Michael Molitor talk at UNSW today

Fusion?

I'd be curious to hear what Michael had to say. Hopefully someone might report back for those of us interstate and O/S.

Nevertheless, I suspect that the complexities for addressing human energy use are greater than most people are really prepared to think about. The elephant in the room that I think does not have nearly enough attention is this: even if humanity developed an economical and benign alternative energy source to fossil fuels, what are we doing to address the next bottleneck(s) that would inevitably occur - the various capacities we exhibit to deplete (or otherwise compromise) the living and non-living resources of the planet that are already groaning under the pressure we place upon them? After all, that's largely what we've been using energy for thus far.

It's a bit like building new freeways and by-passes - the traffic jams are simply moved elsewhere, but sooner or later there will be nowhere else to move them to.

I can't wait for the responses here about (pseudo)sustainability and human ingenuity and market-valuation/recovery cost ratios and such. They almost always smell like elephant-shit to me...

It must be late (or early) AEST - I am growing cantankerous. Polerjees.

Telecommuting to work? Walking to your local grocery store? Buying non-perishable items online? The sheer amount of unnecessary driving that takes place is appalling.

Where does most of the carbon footprint come from anyway? Driving? Industry and manufacturing? Energy production? Food production? The things I mentioned above are good ways of handling pollution due to driving and energy production (well, driving uses its own energy production, and therein lies the problem).

Isn't that a bit presumptuous; that we need to avoid 600 billion tons of emmisions? Couldn't we likewise work towards an acceptible level of CO2 while approaching the goal from the other side; embracing agricultural technologies that sequester carbon such as no-till farming and growing-back conservation lands, which also reduces methan production and lessens the carbon footprint required to till and manage the land, while also reducing irrigation needs and run-off problems which are hurting our water systems. Of course the big CO2 producers are in the so-called developing nations like China and India which are quickly outpacing the US and for which there is little effort to control those emmisions which along with CO2 and I think more importantly are emmiting vast amounts of soot (which accelerate the melting of the ice regions) and heavy metals like mercury which are bioaccumulating in the apex predators like polar bears.
I'm all for protecting the environment but the focus on CO2 just misses so many other greivous assaults. Like nature itself we need to be complex in our response to complex problems. it seems that historically whenever we attempt to find a single factor approach to a complex problem we find ourselves being dissappointingly ineffective if not out and out shooting ourselves in the foot. Surely people are eager to help and the singel focus CO2 approach underestimates the individual and over-relies on large scale beaurocratic approaches which are so inflexible, inefficient and irresponsive to local needs.

If we're on economics, for the time being, ignore global warming issues. There is some chance if we don't go flat-out on efficiency and renewables, we will have such an economic downdraft from peak Oil+Gas that it will be difficult to invest, except in burning coal. Then, we can bring climate change back, as per Kharecha & Hansen.
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The Stern Report uses the standard mainstream economic growth models -
usual sources -> IPCC -> Stern,
and on p. 183, footnote 35 it says:
annual GDP (per capita) growth of 1.9%, population growth 0.6%, or total GDP 2.5% growth. (That's for world).

The biophysical economists (like Charlie Hall or Robert Ayres/Benjamin Warr) use models that think *energy* (or rather work = energy*efficiency) is a stronger determinant of economic growth than labor or capital. Given Peak Oil & Gas, Ayres would predict that GDP flattens at some level depending on efficiency:
see p. 34 of Ayres talk for ASPO.

At 2.5% CAGR, US GDP would be about 65X that of 1900 (to put on same scale as Ayres p.34 chart), i.e., 2X larger than peak of Ayres' best model. I assume that people understand that a 2X difference in assumed GDP makes a very big difference in what people are doing...

Biophysical economics may be a weird minority position, or it may be a better model of the world. If it's a better model, all these arguments about discount rates and exactly how much damage when isn't going to matter much if we haven't gone all-out for efficiency and building renewables very soon. Pressure to burn coal to keep the lights on, and to do synfuels, will be enormous. Places that wait are going to be hurt badly - some countries and parts of countries are already in way better shape than others. People laugh at germany for doing solar and wind... we'll see.

See Charlie Hall's Balloon Graph to see how far we have to go, and the rest of that discussion is good as well. The Hirsch Report addressed the issues (for US) if we didn't start 20 years before Peak Oil to rework the infrastructure, because it takes time.

Sorry I don't have the Oz numbers, but I think you have similar issues to the US. So far, what I see of Hall or Ayres&Warr makes more sense to me than mainstream neoclassical economics, but then I'm no economist. There's a longer discussion of this over at JohnQuiggin, where I've been seeking econ comments.

Ben, fusion was reported as 20 years away in the early 60's, 30 years away in the 80's, 40 years away in the 90's and 50 years away (from delivering commercially useful power) now. The ETA is moving into the future around two years for every elapsed year!

Obviously it is very hard, and it has chewed up lots of R&D resources without delivering. Fusion also produces a nice collection of radioactive waste which has to be managed (neutron irradiated fusion reactor and coolant - lighter isotopes than fission though).

Driving is only a couple of percent of the CO2 problem. I mostly use a bicycle.

SO UNSW that this talk is being flogged, yet the Centre for Energy and Environment Markets brought out two of the top specialists on emissions trading (Buchner from the IEA) and international negotiations (Eric Haites) two weeks ago and they spoke to audiences of a very modest size at the AGSM.

Maybe they needed Tom Cruise-esque taglines to their talks or something.

re: #6 davidp
Fusion: yes; I read a 1958 book in high school, which thought maybe by 1990. At point I was seriously thinking of a career in that turf, but thank goodness, got pulled into computing instead, so actually got to ship things in my lifetime.

In 2004/2005 I heard a talk that said "not for at least 50 years". The speaker might not have been right, but since he was a Nobel Physics winner, I at least was willing to listen to him. His Gambling with the Future presentation is worth reviewing - first part is climate, rest about energy.

Whilst fusion has great potential, so do other far less hard to achieve technologies. Personally I think improved energy storage would be more widely useful, as it would enable other, more easily achievable energy technologies in ways that would make them immediately more useful and scalable. I suggest that the technological hurdles to better batteries and better PV together are a lot easier to get over than getting working fusion. I am not suggesting fusion research be curtailed, but other areas are more likely to give us useful results and sooner.

very nice quantitative assessment on grist of what exactly needs to be done to keep below 450 ppm
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/31/181924/330 for part 1 and http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/4/23/174225/162 for part 2; parts 3 and 4 to come
uses the "wedge" unit, which i had not previously seen but makes quantization easy.