Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright, I’ll try to pitch the counter argument. The current green movement narrative is the same it has always been: living within our means. The current fossil fuel driven economy is objectively unsustainable. Yes, you can geo-engineer your way out of the heat problem, but that doesn’t solve all the other problems resulting from unsustainable growth, and who knows what fresh problems this will create. What the gree…
Watch "Don't look up"
You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
281–290 of 314 posts
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard of launching some large mirrors into orbit, or a bunch of small mirrors that can link together in orbit. Then you use them to reflect some sunlight off into space. I have no idea how practical this is. The bigger concern would be if something goes wrong, you need to make the mirrors deorbit quickly.
You could set it so that some of the mirrors formed a parabolic collector and heated a molten salt column, etc on the surface. That'd have the same net effect as the giant heat sink (energy production from a heat engine, net negative flow of energy to the surface). Wasn't there a city builder that'd let you build such a thing, where it would sometimes lose calibration and burn a swath of the city to the ground?
Sim City 2000 I think. Yeah, getting it back here is not great. And would defeat the purpose of lowering amount of solar radiation...
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#283A lot of people like to talk about nuclear as a climate solution. Geothermal is the most gargantuous nuclear plant we can fathom, all we have to do is to extend a pipe and harvest it. Here is the thing, a lot of that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape. I think we have to start over with geothermal and look at it more like hydro electricity…
Conservation of energy. You could collect the energy that gravity generates, but then you end up with water/mass at the bottom and need to figure out how to bring it back up... Leading to net zero or negative gain due to other losses.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've long wanted to put some money into an eco terror fund. It would buy controlling interests in all the companies that make some critical, specialized and heavily patented piece of modern internal combustion engines or coal turbines. Then, it'd wreck the factories, and patent troll everyone else into not producing. Money is speech, and that would be protected political speech, right? :-)
that will result in those devices will be manufactured by the Chinese instead, and them then having a near monopoly
Honest question: if something is patented, sure China could manufacture it, but wouldn't patent protection prohibit importing the counterfeit good into the USA?
I've never actually thought about whether patent protection covered just the sale, or the manufacture, or exactly what, so thanks for bringing that nuance to my attention!
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working. To flip that around: this would imply that the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches to deep hole boring would be the ones that destroy the economic value of any oil-and-gas in the ground, no? Ones that make the ground radioactive, perhaps. Or that would set any potential oil f…
I've long wanted to put some money into an eco terror fund. It would buy controlling interests in all the companies that make some critical, specialized and heavily patented piece of modern internal combustion engines or coal turbines. Then, it'd wreck the factories, and patent troll everyone else into not producing. Money is speech, and that would be protected political speech, right? :-)
Hey, if a DAO can raise enough money to almost buy the Constitution, maybe you don't need to wait for Someone Else™ to start the slush fund required to pull off that stunt /s (but also not /s) -- err, specifically I meant the "fund" part, not the "wrecking factories" part, unless you meant economically wrecking, in which case I think it's still plausible
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright, I’ll try to pitch the counter argument. The current green movement narrative is the same it has always been: living within our means. The current fossil fuel driven economy is objectively unsustainable. Yes, you can geo-engineer your way out of the heat problem, but that doesn’t solve all the other problems resulting from unsustainable growth, and who knows what fresh problems this will create. What the gree…
There is no such thing as sustainable growth. Eventually, one day, sooner or later a very unsustainable chunk of high speed space rock will hit the planet and wipe us out, or some other completely natural and “green” disaster, like a supervolcanic eruption, as has happened repeatedly in history. The only thing that will matter is if we advance our technology to a point to divert the problem or make ourselves sufficie…
I agree with the main argument, I question the means to get a higher standard of living. ATM it seems like rather than sustaining people we're sustaining their management by and for corporations... it seems like multiple layers and huge inefficiencies to get that QOL you speak of... I mean after all isn't leisure the mother of philosophy ?
We treat time as something we don't have enough of...(not surprising as routines tend to contract the perception of time ) We treat humans as disposable, when they have more knowledge, experiences, social contacts the older they get... We revere money more than empathy (moreso in Western Europe, some developed countries or among those "who have")
I'd suggest it's all a play by the politicians to remain in power, rather than let people decide (if they weren't working so much to sustain real-estate, rental, health care) We need to replace them by choosing them at random... I believe the term is Stochocracy
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#287They can keep the microwave beam that tightly focused that the energy goes into making the hole deeper and not wider when the bottom is a target 6 inches across and 12 miles down? Wouldn’t it spread out and just absorb into the walls? This feels wildly implausible.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction. The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed. But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then i…
There are certainly cases where a more holistic view is very important. For example a plan to plant trees in the Sahara desert, irrigated by desalination plants powered by solar, at first glance seems like a "reasonable" plan to sequester carbon. But once you account for the fact that the desert reflects a lot more light then trees do it actually looks like it would accelerate global warming. The plan gets kind of "s…
don't the rainforests depend on that desert being windswept, in that the dust contains several hundred thousand tons of phosphorus...
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
High CO2 concentrations have other effects too, including ocean acidification and cognitive impairment.
And crop nutrient depletion
plants are 99.9999% carbon from carbon dioxide, though... what?
edit: i mean of the things in a plant that contain carbon and don't, 99... whatever percent of a plant is atmospheric carbon. all the soil amendments added are to replace stuff like fungus that normally forms a relationship with nearby plants and gives nutrients that plants use to modulate energy production and transpiration (or whatever), similar to how we need all of the "salts" to have a functioning brain. N-P-K lets plants more efficiently turn atmospheric carbon into food than without. Couple this with the fact that humans use nearly all of a plant now, to make cooking oil, fuel oil, and animal feed, there's nothing left after we harvest for the fungus to eat.
I normally would have launched into a diatribe against bayer/monsanto as a reply about stuff like this, but as it stands, i'm fine with careful and scientifically sound application of N-P-K for huge farms. I do, however, have a problem with pesticides and their "inactive" ingredients, not the least of which due to drinking water from an untreated well, myself.
Also i know it's not 99.9999%.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar is also trapping more energy than what would never be there. If the sun's rays just hit the ground, a portion of it would be reflected back. We're using dark material to aborb most of what would be reflected back and we end up trapping more energy than we should... Solar panels are around 15% efficient, which means 85% of this trapped energy is immediately converted to heat, heating the local environment... and…
Except, you know, 100% of the energy obtained by fossil fuels also eventually becomes waste heat. All of our electricity consumption and production is a rounding error to the earth. Global warming only works because the Sun can do most of the work.
>Except, you know, 100% of the energy obtained by fossil fuels also eventually becomes waste heat.
And? Where did I say it doesn't?
>All of our electricity consumption and production is a rounding error to the earth.
Agree. But I'm talking to those who believe solar is the solution to global warming... when what solar does is capture more energy from the sun and turn it to heat.