Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

trust your instincts

< £ Salon Bloggers & >

	May 19, 2003

WHAT'S NEXT: ALTERNATIVES TO GROUPWARE, PLURALITY VOTING AND RIGHT-WING MEDIA Darwin Magazine talks about Social Software : Social software is likely to come to mean the opposite of what groupware and other project- or organization-oriented collaboration tools were intended to be. Social software is based on supporting the desire of individuals to affiliate, their desire to be pulled into groups to achieve their personal goals. Contrast that with the groupware approach to things where people are placed into groups defined organizationally or functionally. Science News talks about alternatives to current unsatisfactory systems of choosing elected representatives : Nearly all political elections in the United States are plurality votes, in which each voter selects a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Yet voting theorists argue that plurality voting is one of the worst of all possible choices. "It's a terrible system," says Alexander Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and director of research for the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "Almost anything looks good compared to it." At Common Dreams, Thom Hartmann has a curious theory that as soon as the Bush regime loosens regulations on media ownership (next month), major media organizations will stop pandering to the neo-cons and introduce a flurry of new all-liberal media : This is why Powell's announcement - once the vote is final and irrevocable on June 2 - will begin the transformation of the landscape of talk radio in America. Freed from the need to curry favor with the party in power, the multi-billion-dollar media machines will get back to the profitable core of their business: serving programming that meets the needs and desires of a wide range of listeners while delivering advertising to consumers. Get ready for a flood of all-day liberal/progressive talk radio 7:27:34 PM  trackback []  comment []

THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY: POWER TO THE PEOPLE Finally I understand how the energy system of the future, powered by hydrogen, will work. It took three readings of Jeremy Rifkin's Hydrogen Economy and some home-made charts to figure it out. To my more scientifically savvy colleagues, I get it now. For others, here's a primer to get you up to speed. This chart shows where we are today. Boxes represent forms of stored energy, and arrows conversions of energy. The red boxes and arrows represent sources and processes (combustion, refining, fusion, dams) that are environmentally harmful; the rest are benign. The current state is a centralized distribution system: We are all tied to 'the grid'. Even so-called 'hybrid' vehicles rely on a gasoline-powered process called reforming to produce the hydrogen that powers the fuel cells, which convert energy back to electricity, supplementing that produced by internal combustion and hence improving gas mileage. All in all it's not a pretty picture. By contrast, this second chart shows where we need to be in twenty years. The first, and obvious, difference is the sources of energy: solar, wind, steam and (conditionally) biomass will produce much of the energy needed in the future, replacing environmentally harmful sources. Secondly, the entire process by which our cars are powered will be different. We will buy compressed hydrogen the way we now buy gasoline, and the car we put it in will have no engine, no pedals, clutch or gearshift, make no noise and produce no harmful exhaust. Third, and probably most contentious, the centralized distribution system or 'grid' we now use will be replaced by a decentralized system. The compressed hydrogen will be actually produced at the local service station, not merely trucked and stored there. And the unused electricity in our car's fuel cells will supply much of the electrical need for our homes, and any excess will be available to be sold back to the local electrical utility. So where today central utilities and refineries generate almost all of the energy we consume, in the future most of the energy will be generated by the fuel cells in our cars and by the hydrogen production plants at the local service station. At first blush, this seems too good to be true . There are two significant challenges. The first is cost. Fossil-fuel energy costs are about 1.5 cents/kwh, whereas the costs of other sources are two to ten times higher. But even when other sources become cheaper with technological advances, and fossil fuels get more expensive with scarcity, the real cost is the needed investment in new infrastructure. which Rifkin estimates at $100 billion (about the cost of a small pre-emptive war). Although these costs do get recouped quickly as they are amortized against the cost per kwh of clean energy, the only parties currently capable of financing such an amount are governments (which in today's privatization climate are disinclined to invest in more than research towards a hydrogen economy) and today's energy companies. If today's energy companies foot the bill, they will probably be disinclined to obsolesce their existing hydrocarbon, hydroelectric and nuclear facilities sooner than absolutely necessary. In fact, today's energy companies hope to generate most of the next generation's compressed hydrogen by burning fossil fuels in existing plants, which undermines the economics of developing new clean energy sources and the environmental benefits of doing so. And rather than the decentralized model shown above, these companies may well want to continue to control production and supply centrally, rather than accommodating co-generation from car-owners' fuel cells and devolving control to a locally-owned and managed electricity "commons". So there are both political and economic challenges to making the hydrogen economy a reality. Of course, the return on investment of hydrogen may prove attractive to new entrants, companies with sizeable cash resources who have nothing tied up in, and hence no compunction not to obsolesce, 'old' energy technology and infrastructure. Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates, are you listening? The auto companies are also interested in investing in hydrogen, if they are not tapped out by the cost of developing hydrogen vehicles. The economics of co-generation, regeneration and devolution are so compelling that the future state is probably inevitable. The excess energy generation capacity of hydrogen vehicles is so great that if all cars were converted to hydrogen, four times the current capacity of hydrocarbon burning, nuclear and hydroelectric plants combined would become available. Local generation of clean energy would be an enormous economic boon to communities and countries that are today energy-poor - it could make them immediately energy self-sufficient.  And no new technological breakthroughs are needed to make this a reality. And just imagine a world with no traffic pollution and no traffic noise. So whether it's fifteen years or fifty, the hydrogen economy is coming. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for a hybrid, and you can get information on how to buy one of them here . 4:10:01 AM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 19/02/2004; 2:44:28 PM.