sid. 48. Biofuel.
Biofuel production has quickly created a global impact, with
developing countries rushing to take advantage of the sudden thirst
for ethanol and biodiesel in the USA and Europe. Brazil’s soybean
production has long been implicated in the destruction of its rainforests, even prior to the biodiesel boom.40
Now burgeoning demand for biodiesel from soybeans has only exacerbated an already
worrisome situation. Whereas logging gets most of the attention (it’s
easier to demonize chainsaws than tractors), look to the humble
soybean and the vast quantities of them pouring out of the Amazon
basin to find the
reason behind much of the logging.
Environmentalists feeling smug about eating tofu may have to
rethink their situation. (In the interest of full disclosure, I consider
myself an environmentalist and I eat tofu regularly. Mea culpa.)
Soy, though, suddenly finds itself being upstaged. In 2007 the USA
struck a deal with Brazil to
clear even more forests, this time for
sugar cane to make ethanol destined for the American market.41
Sid. 52. Clean Coal
When it comes to egregious polluters, the coal industry tops
the list. Coal combustion is the world’s foremost offender in the
production of greenhouse gas emissions which, as bad as they are,
comprise only a portion of the coal stacks’ damaging output. For
years coal has provided the bulk of electricity generation around the
world, with coal-fired power plants belching a toxic cocktail of
pollutants. The resulting acid rain has killed forests, made lakes
uninhabitable to fish, and dissolved ancient works of art where stone
sculptures had the misfortune of being outside and downwind of
power plants. Mercury and lead plumes have slowly but surely
poisoned people and animals alike. Burning over
a billion tons of
coal per year in the United States alone creates such stratospheric
levels of global warming gases that the numbers make your eyes
glaze over.52 You may be trying to wrap your mind around that
billion tons number, otherwise written as two trillion pounds. To
bring that down to earth a little bit, that’s about
twenty pounds of
coal per person—every day! Add up the coal consumption of China
(horrendous), India, Europe, et al, and you’re talking about some
serious pollution.----- In the USA there are 154 coal-burning power plants on the
drawing board in 42 states.53 3 China is building new coal-fired power
plants at the rate of about one large plant per week, this despite the
fact that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China.54
sid. 76 Solar power
If that 10,000 square miles sounds like a lot (and it is!), an
article in the esteemed journal Science77 by a proponent of solar
concentrator technology, as exemplified by the aforementioned
Nevada Solar One, estimated that to supply 50% of the USA’s
present energy requirements would require 15,000 square miles of
solar panels in the desert southwest. Not to be outdone, Scientific
American touted a plan to provide 69% of America’s electrical
needs by 2050 with a plan to cover 30,000 square miles with solar
panels!78 Construction of such a system would require completely
covering
2 square miles per day with solar panels and all their
supporting infrastructure, every single day for over forty years. One
can’t help but wonder at the limitless imagination of those who
propose such scenarios with seemingly no thought for the
implications of scaling up construction projects to such unrealistic
sizes.
sid 80 Wind power
Wind Power
With those statistics in mind and without wanting to seem
dismissive of wind power, there seems to be little point in digressing
from my purpose of this chapter, which is to provide a brief look at
purported solutions to our planet’s energy quandaries and point out
unfortunate shortcomings where they exist. Wind power, like solar
(and, to a lesser extent, biofuels) seems terrific on a visceral level,
and like many alternative energy systems it begs to be scaled up to
global size. But in reality wind power suffers from serious problems,
not the least of which is that the wind is a fickle provider.
When calculating the generating potential of wind, solar, or
any other electrical generating system, it’s helpful to use their capacity factor. This is simply a ratio of the amount of actual energy
they produce in a year (in kilowatt-hours, usually) vs. the amount of
energy they would have produced if they ran full bore all year. This
is how we calculated the 16% solar efficiency in the preceding
section. Many agencies and wind power advocates assume a
capacity factor of 40% when estimating the cost of wind-generated
electricity, yet the reality seems to be about half that.
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf
