Posts Tagged by ocean acidification
Energy Policy’s Difficult Choices
| May 10, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
I recently wrote a post critical of radical environmentalists who take rigid positions and refuse to make the tough choices that confront us all in the real world. In particular, I stand in disagreement with people’s unwillingness to exile the tortoises from 4613 acres (about five square miles) in the California desert that would have been used for a gigawatt of solar photovoltaics, an almost exact replacement for a full coal-fired power plant. Read More
PBS’s “Electric Nation”
| May 1, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Fossil Fuels |
The PBS special “Electric Nation” is a reasonably fair-minded and certainly non-hysterical treatment of the various modes of how we in the U.S. generate electricity. Personally, had I written the show, I would have been quite a bit more hysterical, emphasizing the utter insanity of our business-as-usual approach to fossil fuels and our failure to form a workable energy policy, even in the face of:
• Global climate change
• Ocean acidification
• Peak oil
• Empowering terrorist and other anti-American regimes
• Escalating rates of lung disease
Yet they were good enough to quote Thomas Edison’s famous simile regarding our shortsightedness when it comes to energy:
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy–sun, wind and tide.”
Energy Consumption, Economics, and Environmentalism
| January 28, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Sustainability |
To simplify where we are as a civilization and where we’re going with respect to energy consumption, economics, and environmentalism, it’s useful to postulate three broad “plans”:
Plan A: We continue on our current course. We ignore the fact that our population will soon be growing from 7 billion to 10 billion, and that an ever-growing percentage of that population is joining the ranks of consumers. Our leaders know that we’re in the process of driving off a cliff; they may lack basic decency, but they’re long on intelligence, and they exploit voter ignorance of this core truth as long as they possibly can. During this time, they and the extraordinarily powerful forces that elected them desperately look for new ways of extracting fossil fuels, while obfuscating the effects on global climate, ocean acidification, social chaos, war, respiratory disease, etc. The elite remain in power until the planet is in ruins.
Plan B: We aggressively adopt what Jeremy Rifkin and others refer to as “The Third Industrial Revolution,” which contemplates continued economic growth by focusing on renewable energy and the many other components of sustainability. Read More
The U.S. Has a Responsibility At This Point In History
| December 20, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Fossil Fuels |
Bill Moore, editor of EVWorld.com has written a splendid article on the failure of certain of the early electric vehicle companies, in which he points out:
Breaking into the automotive business can be relatively easy; making a success of it is pretty damned near impossible, regardless of what type of propulsion system you favor: ICE-age or otherwise; and it’s especially tough if you decide to go electric. Beyond this, the reasons for individual failures are myriad and multiple: right product, wrong time, wrong product; wrong time, etc. Management missteps, unrealistic investor expectations and impatience, government responsiveness, inept marketing, unanticipated technical setbacks, product shortcomings, public resistance to change: the list is long.
I don’t dispute any of this, but let’s look at the subject from a “big picture” perspective. As a country, we’re still married to fossil fuels, and we’re doing essentially nothing about it In particular, we have no energy policy. Hell, we’re about to build an oil pipeline Read More
Ocean Acidification
| June 4, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
Global climate change deniers wishing to argue their position often point out the oceans, enormous as they are, act as huge “carbon dioxide sinks.” It is true, of course, that the oceans absorb about 30% of the atmospheric CO2 we emit each year. But this has its own deleterious (some marine biologists say “catastrophic”) effects, in the form of ocean acidification. Linked above is a good article on the subject.
The Hydrogen Economy and the Migration from Fossil Fuels
| April 13, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Fossil Fuels |
Here, 2GreenEnergy Video Report host George Alger interviews me on the hydrogen economy: what it means, its validity, and its ramifications.
2GreenEnergy Report – Peak Oil
| April 11, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
In this episode of the 2GreenEnergy Video Report, host George Alger interviews me on the phenomenon known as “peak oil,” i.e., that the world has peaked in terms of its oil production capacity. I discuss my take on this, as well as its many social, financial, and political ramifications.
2GreenEnergy Video Report — Peak Oil
| March 19, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Fossil Fuels |
Here’s another episode of the 2GreenEnergy Report, in which I’m interviewed on the subject of peak oil. I manage to squeeze in references to related subjects as well: the consequences of our addiction to foreign oil, the externalities associated with fossil fuels, long-term environmental damage, the associated costs of healthcare, ocean acidification, and global climate change.
Global Warming "Debate"
| December 1, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
I thought I’d write a quick post on the “debate” over global warming. Perhaps the first thing to note here is that there really are very few informed people actually debating. Of scientists covering the issue who publish peer-reviewed papers, there are very few who question the concept that human activity is raising the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, which have caused — and will continue to cause — a rise in the temperature at the earth’s surface. I’ve met many of these people personally, e.g., Dr. Ramanathan at Scripps, and they’re enormously convincing.
Out of fairness, here’s a rare dissenter.
I point out three things:
1) As discussed here, the oil companies have spent a fortune creating doubt in the public’s mind about the validity of concern for global warming. With a brazen lack of regard for the truth and a callous indifference to your health and safety that rivals that of the tobacco companies, they’ve funded sham “research” companies whose sole purpose is to build a cloud of uncertainly regarding global warming. There’s no debate about that.
Now is it possible that, again out of fairness, those who stand to profit from global warming mitigation are campaigning in the opposite direction? I suppose so.
2) But even if the global warming hypothesis turns out to be incorrect, no one is saying that it isn’t likely. Is it sane to risk inaction that could result in complete ecological, social, and economic catastrophe?
Here is a video that I think everyone on this planet should watch, that offers cogent reasoning that mankind should take action to deal with the possibility that most climatologists are correct in their theories.
3) Again, even if the global warming hypothesis turns out to be incorrect, even fewer scientists doubt that increased CO2 levels are lowering the pH of the oceans, causing long-term damage to the fragile ecosystems therein.
I would think that this would make it intensely difficult to argue against controlling carbon emissions. But hey, I’ve seen incredible behavior from people where money is concerned before. Why should I think it will suddenly cease now?
Ocean Acidification
| October 26, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Science |
Occasionally readers take me to task for glossing over the important concepts of the day, leaving people to research for themselves the terms that I bandy about as if they were household words. Ocean acidification is a good example. Yet I am by no means an expert on this, and so I can do little more than to point readers to any of the hundreds of articles that have been written on the subject. Here, e.g., is the Wikipedia treatment.
In essence, rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere causes more CO2 to be absorbed into the oceans, which in turn causes a complicated set of (mostly) unwanted chemical reactions, most directly the formation of carbonic acid. This affects the survival of calcifying organisms, damaging corals, shellfish, and many other lifeforms that maintain the delicate balance that is the ocean ecosystem.
What makes this phenomenon of particular importance is the fact that it is not disputed. As discussed in my upcoming book on renewables, Big Oil is working hard to obfuscate the global warming issue. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere are causing long-term environmental damage. Thus ocean acidification renders moot any controversy that the oil companies are working so hard to generate about global warming.
