The Institute (協会)

you mean, if it were smart, efficient, and economical to do, it would already be happening, and if it needs governmental monies to develop, it's not wise?

I am shocked. Shocked.

I'm still waiting for that trash-consuming combustion system that Doc had installed on the Delorean.

...turkey carcasses. carcassi? carcassum?

are we gullible if we don't have all the information? on the surface of things it would seem that biofuels would be better because you are dealing with a renewable resource (corn), as opposed to fossil fuels of which there is a limited amount. obviously it is important to get beneath the surface of things, so bully for the NYT!

john; i submit that we're gullible if we don't work initially and primarily from the premise in my first response. So, if you have to listen to politicians about what is best, the battle is already lost.

John, we are gullible if we don't test everything and questions and don't think about PROCESS characteristics and not simply results.

Focusing on process helps us not compare corn vs. coal but combusting (processing) corn vs. combusting coal.

But yeah, not having the information puts us at a huge disadvantage!

My favorite example of this; clearing of Indonesian peat bogs to plant palm oil trees is said to release as much carbon dioxide annually as all of western Europe.

"Oops."

(and it produces sufficient fuel to power one F350 for six months, I'd bet....)

Did you know they took the word gullible out of the dictionary?

Seriously, thanks for posting this article. Ethanol production is huge new in the farm belt. Here in Michigan its not only corn but also sugar beets that are being grown specifically for this purpose. New ethanol plants are being constructed too.

What's crazy in all this is that you actually get worse gas mileage with ethanol - either 10% blend or E85. We truly are gullible.

I say drill for our own oil and build new refineries. I just don't buy all the global warming hype.

dave...yes, it is very big, as the farm belt is fleecing the rest of the country with this rent seeking. Sanctioned thievery...

I wrote a paper on this last quarter just before this all hit the mainstream media.

The amount of bad information out there on alternative energy sources is just amazing. Sadly, due to the way research is funded, you often won't see scientists speak up about the downsides of things until many, many years of research has been done. (It's just not good business to tell the funder to stop giving you research grants because you've found out that what you're researching is a dead end.)

Expect solar power to go the same way as biofuels; the information is already available on how ridiculous it is to try and power anything beyond a couple light bulbs off of solar (basically, it just costs waaaaaaaaay too much for the power output). Just don't go looking to the mainstream media for coverage of that yet.

Unless we discover a truly new power source, the only reliable, cheap, clean power source is nuclear. And that's a hard sell with literally hundreds of environmental organizations spreading info from the 70s and 80s as if it's current.

k to the yle: dude...shoot me your paper, wouldja? we've got me, and my email address, and my blog address right here promising that i'm not going to plagiarize your work, I'd just love to see it as I'm fighting "green-sanity". Your bibliography would work, as well, if you don't want to send the paper.

Kyle, I have to disagree with you about solar power. First, there is tons of research going into designing better solar cells--most trying to use polymers instead of semiconductors, which would bring the cost of production way down. Plus you're talking about cost in $$ as opposed to cost to the environment--which I think was the point of the biofuels article. (I also happen to know a couple who power their entire home with solar. They actually put power INTO the grid.)

I agree that nuclear is great and I wish our country was more interested in using it, but you have to consider disposal of the spent rods. This is where $$ and environmental cost come in with this choice.

...jamie, how can you differentiate "$$ in dollars" vs. "cost to the environment"?

I'd love to be able to have a metric to measure whether something is a good idea or not, perhaps you could propose one?

I wonder if this lack of thinking about process isn't happening with the cfl, that piggy-tail lightbulb. From what I've been reading, you almost have to have a Hazmat team come clean your house, after you bug-out, if you drop one and it breaks, releasing the mercury. Pregnant women are urged to leave and not clean up the mess. Also, the dust can get into carpets and other materials, affecting people and pets. Then, when it's cleaned, you can't just throw it in the household trash, it has to go to a place designed to handle the toxic material. I wonder how many people are using, and disposing of these things not knowing the risks. So, I wonder who is benefitting from the incadescent bulb being phased out and the cfl taking it's place? I'm tempted to hoard a roomful of incadescents.

I'm just wondering, if corn is the crop of choice for ethanol, why is the picture above showing what looks like wheat being put in the fuel tank of the car?

corn is by far *not* the crop of choice...just here in the states it is. sugar cane is vastly more efficient for production of ethanol, but given our sugar tariffs and corn-state lobbies, guess what we end up with?

Shawn--well, the article was saying that the amount of CO2 evolved in producing biofuel and then using it is more than an equivalent production and use of some fossil fuel (if I understood it correctly). A solar panel may not save anyone money (although, probably in the long run it would), it has less negative environmental impact (although I honestly don't know what kind of wastes are involved in growing huge semiconductor crystals). I don't know how to make a comparison. I think it would depend on your values and economics.

It's also interesting to think about where the cost ($$-wise) comes in. For solar cells, the cost is mostly on the front end--they're expensive to make. But they require little upkeep. Nuclear power has some cost on the front end, but lots on the back end when you need to dispose of the waste.

t. smith--I wouldn't worry about the mercury in cfl. One exposure to a very small amount of mercury (milligrams!) is not going to hurt you. You'd be surprised when you start looking up the OSHA, etc. approved levels for home and the workplace. You need chronic exposure for it to be harmful. (Except in the case of the pregnant women perhaps...) But you make a good point about disposal. I don't know. Mercury's pretty dense. I've picked up containers of mercury smaller than a pint, and they're close to 10 pounds--my point being that there's not that much in a lightbulb.

mmmhmm...and, now factor in opportunity cost, jamie. solar panels may (!!!) have low maintenance/upkeep (I doubt that highly, with a complex system, but even so), but what about the extra money you spent on those happy-green-time panels in the first place? what could that money have been doing otherwise?

bastiat's very old, but very pertinent, essay is worth a look: The Seen and the Unseen.

After a bit of looking, you may come to think that price is the best proxy we have for efficiency (as I do...it's not perfect, but it's the best one we've got)...you may choose to spend money on something else, but the problem lies here in that the government is subsidizing. You may be able to use solar "affordably" as an individual, but that affordability is often at the expense of other taxpayers, and is not an efficient use of money in any way, shape, or form.

I just don't think we can continue to think in terms of lowest cost anymore. Oil was/is cheap because it practically gushes out of the ground in some places in the world and it's relatively inexpensive to refine. But if oil stops gushing, every other energy source is going to cost more $$--basically no matter what. Or it's going to cost more time (if you, for example, decide to do nothing but burn firewood for all your electricity).

Solar panels aren't that complex, by the way (in the larger sense). They're tricky to make, but once you make them, they just work.

I, personally, have no problem with my tax money being used to subsidize alternative energy. All the research I did in graduate school was subsidized by the government as is almost all university research.

Thanks for the essay link. I'll check it out.

jamie...keep looking into economics, you'll be glad you did if you're interested in this stuff. Prices contain a lot more information than you're realizing right now, and opportunity cost is very key, as well as the effects of governmental subsidies.

In short...government has a horrible record of picking *which* technologies they should subsidize, and they have horrible incentives in place that cause them to not just make randomly bad choices (as in, correct enough most of the time with some random noise), but consistently bad ones (always aiming at the wrong target). And, when government picks a tech to subsidize, that is overproduced, when a more efficient tech may do the job better...but it won't get monies because the early companies get power and lobbying money on their sides.

For a great example, see the 'catalytic converter' situation in the 70's, and the 'scrubber' technologies employed by coal burning plants. I'd write more about that, but this is long enough as it is; I can send you some links to podcasts, if you're interested...or just check out something that looks intriguing to you on econtalk.org

You really can't consider the environment (or anything else) without economics...

alright, I can't help myself...this is so fun for me!!

When oil becomes more expensive, as it will if supplies get lower, people will naturally, and without any need for governmental coercion/subsidies, switch to different sources of energy (be they battery, solar, wind, etc.). At some point, even if nobody developed anything more efficient than what we currently have (which would be utterly foolish to think, but we'll go with it here), solar (or whatever else) will be cheaper than oil, and we can switch then, without having wasted money on technology before we needed to, and therefore losing whatever else (the unseen) we could have bought with that money/invested that money in. Isn't it glorious? The market just, almost magically, rewards efficiency through prices.

Unfortunately, your good intentions are being manipulated by politicians. They make you feel good for voting for them, and they get elected on a "save the planet" platform. Saving the planet is a great thing. The public process (politics) is the worst way to accomplish that great thing.

Jamie, the trouble is that the cost of alternative energies translates fairly well into the effort, and hence the energy, needed to make them. So in a way, if the energy source can't make it in a free market without subsidies, you've got to question whether it's actually that efficient of an energy source.

To use your example of solar panels, consider that the biggest area of Superfund sites is in the SF Bay area. You've got some serious uphill argument to persuade me that silicon chips are an environmentally sound way to generate electricity, to put it mildly.

Jamie: you're sort of being a poster-boy for what I said.

The issue with solar is NOT the cost of the PV (photovoltaic) cells. The issue is no matter the material you develop, PVs still give off relatively tiny amounts of energy. The issues are simply things science can't solve:
- space requirements (HUGE; like 10k's of square miles huge)
- power output (tiny; )
- location requirements (some areas of the world get a lot more sun than others)
- intermittent power (science can give us better ways to fix this, but the fact is it still exists)

Spain just used one square kilometer of land to build the world's largest PV facility. What's the PEAK output? 20 megawatts. That is nothing; the only power plants you'll see generating a mere 20 megawatts are small and privately owned (generally large hospitals, TV broadcasters, and some smaller military installations). 50% of the power in the US is produced by power plants producing a little over 1 Gigawatt (and those facilities take up far, far, far less space than a square kilometer).
Realistically due to weather and the like, the annual average of their plant will hover around 4-5 mega watts (and that's being nice; I've read estimates as low as 3 megawatts).

So solar is tremendously expensive--regardless of cell technology advances--in both terms of dollars and the environment.

Disposal of nuclear waste is cheap and with technology--that is ALREADY developed--it is environmentally safe.
France pretty much only uses nuclear energy for electricity and has proven for some 20 years that it's the safest, cheapest, and cleanest form of energy known.

And as much as many of us would love to leave cost out of the equation for cleaner, more reliable energy sources, it cannot be done. People love watching "An Inconvenient Truth" and demanding the government do something. But it's no different than movie stars flying around in their private jets telling governments to end poverty. We like the idea; we like to feel good and pretend we are doing something. But in reality, we don't want to (and in most cases CAN'T) pay for change.

You probably want sources; I've intentionally left them out to encourage readers to go do some searching themselves. The mainstream media gives sources and we have a mess. Folks need to be willing to go out and find stuff on their own or they will continue to be feed disinformation.