We Are 5 Minutes From Exponential Armageddon
December 4, 2011, Submitted by: Ken Tweet
We are presently living in the beginning of the last 5 minutes of a 50 minute exponential curve function, a time when change will become alarmingly rapid, a time which will leave many people in shock and fear.
We are all ‘wired’ for linear functions – things that happen at a relatively known rate or constant. Understanding ‘exponential’ requires thinking and understanding as it is not natural for us in our everyday lives. It is a function such that the rate of change will be going along somewhat calmly and then at some later point in time it suddenly ramps up in a dizzying escalation. It is in fact the function that many of our built-in systems are tied to, and a function which will show its teeth very soon.
I have been following Chris Martenson for several years and have a deep respect for his background, his opinions, and his predictions. He has a scientific background, a very logical mind, and a talent for teaching and presentation.
The following video presentation is worth far more than the time you will spend to watch it and it encapsulates the situation we are now in, and is presented in a manner that is understandable, factual, and without apparent bias.
As I watched this presentation, I could not stop watching – as his words rang true with my own beliefs. His presentation lasts 40 minutes followed by 30 minutes of questions-and-answers. The following 70 minutes of your time (at least the first 40) may open your eyes, or reaffirm what you’ve been feeling all along…
Oh, and the earlier reference to 5 minutes left till Armageddon is revealed in a hypothetical example in Chris’ presentation.
You may wish to visit Chris’s website from time to time at http://www.chrismartenson.com/ (but don’t forget to come back and visit us too!)
Be Prepared. If you enjoyed this, or topics of current events risk awareness and survival preparedness, click here to check out our current homepage articles…
This E to the X type curve is also what the human population looks like, coincidence, I don’t think so. The planet has finite resources, every space of the universe has a certain space to fill, the closer this space comes to being filled the less there is for everything that occupies this space. The economy is the same, there is just so much TRUE money that is tied to TRUE resources, the more this has to be divided the less there is for everyone because there is only so much. This function is tied to everything that we are as a people. Five minutes to midnight, it is more like 30 seconds or less on a 24 hour clock to midnight, armegeddon. You are so correct Ken, shock and fear, AND horror and panic.
Have followed Chris for about a year now. Oil accounts for over 400,000 products in use today, some use a lot of petroleum, some a little. Those with a very high use and exponential rates of acceleration will be predicaments while the slower ones will give us more time to solve as problems. If you look at a glass of milk on your table and ask yourself how it got there, you will see the use of oil in almost every step of the way to get it there. From the fertilizer for the field to grow the food for the cow, the electricity to milk the cow, the truck to get the milk to a processing center, electricity to process and package the milk, fuel for all the employees who work at the process center, fuel to get the milk to the store, electricity to keep the milk cool at the store and gas for you to go to the store and pick up the milk to bring it home and put in your electric refrigerator. Multiply that process times nearly everything in your life and it quickly becomes evident something has to give. Once oil becomes too expensive or scarce to continue this way of life, a contraction of gigantic proportion becomes evident.
I second B.I.’s opinion. It’s more like 30 seconds to midnight rather than 5 minutes.
I disagree with some of the segment presenters time lines however I don’t doubt the outcome. His tie between energy and the economy is correct but debt levels have breached it’s relevancy. A Black swan event could happen any day.
I agree with the predictions about oil. The problem with the discussion though is what comes next. That is what does “a contraction of gigantic proportion” look like? Everyone with something to sell, (wind, PV, EV, green something or other) has an answer but in fact none of them are sustainable on a commercial scale. The blunt and uncomfortable answer is that without oil we cannot sustain a population of 7 billion people ( or whatever that number grows to when the fossil fuel crash hits) and the population must be dramatically reduced. How that happens is the problem and the most likely outcome is unthinkable. Somehow in the next 20-40 years or so we will reduce the worlds population to a level sustainable in a post oil world. There is no viable alternative out there waiting to save us. 100% of the so-called alternatives are scams, frauds intended to extract trillions from our government coffers. Solyndra was the tip of the iceberg. All of the subsidized alternatives will fail as soon as they run out of government funds. The only question is will we stop the subsidies before everyone is broke or will we continue to fund these frauds with our last penny?
I believe that you are correct. Chris implied the same notion, that is, without oil we cannot sustain the current model. Something will have to ‘give’.
One of the questioners bought up the subject of Malthus. Interestingly Chris put Malthus to bed very quickly. e.g. quote :”Malthus didn’t have Google”
@CG; I would respectfully agree and disagree with you. You are absolutely right that in a post-oil world 7 billion people is unsustainable. The premise is (according to ‘they’ ‘them’) that the correct worldwide number is somewhere between 20-200 million people; and that’s worldwide!!! Lotta people to get rid of. However the bright side of that is that most of them will pass NATURALLY, so to speak (contraction of gigantic proportion, they will starve). It isn’t uncomfortable or unthinkable, it just IS. If significant sustainable energy sources cannot be produced then the nice world that we know is certainly doomed. My thoughts are that we need to do both, reduce the population and produce better energy. We have been promised flying cars, moon colonies and fusion for over 60 years now. Where the hell are the flying cars…..I’m pissed, there are no flying cars, I’m angry….!!!!!!! Oh, yeah, there’s no fusion either. Unlimited power, either it is possible or it isn’t. We as a human race should be trying with all our might to produce fusion power and in the meantime we should be using fission power as a transitional medium until we achieve the fusion power. It will produce all the electricity we need without carbon pollution and save the oil for the things that only oil can be used for and get us to the “fusion point” of energy in human future history. As far as the “contraction of gigantic proportion” it will be wars, mobs, scrabble fighting, disease and starvation, in other words “survival”. It isn’t “unthinkable”, it’s just the way it will be for those that choose to ignore the obvious. You cannot save the world, you can save those that want to be saved and that is all at best. I don’t mean don’t try, please do, but realize some (most) will not believe as they think the “gubment” will save them. I would say that PVs, wind and other so called “green” energies are viable (or they will be at the appropriate price point) and actually produce more energy than it takes to manufacture them. They are just expensive right now and the gubment has no business in promoting them. One day they will be what we use, in the meantime they should be left to their own devices and not the gubments (that’s our) dime. They will be stronger for it. Hopefully we will survive. It’s what I plan on! Enjoy.
I do not think “so called “green” energies are viable” commercially. I first got ahold of a “solar cell” in the mid 50′s. I am willing to bet youy dollars to doughnuts that 90% of people in the West under the age of 30 think “solar cells” or Photovoltaic cells are relatively new and therefore will someday be more efficient or cheaper etc. I have been folowing and working with PV for almost 60 years and they have been promising a breakthrough in cost or efficiency for that long. Where is it? In my opinion without exception all of the hype around solar (PV) is intended to do one thing; to get government and private money. Nothing more! There are no viable, sustainable alternatives on the commercial level. Not wind, not solar, not geothermal, nothing. There hasn’t been since they started looking for it seriously over 50 years ago. Nothing! My gut tells me unless the laws of physics are repealed there won’t be anything commercially viable.
On the bright side I think there are 100 things individuals can do. The simple reason is we can individually substitute sweat equity for cash equity. That is we can build thermal solar collectors out of old windows and pop cans. We can burn wood or super insulate rather then heat with fossil fuels. We can build small scale, cheap wind powered devices from scraps instead of building multi-million dollar windfarms that sit idle for 90% of their life. There is much that individuals can do that is impractical on a commercial scale.
@CG, I agree with you regarding the “commercial” viability of PV. I do have a small system with battery-bank storage, and I feel good about the preparedness aspect of it and the systems that it will power in my own home. But when it comes to cost vs. watts, it’s pretty expensive. There’s no way that ‘industry’ could take it on as their power source due to costs and physical space requirements.
Your mention of super-insualtion and many other small scale things we can do, makes good sense.
The fact remains though, something’s going to ‘give’ regarding the loss of ‘cheap oil’ versus ‘growth’ in this world…
@CG; Let me re-iterate PVs, and wind and other green energies will be viable at THEIR PRICE POINT, which for most people is not now. Of course if you live off the grid and they want $30K to feed you electricity, then PVs will be cheaper or wind depending on where you live. PVs started out at about 5-6% and have gradually risen to about 15-17%. So they are advancing. When they get to about 20-22%, they will be more than viable. Anyone that builds a wind farm in a place that it can’t be used for 90% of the time is stupid but I’m not aware of one (not experimental) so positioned. Built in proper places, wind turbines would be viable for 90+% of the time. I’m unaware of civilian applications of PVs in the 50s (other than novelty items) as they were not invented until 1954 at Bell Labs and they were not used on satellites until 1958 on the Vangaurd I satellite. The cost per watt was still $100/watt in the 70s. I do agree with you completely about “hardening” our structures with insulation and using passive solar for water heating and general heating, it is a go and I’m moving that way this year!
The one best sustainable, cheap and effective source of power is hydro. We pretty much built hydro power plants in the easy or the huge locations (huge like bonneville dam or Boulder dam). But we haven’t even touched half of the available hydropower that we could exploit. Of course it won’t make everyone happy but when the chips are down and people are dying (freezing in the dark dying of hunger) I think the supporters of hydro power will outnumber the opponents.
Here is another electric power related fact: Every train in the U.S. is an electric train. They burn diesel to power a generator which in turn powers electric motors on each of the drive wheels. It would be relatively easy to rewire every locomotive to pick up electricity from a overhead catenary to power the train. In the city I grew up in we had electric trolleys in the street which were replaced by electric busses (not dependent on tracks) that used exactly the same lines the trolleys did. Converting public transportation and rail shipping to full electric would be fairly easy and not require huge sums of money or dramatic changes in engineering.
@ CountryGirl. I agree with the fact that in all likelihood this world CANNOT support 7 billion, or that many more without fossil fuel. Oil and natural gas are products that have such a high ratio of energy usage to the energy needed to extract it. That is oil and natural gas that do not have to be refined with much energy and water such as oil FROZEN in rock and sand. As the population increases so does energy need to produce more food and to transport it, keep it refrigerated, etc. There is ONLY so much space that can be occupied before something gives.
Hydro is a good option for energy as long as everybody upstream is not using up the water before it gets to the dam. I suppose you could build hydro dams up and down the river and dredge the river every couple of years and this would supply some energy. I suppose you could have everyone plug in electric cars to this energy source. Again if there is water to use. Population has a way of sucking up water like a sponge.
Another option of energy is what countries like Iceland does naturally, geothermal. I suppose if everyone became so desperate they could start drilling mega deep holes and use the heat from inside the planet to turn turbines for electricity. There will be heat from inside the planet for billions of years thanks to the long term decay of radioactive material inside the planet.
To me the real issue is not so much energy needs that will of course become a huge issue, it is water and arable land. As I have said many times this planet does not have a lot of farmable land as people think. The lack of food is what is going to lead to malnutrition and disease. Disease and squalid conditons, especially in humid and hot climates, will lead to some super pathogen that is most likely airborns and probably mutates quick enough so a vaccine cannot be developed until more than 1/2 of the population is wiped out.
If not this, then World War 3 will likely develop like most wars start, over resources. Wars are one of the most unpredictable events because a country that knows that they are going to lose will use all their weapons they have to avoid surrender and defeat. MAD works as a wonderful deterrent during peace times as it has for the past 50 years+, but during full scale war, everyone is MAD and will likely use this rather than lose and be taken over.
The clock is ticking, and there are really no good options unless the population stablizes and stops expanding exponentially.
@CG; Guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree. As much as I’m not a tree-hugger hydro is very destructive to the environment. Our best bet is nuclear fission. There have been great advances in reactor design and the kind of reactionary BS of Fukushima will not be an issue. What you need is “energy density” and the only thing on planet Earth that remotely has as much energy density as oil (actually 10x as much) is nuclear fission. There is not enough potential hydro power in the US to meet the current needs of the population now. Most areas are trying to dismantle the hydro plants in place, due to the environmental impact of the dam itself. Now I would just as soon drill through the head of the last polar bear on Earth to get oil for electricity as anything else, so that’s where I’m coming from. If we had a national plan to build nuclear reactors for electricity and a “Manhattan Project” style national effort to tame fusion power, this would be a non issue. The conversion you talk about for public trans. and rail would only work if there were catenary lines IN PLACE to begin with. Nowadays there are no electric lines that follow most rail lines, any lines that follow the rail lines are simply coincidental and have nothing to do with the train itself. Copper is extraordinarily expensive these days so conversion would not be easy nor inexpensive. It would require tremendous infrastructure construction as well as tremendous cost to produce this outcome you are talking about.
There are NO dams being dismantled because they destroyed the environment. That is the propaganda. Everything you do has some effect on the environment and arguably someone would say has a negative effect. If what you want is pristine Mother earth like it was before man climbed down from the trees then you will have to eliminate man. EVERYTHING effects the environment, even natural things, even the polar bears, even the Elephants that we are trying to protect destroy the environment. It is all relative. If you don’t like dams then you will view them as bad but all things considered dams are far less harmful then the electric cars you seem to like. You do know that the rare earth elements used to create the batteries and electronics are mined and refined at a huge environmental cost. It is laughable to hear the so-called environmentalist claim that EV’s are less polluting the ICE’s. I just guess it all depends on where the mess is. If YOU can’t see it then it must not exist.
@CG; Well, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on semantics. You are right, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, depends on your point of view. Let me be a little clearer. Point; there is not enough potential hydro power in the U.S. to provide current levels of electrical power, period. Point; there is currently a movement afoot to dismantle dams in general all over the U.S. (been going on for years), which includes the small hydro power generators, that is a fact, period. The reason for this is the impact on natural fisheries, particularly where migratory fish are involved and they have been SIGNIFICANTLY impacted, so, yes, they are being dismantled because of their environmental impact. This has tremendous effect on the food chain with which we are all involved. Also, it’s not that I see the dams as bad (a human quality) I just see them as the useless relics that they are for this day and time. This isn’t about a snail darter, for which I could not care less. You are right in that everything AFFECTS the environment and will always have an EFFECT on it. Never said I liked electric cars. Personally, I think they are stupid without nuclear power plants, period. You are absolutely right that EVs, as built today, are more environmentally damaging than conventional vehicles, BUT there will come a time that hydrocarbon fuels will be gone. As far as a pristine Earth, I could wish, but I’m not a human hater as you would suggest, we have to live here. That does not mean that we should have no reasonable concern for our habitat. Let me be clear here, I would club baby seals if it paid good enough. I am not green nor am I strip and burn. I evaluate everything carefully and determine, intellectually, if it is a worthwhile endeavor, without any emotional bias, period. Good survival. Enjoy.
Dams clearly impact migratory fish. Hatcheries solve this problem. Simple as that. But the solution is not “natural” so therefore not acceptable.
“Human hater”? I would never say that if that’s what you thought I said I apologize.
Yes hydrocarbons will one day be gone. My point is we need to look for real solutions and not the phony highly subsidized “solutions”.
@CG; Well, it’s more than just the fish, it’s the entire ecosystem. Don’t have a prob. w/fisheries, they serve a purpose, but if you are a fan of salmon you can tell the diff. between wild caught and “farmed”. NO, you didn’t refer to me as a human hater, just didn’t want to be categorized that way, so no apology is necessary. Yes, I agree we need real, no BS solutions but the politicians appear to be the dominant species right now. It seems pretty simple to me, build a few hundred nuke plants, all the same design, so the operators actually know how to run it properly (weed out all the Homers) and put our resources into fusion research. Then schedule the nukes for shutdown and build the fusion plants on the nuke plant sites. This would be relatively safe and have the added benefit of no carbon pollution, if you see that as a problem, which I don’t, necessarily. I will say though that if you used a very energy efficient home, PVs would wind up being cost effective over their life span and provide all the clean energy that one would need. The average life span is about 25 years for the panels (most are warranteed for 20 yrs, even though 30-35 is more likely), although battery life is more like 12-15 years. I think that the price of electricity over the next 20 years will, conservatively, triple because of hydrocarbon supply issues. This would actually guarantee that your PVs, while costly today, will become cost effective in the long run. You rightly point out the probs w/ hightech batts and their rare earth metals. Lead acid is the only way to go and they can be recycled, easily compared to the others. Nukes would not have to be subsidized, other than making licensing more reasonable. Good survival, enjoy.
Hatcheries are not farmed salmon. Experts cannot distinguish betweeen a hatchery returning salmon and a wild returning salmon. I both fish for and enjoy salmon. I eat salmon that are raised and they do taste different, not bad just different. I like to buy Copper River Salmon when it is available and it clearly tastes better then other wild salmon. Does that mean there is something wrong or unacceptable in the other wild salmon?
I am not opposed to nuclear but I think that the opposition to it has the upper hand so it isn’t gonna happen until as I have dexcribed it before; more of us are starving and shivering in the dark. Right now everyone has all the food they can eat (even if it comes from food stamps) all the heat and light they need (even if it comes from the massive welfare state) so who cares if we torpedo needed energy generation facilities. Until this thing collapses the anti-business pro-environment, pro-big government forces are in charge.
Fusion may forever be a pipe dream. The last thing we should do is poor tax money into it that would destroy any possibility it could ever be successful. If our government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert they would run out of sand in a year or two. Everything our government touches is screwed up, over budget and off schedule. If you want Fusion then mandate that the government cannot provide any funding at all.
Lead acid batteries are practical, recyclable, can be built to last 10 times as long as the common battery we can buy. They are quite heavy for an EV and that is their primary negative.
Hydro is probably the single best and cheapest opportunity for us right now. Less then 20% of the available possible commercially practical hydro in this country has been exploited.
Geothermal is very difficult to tap. The current technology requires dealing with very hot, very corrosive water mixed with various chemicals/minerals. The short answer to the problem is that either the pipes are eaten up by the corrosive nature of the geothermal steam or the pipes are clogged by the excessive mineral load that the steam can no longer hold once it cools.
Electrifying our railroad would of course require building the catenary lines and it would even require copper for power lines. But this is hardly an obstacle. It could probably be done for less then has been spent to merely explore the feasability of a high speed rail line in California. It would cost less then we spend to subsidize Amtrak. It would be less (far less) then we spend trying to buy Afghanistan’s good will with foriegn aid. It would cost less then we spent destroying dams in the last ten years. It would cost less then we forced coal fired plants to spend to try to reduce some small portion of the last 10% of pollution they put out. It would cost about 100 times less then we spent giving the unemployed 99 weeks of vacation and about 1000 times less then we spent giving 43 million welfare recipients free food, housing, medical, heat, lights, telephones, and money to buy drugs. So it is really all relative. I assume most welfare recipients would prefer to lie back in their “safety net” living the good life then have to go to work so we could afford to have a transportation system in the future.
@CG; I wont post anymore on this thread after this, but I was right about it getting a lot of posts. Have I made you angry? You sound like you need a hug and I’m not being facetious. There is a lot of pent up anger there about the “system” AND I FEEL YOUR PAIN, trust me. I am also not trying to be condescending, just factual. My point about the fish hatcheries was not that the fish are different but that they have to be there to replace what the dams (of any kind) destroy. While I do not live in the NW as you apparently do, I do know good salmon. While I cannot taste the diff between net and line caught like some gourmet I can definitely pick out farm raised salmon, Pacific or Atlantic, from wild caught and I have to say it is not nearly as good as wild caught IMHO.
On nuclear, I hope it doesn’t take starving in the dark for nuclear to come to fruition. It is the only real hope of electrifying all the things that need to turn to electricity. The technology and the logistics of running it can be very safe and in the vein of carbon pollution it is not nearly as hazardous to the environment if done correctly. And you are right, the pro-greenies, anti-business and big gubment forces are in charge right now, and hope they starve in the dark first. As far as fusion, you may be right that it is a pipe dream, but we need to find that out. When I said put our resources into that I meant the kind of support that the government (as much as I hate to say it)and businesses gives to institutions for research, which is actually one of the most efficient uses of government money getting something done. Government does shitty research but the universities don’t, they are interested in scientific achievements. Of course what the gubment does with it after that will be the question. And you are quite right, they would run the Sahara out of sand in about 2 weeks.
Lead batts are still the way to go in EVs, even if they are heavy. The technical probs in the new EVs is the batt technology and just doesn’t seem to be worth the extra cost, both in dollars and to the environment, as you pointed out.
If you don’t live in Iceland geothermal is not cost effective.
Electrifying the railroad…if you don’t like the government meddling in business and you don’t want the government spending billions or trillions of tax dollars on private business, you would not want them to get involved in the electrification of the railroad system, as I would not. There are over 140,000 miles of commercial railway, not counting commuter rail. At $1000 a foot, and that is a conservative estimate from some trans engineer friends, it would take over a trillion dollars to achieve this feat…only if there were no cost overruns and there is no way the private sector could fund this…you are talking about 6% of the US annual GDP dedicated to electrifying the railroads. This does not sound cost effective to me.
You are sooo right about the entitlement issues and the less than astute international posture that we take in trying to cultivate “friends” in the world. I would take a more imperialistic approach by leaving them alone and if they f**k with us we just kill them. Simple, to the point and others will not emulate them after we hand their heads to them. Simple, as I said.
Ah, now the dams and hydroelectric power. According to http://www.ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/wuhy/html hydroelectric power currently accounts for only 7% of U.S. power generation. If you check the info at this site http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_energy.html you will find the statement that hydro cannot produce most of the power in the US and looking at the map, most of the GOOD HYDROELECTRIC SITES ARE TAKEN. The many sites left that have hydro potential are small potatoes. There’s no room for anymore Grand Coulees or Hoover dams. Even if you could triple the power output of hydroelectric, it would only be 21% and that would be steadily declining as usage goes up and hydro stays static.
In conclusion, I basically agree with most of your premises we just have problems with semantics a lot. However, hydro is not viable, and will never be on a large enough scale to make any difference. Nuclear is the only way, regardless of politics (easy to say LOL) to make a difference to significantly reduce dependance on hydrocarbons either foreign or domestic. The quest for fusion is a human race imperative, to either prove it can’t be done and waste no more resources on it or to prove we can do it and take the planet to the next level of existence.
This horse is now nothing but a mere stain on the pavement. It has been beaten into oblivion and ceases to exist on this side of the veil. CONSUMMATUM EST. Enjoy. See you on other topics!
The cost to electrify our railroads is closer to $10 a foot then it is to $1000 a foot.
You failed to clearify your position on salmon. The best tasting salmon available is the copper river salmon and it is available fresh for about a month each year. So if Copper River salmon is the best does it make other wild salmon unacceptable and therefore you wouldn’t eat it? probably not, in fact since you made no reference to it I will assume you have never tried it. The same logic applies to farm raised salmon vs wild salmon. Lets say you are correct that wild salmon tastes better does that mean the farm raised salmon is unacceptable? It is still better then pollack which is what you will get in most restuarants if you order fish and chips. And no doubt pollack is better then whatever it is in those packages of frozen fried fish in the supermarket. So in my opinion to disparage farm raised salmon is a kind of elitism.
I actually have quite a bit of experience when it comes to small hydro power and by small I mean in the range of 25 MW or so. They are incredibly easy to build and can be incredibly cheap. The generators are old school design and are cheap, easy to maintain and last forever. Once you build one of these small plants they need very little maintenance. They require very little head, although more head is better (no double entendre!). In my state alone there are probably 10,000 potential sites for a small plant like this. In a typical mountain stream with good flow you could place these a few hundred yards downstream from each other. The only limitation would be environmental resistence. The potential is there, We may not choose to exploit it but it is there in far greater volume then you describe.
OKAY….First, learn English, more specifically the difference between than and then! If I didn’t clearify (sic) (look it up; also look up “clarify”) my point on salmon,my bad, but NOT TO NITPICK mind you, the point was wild sallmon, regardless of what #$%#$%^ river it comes out of, tastes significantly better than (then???) farmed salmon, PERIOD. If Copper River salmon is the best, then so be it, HOWEVER, there are a number of Alaskan purveyors of wild caught salmon, all of them very reputable, that would disagree with you, and everyone can’t be right. Copper River, False Pass, Bristol Bay, Kodiak, Sitka etc. are all top quality salmon and everyone has their own favorite. Also I have had Copper River salmon and it was quite good. But the best I, ME, I, have ever had personally, was from Oregon (36 years ago) and it was line caught and home smoked with apple wood. And yes, I will pass on farmed salmon and pick something else, my choice and right for me! Farmed salmon also have other quality issues but I dare not mention them or there will be another snot-string of replies about that.
NEXT; You may have some sort of experience with power generation, but you are mistaken about small being “25 MW or so”. 25 megawatts will run a town of 15-20K people, that is certainly not something you can make cheap and easy. It would also require state and possibly Federal approval to install. I was the electrical Superintendent in my unit and when I deployed on one tour I was responsible for running an entire base camp with over five thousand people. We used 6 ganged 850KW Caterpillar (5.1MW nominal) generators to do this, each one the size of semi-trailer. Now maybe you meant 25KW (kilowatts) but that is such a simple mistake (coupled with $10 a foot) I would question your veracity, here. EVEN SO, if you did put in a 25KW hydro generator it would only power 3 modest homes (833KWH/month) and even if you had 10,000 potential sites for it, that would only take care of 30,000 homes, tops! And if Alaska is your home state then you are about 170,000 HOMES short, according to census data. Hydroelectric power IS NOT VIABLE for producing all but a modest amount of our national power. I grant you it is cheaper and in certain LOCAL circumstances a serious choice. I gave you researched references that leave no question about this. Either you didn’t read them, you don’t understand/believe them or you don’t care about the obvious facts and it is just your opinion that matters.
NEXT; On the railroad electrification, we are both wrong. The cost to do this is $500,000-2.3million/PER MILE!!!!!!!! Here are the references;
http://www.sonic.net/~mly/caltran-electrification-qa.html and
http://www.ergosphere.blogspot.com/2011/02/rail-electrification-costs-from-alan.html
READ THEM, also Google “electrification of rail cost per mile”. Even if these costs are off by a factor of 10x, it is still $100K-200K/mile. Oh, and those costs don’t include the building of the catenary infrastructure or “third rails”. $10 per foot demonstrates that you don’t have any fundamental understanding of the logistics involved. You can’t run just general electrical mains power for your home for $10 a foot. It cost me $30 a foot to run power to my shop, doing all the work myself. I have no idea where you came by that price but drugs and wishful thinking would have to be involved, because it has no basis in fact, unless Unicorns build it. Now in all fairness, I was wrong too, but I did ask an electrical transformer engineer friend, who doesn’t work on trains, and he gave me a swag and I used it, lazy. BUT, the point is, that it would take TRILLIONS of dollars to build/re-build the infrastructure to electrify all the rail in our country, PERIOD.
As an aside, I don’t mind being factually wrong and then being told that I’m wrong or that I made a “typo from hell” kind of error. I will fess up to it with no problems. What I don’t like is being nitpicked by someone that either doesn’t read what I wrote, carefully (and I usually do try to re-explain it again for clarity, as I have done several times with you), doesn’t use the references when I provide them, or just wants to be contrarian for the sake of being contrary (that is, right). I strive to use facts and fact based discourse, that is not based on opinion. When things are based on opinion, I like green but you don’t, then we’ll have to disagree in a gentlemanly (gentlewomanly) manner. I also try to not be shrill to others as it often means they will be shrill back and I can get all of that that I want for free, right here (are you blogging again?). Most people will simply say that they like wild caught salmon, too, and let it go. Most people won’t claim to know something that their discourse obviously shows that they don’t know. I have tried to “have discourse in the spirit of vigorous debate” with give and take and be polite, but you have pegged the BS meter several times, now. Now maybe it was all a misunderstanding but I will no longer comment directly on your future posts and I would respectfully ask that you respond in kind. Good survival. Enjoy.
Here is the problem with your first comment:
“OKAY….First, learn English, it’s Salmon not “Sallmon”. Oh gee, a typo you say. Doesn’t matter because now I’m looking for anything I can criticize you on.”
Do you suppose you were being childish? If this is a spelling contest then I am going to have to turn on the light because I am sitting in the dark typing on my lap. I would never have thought it was an intelligent move to criticize YOUR misspelling of Salmon but If that’s what you need to do to feel superior then go for it.
A 25 MW power plant is small, we did have a 10 MW power plant as well and that would be the low range for the kind of power generation I am talking about. Boulder dam is large at 2080 MW. As for state and federal approval; Of course!!! We are talking commercial hydro power not a backyard mini-hydro. I worked for a small utility that owned a half dozen small power plants in this range.
It is incorrect that “Hydroelectric power IS NOT VIABLE for producing all but a modest amount of our national power,” IF your point is that as long as we are able to generate all the power we need from other sources then your statement is essentially true. If however you remember this discussion began talking about solutions to our inevitable need for greater power at the same time we are facing a peak oil problem that changes everything. My position on this is when enough people are sitting in the dark cold and hungry they will choose to make use of all resources that are available. Hydro power is grossly under developed in this country. If we choose to bypass red tape and tap all available small hydro sites we could supply most of our electric energy from hydro.
The cost to electrify a small rail line in and around a major Eastern city is not typical of the cost to electrify the majority of the rail line in this country. Unfortunately most projects like this are not designed to be efficient or cost effective they are designed by big government to benefit a variety of special interest groups. Under those circumstances it may well cost $100K a mile. But I never suggested we do it today with oil flowing freely and no real energy crisis. But if we go back to my example of a post cheap energy world with 25% unemployment and leadership more intent on solving problems then greasing palms then I believe the cost will be well under $100K a mile.
Okay you two… I ask that you respect the blog and quit your pissing contest. It was amusing up to a point… Do either of you think that you’re going to change the established beliefs of someone else in a comment string on a blog site? Really? Contributing ideas and opinions are helpful and interesting to other readers, but this particular thread has gone a bit overboard and appears to have become personal… Thanks.
I have thought and thought about the fact that there are no real good options to this problem that we all are so close to midnight in so many realms. The main issue is of course that there is only so much fossil fuel that will be used up one day, but long before it is extinguished the real problems will start. I have read about Hubbert in regards to peak oil in which he said that the peak would have been reached about 1999-2002. From what I have seen it was probably reached about 2006-2007. It really doesn’t matter because it will be reached someday anyway if it has not already happened.
I was thinking about all sorts of alternative sources of energy and the one issue came up with me, it has to be renewable. Forget that with fossil fuel. Nuclear is only achieved if they can recreate the fuel they are using. Bio waste is fine but does not produce that much energy. Grown fuel is something that works wonders, but requires lots of land and water and food for the plants, and reliable climate. Sugar I heard is a really good source of energy, better than grains, corn, but limited to where yopu can grow it. Wind seems like a good option to where it blows all the time but the problem is the copper for power lines that would go over thousands of miles. Hydro is an option, and to guard against damage to the environment I don’t see what would be wrong with tidal power, but that is limited.
What you are trying to make work here is something that will turn a turbine and generate electricity. Geothermal is something that will not run out and I don’t understand why they cannot find material that is corrosive resistant to utilize this energy source. The mineral build-up is just something that would require more manpower to clean and deal with. I watched a show on how everything practically is run by geothermal in Iceland and I don’t see why they could not handle this in other parts of the world. It would be costly of course to drill deep vents to get at the energy below us in many spots, but it would be better than no energy at all.
I even started to think about trying to harness the magnetic field of the planet, and that I thought was at least a century away. The whole point is that people right now are not really putting the resources and brain power into finding energy resources that we can continue to use because a true shortage and the true fear has not set in YET. Just like all the wonderful inventions of the turn of the century and during the World Wars, unless there is an immediate need people become relaxed and complaceant. There is energy to be tapped into, the planet itself and the moon rotate and move, the advanced technology is just not there to get it. Not enough importance is going to hard core research in getting energy that requires tremendous money and enormous thought.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions. This is what this article really hits upon, that people don’t see that there is a need, UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE. The energy issue should have been well financed since 1970 when peak domestic oil was reached in the United States. It is going to be an issue of survival, and money and manpower is going to be second fiddle to the harsh hell when the clock strikes midnight, then everyone is just going to have to wish they had cared when they had the chance.
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. The problem is that the government has decided which “alternatives” get subsidies and regulations favoring them and this has effectively pushed out any alternatives not anointed by Washington. As for financing this problem THAT is the problem. The money, literally billions and billions flowing out of Washington without controls or restraint has created an enviornment where the big scammers have pushed out the thinkers. Letting the government make this massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the robber barons was a mistake and it doomed our energy future.
@ SweetPea. Boy oh boy is that the truth, the sad pitiful truth. A king size unhappy face for this and all of us when the chickens come to roost.