A story about a website with user-created content, where the users took over:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/the-day-the-digg-users-revolted/
This is an interesting story about the coal industry, however it exercises a certain flawed logic:
Coal is so cheap and so widely available that its increased use is inevitable, but clearing the hurdle to burning it on a wide scale — separating the carbon dioxide and sequestering it — could turn out to be one of the great engineering challenges of the century, energy experts say.
Wind and sunlight are both cheaper, and more widely available than coal, not to mention renewable, which coal is not (at the current rate of consumption). I wonder whether the author would claim their increased use is inevitable. Also, I wonder if the author has failed to notice that coal is being burned on a wide scale.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/science/01coal.html
Yeah, there’s more, but those were just two things that caught my interest.
It’s easy to forget about the wind when it’s blowing through one’s ears, eh? And that sun. How would we deal with all the heat IT produces! Global Warming! Clearly, coal is the inevitable answer.
/pfft
I’m always amused by the contradictory fears related to fossil fuel consumption. Fear # 1: Fossil fuel consumption is awful for the environment, therefore we must stop consuming it! Fear # 2: We are running out of fossil fuels!
If fossil fuels are so bad for the environment, shouldn’t we be thankful we are running out of them? Shouldn’t peak oil be celebrated by environmentalists? Isn’t the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels inherently limited by the rapidly depleting supplies?
Fossil fuels being bad for the environment, and fossil fuels running out are two complimentary reasons for moving away from using them. They both argue for the same end result. I fail to see any contradiction.
Additionally, there are very good reasons environmentalists don’t celebrate depleting supplies of fossil fuels. The biggest of which for environmentalists is that as the supply gets scarcer, more damage will be done to the environment to extract the remaining supplies that aren’t as easy to get (see: ANWR). That’s not something to celebrate in the least.
Peak oil isn’t a cause for celebration, because we have no infrastructure yet for providing enough power to maintain civilization once we run out. We need fossil fuels in the short term.
Wind and sunlight are cheaper than coal in limited areas of the country.
Calling sunlight cheap and coal expensive in the northeast would be kind of ludicrous?
I’ve never heard of unsubsidized sunlight being cheaper than coal, unless you’re talking about water heaters.
Coal is about as cheap as it gets. That’s why we use it.
Correct, and the heat produced by solar water heating isn’t generally amazingly hot.
wind and sunlight are free. Coal is not.
The means to convert those into electricity are another story entirely. He said “coal” not “coal powered electricity”.
Senators Byrd and McConnell will, as long as they are able, ensure that we are producing and burning as much coal as possible. There are other state delegations who will also continue to push coal (Pennsylvania, Minnesota).
What would be good would be increased use of wind by design of new turbines that don’t have the big propellers on them. Such a design has been proposed, and it obviates many of the problems that traditional ‘windmill’ type turbines have (bird strikes, size, speed, etc.), and would likely be something usable on the tops of large buildings where there’s a fairly constant wind presence. Our technology (both wind and solar) is getting to the point where it’s cost-effective to add it, but it’s not quite all there yet.
ugh! that entire coal article bothers me. but unfortunately that sentence is correct: under the current technology and market environment it’s much much cheaper to extract a kWh of electricity from coal (or any other fossil fuel for that matter) than it is by any other clean or renewable source. I would bet that equipment for this new technology is more expensive even though it probably burns the coal more completely and captures more heat than the current 19th-century process extant in most power plants.
Therein lies our problem.
He said ‘coal’ not ‘electricity from coal’. That’s the point I was making. I was saying his writing on the issue was sloppy. =)
Yes, coal is cheaper, if we pretend there are no externalities. Wind’s externalities tend to be milder, but wind is intermittent.
Wind and Solar have their good points, and are good in limited areas. But they are not extremely reliable nor are they without their problems.
Windmills aren’t so great if you’re a bird or a bat. Or if you live near them. (This happened in my own “back yard” or rather very near where I grew up. The Mrs. Yunk is related to a friend of mine from high school. Granted, the site hosting the report is probably an Astroturf organization, but they didn’t write the report.)
Not to say that wind doesn’t have its place, but do we want our scenic landscapes to turn into this?
Now in 2006 renewable sources accounted for only about 9.2% of the almost 71 quadrillion BTUs of energy produced in the U.S. (source: US DOE) I definitely think we can and should do better than that.