the Arab Nations, leading to petroleum prices effectively being quadrupled, to nearly $12/barrel. Funny thing, but Europe and Japan actually supported these oil producing countries, so the situation during the Iraq war, later in 2004, is only symptomatic of countries fearing a traumatic termination of oil supplies.
In 1979, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his wife, Empress Farah, fled Tehran for Egypt. Exiled Ayatollah Khomeini returned, the Second Energy Crisis occurred, and, later in the year began the hostage crisis, when 70 Americans were held captive for 444 days. Remember President Jimmy Carter wearing a sweater in a frigid White House office to conserve energy, while generally restricting himself to the Rose Garden to express his displeasure about all this?
In both crises, gas lines became a royal pain and our economy got seriously disrupted. We thusly went through a push for energy self-sufficiency when the White House was controlled by Democrats, but Republicans have generally treated energy as a source of profit for industry and the environment as a mild concern for re-election rather than a problem to be faced and resolved. Well, there are exceptions, as Energy Independence was also a goal of Republican President Richard Nixon. Anyway, an effective energy policy has completely defied politics, mostly because the will of the people was lacking. You can't only blame the President or Congress or the private sector. Yes, part of the problem has to be with campaign spending and successful lobbying, but the greater blame falls squarely on you and me for not caring enough.
The Year 2005 finally revealed the reality of Peak Oil and again gave tribute to King Hubbert's forecast. Most economists felt that $50/barrel oil would be a bothersome and occasional spike ... until $70 oil appeared, triggered by Hurricane Katrina, going past $75 in 2006. Chances are that there is still sufficient petroleum to withstand the latest upward excursions, but, certainly, not long after 2010, the true crunch will inevitably come. The International Energy Agency reported that we would be using 53% more energy and producing 55% more carbon dioxide by 2030. Over 70% of the increase will come from developing countries, especially China and India. Moreover, as precarious and metastable as energy sources are today, world consumption will more than double by 2050.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Simple Solutions by PATRICK KENJI TAKAHASHI Copyright © 2007 by Patrick Kenji Takahashi . Excerpted by permission.
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