{"id":646,"date":"2011-11-13T19:55:56","date_gmt":"2011-11-13T23:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=646"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:47:27","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:47:27","slug":"the-problem-with-plentiful-solar-energy-or-any-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/the-problem-with-plentiful-solar-energy-or-any-other\/","title":{"rendered":"The problem with plentiful solar energy.. or any other"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past 50+ years there have been regular announcements of limitless affordable energy soon becoming available, such as Paul Krugman’s recent article “Here comes Solar”<\/a><\/span>, with the consequences of that happening never getting discussed. \u00a0 The following is as posted to the more cautions Washington Post article<\/a><\/span> yesterday 11\/12\/11.<\/p>\n

One of the most overlooked drawbacks of creating affordable and plentiful solar energy, or ANY other form of energy, is what we\u2019d do with it, the consequences of mankind having access to continually doubling amounts of energy. \u00a0 What if the improbable “cheap energy” solution were actually discovered?<\/p>\n

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Would cheap energy eliminate or worsen our other impact problems?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Energy is far from our only constraint on economic growth. \u00a0\u00a0Energy is actually what let us do the destruction of our environment as we have already done, none of which yet result from the CO2 and other GHG\u2019s.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Because we are already at the destructive threshold of many other environmental impact pressures we could expect growing energy use to cause even faster growing impact repercussions than we\u2019ve experienced.\u00a0\u00a0 They will not come with a neat technological fixes, either.<\/p>\n

The core unrecognized problem is that growth is a construction process.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a mechanism for using the profits of a system to build a bigger and bigger system.\u00a0\u00a0 That involves our using our (limited imagination) to take ever expanding control of our environment to do ever more things to our environment.<\/p>\n

As growth begins as a process of constructing a new system its first steps make every step easier and then at it exhausts those hidden potentials in its environment it does the reverse. \u00a0 As a growing system starts confronting more and more problems with expanding its use of its environment, each problem solved causes growing waves of new unsolved problems.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s why we feel \u201cthis is snowballing\u201d, because having our solutions multiply our problems is physically what\u2019s happening to us.<\/p>\n

The basic systems physics of it is that our self-construction process is like every other in nature in many ways.\u00a0 It began with using profits to build the process, causing an explosion of new uses for resources that became ever cheaper and more plentiful, as we used them up ever faster. \u00a0That\u2019s what reverses as a signal of the system beginning to meet its growth limits, replacements for things you use up becoming ever more costly rather than cheaper.<\/p>\n

To keep the system profitable when that happens one needs to reverse the investment principle being used.\u00a0 Keynes was actually the first to recognize that principle, discussed in his parable of “the widows cup [or ‘cruse’]” and in Chapter 16 of The General Theory.<\/p>\n

After a period of growth becoming ever easier, following the principle of using profits to expand the system for making a profit, complications with growth begin to multiply toward making the system as a whole unprofitable.\u00a0\u00a0 It then drives itself bankrupt unless the investment principle reverses, and profits are earned for spending on other values instead.\u00a0\u00a0 Those are elemental certainties for environmental systems with accountable parts, like energy and money, and will not change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past 50+ years there have been regular announcements of limitless affordable energy soon becoming available, such as Paul Krugman’s recent article “Here comes Solar”, with the consequences of that happening never getting discussed. \u00a0 The following is as posted to the more cautions Washington Post article yesterday 11\/12\/11. One of the most overlooked … Continue reading The problem with plentiful solar energy.. or any other<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mail","category-econn","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2481,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646\/revisions\/2481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}