[PLUG-TALK] The Keith Effect - Lightbulb factories closing

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Rich Shepard wrote:
> There are hidden energy costs in everything. In the early 1970s there 
> was a guest speaker at the U. of Illinois talking about the energy 
> savings of coal gasification. They were running a pilot project at GE in 
> New York and he was enthused about the results. Then someone in the 
> audience asked how much energy it took to gasify the coal, and what the 
> _net_ energy was of the process. No answer.

Oh, yeah.  That shit is rampant.

You have people now pushing corn-produced ethanol as though it doesn't 
take way more oil to grow and transport corn in a modern agribusiness than 
it would take to fuel the vehicles getting the ethanol.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  You may speak of something as 
"fuelling" a process, but there is no such thing as fuel.  Everything's a 
battery.  You just have to figure out how it's charged and what energy is 
lost in that process (and what processes are disrupted by diverting the 
energy to battery-charging).

I mean, hydrogen and ethanol?  Come on!  They're both huge sinks.  No net 
gain whatsoever.

And going back to transportation costs, it includes emissions of not only 
the vehicles doing the transporting, but the systems used to maintain the 
routes for the vehicles, etc.  The chain goes on and on.  Right now, all 
of those costs of transportation are considered externalities in 
business... I think we're not very far from the business world being 
forced to accept the laws of thermodynamics and realizing there's no such 
thing as "external".

J.