Contemplations on the Tree of Woe

Nov 8

Just three days ago, on November 5th, 2024, Donald J. Trump was elected once more to the office of President of the United States, securing a decisive 312 electoral votes and, for the first time in his political career, the popular vote. It was the greatest comeback in the history of American politics.

I am all in.

Then he followed up with the bad news: We are scheduled to run out of crucial resources in less than a century.

The Aenean Challenge

Nov 16

Last week, in an uncharacteristic moment of optimism inspired by the red wave that swept across America, I announced the dawn of a new civilization - one based on what I call the Aenean soul, the successor to the Faustian soul that has animated the West from the Renaissance until now.

Getting off this world before we run out resources is going to be a challenge, maybe impossible. Our host has invited Ahnaf ibn Quais and yours truly to debate the proposition: Can we become a spacefaring civilization before we run out of resources here on Earth? Ahnaf has provided a worthy response in the negative:

Proem For All Post-Dark Age Civilizations

Ahnaf Ibn Qais

Nov 22

Proem For All Post-Dark Age Civilizations

Two weeks ago, I published the essay The Dawn of a New Civilization which proclaimed the birth of an Aenean man standing in the liminal space between doom and destiny. The piece inspired a number of readers with its heroic spirit. It also inspired a number of stern responses

Good stuff, and the videos are worth watching as well.

This is going to be fun! I originally got the political bug through reading science fiction and playing on my high school debate team. Energy policy was the national debate resolution my sophomore year. I spent many an hour in the local community college library reading everything possible on the subject. The following years I spent many an hour doing alternative energy experiments on the family farm. In the process I learned that:

Nuclear fusion will be "just around the corner" for a long, long, time.
The energy shortages of the 1970s were purely a product of price controls.
Depleted oil fields retained 70-80% of the oil that was there upon discovery. (Crude oil flows slowly once the pressure is relieved.)
The United States has tremendous reserves of coal and oil shale. If the price of oil stays above $100/barrel (Carter Era dollars), then we can run our cars for centuries.
Some people ran their cars on charcoal during World War II. Smoldering charcoal in a reduced oxygen environment with a bit of steam injection results in a flammable mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These can be used to fuel an internal combustion engine. (I later learned that this was the fuel for the first internal combustion engines. Carburetors to vaporize liquid fuels came later.)
Turning these gases into liquid fuels using Fischer-Tropsch synthesis requires better equipment than can be found at the local hardware store and junkyard, and more knowledge that high school chemistry and reading a bunch of articles in Science magazine.
There are a lot of bogus free energy patents out there.
Ditto for antigravity propulsion devices.
Centralized energy leads to centralized societies.
Giant tax free foundations are dangerous.
Harvard Business School can make some really bad policy prescriptions.

I ordered a book of free energy patents and got a couple of conspiracy books as a surprise bonus. My first introduction to populist thinking.

Most of these lessons have held up surprisingly well over the years. Fusion is still just around the corner. The United States is now beginning to tap shale oil thanks to a combination of higher prices and improved technology (fracking). We still don't have any quasi-magical Tesla technology or other free energy devices in production. Tax free foundations are still sponsoring an elitist socialist agenda which resemble the dark predictions of None Dare Call it Conspiracy, only gayer. And Harvard professors managed to do to post Soviet Russia what they tried to do with our energy economy. Sending Harvard economists instead of Chicago economists to Russia was a war crime. The Russians have reason to be angry.

Some things have changed:

We now have liquid nitrogen temperature superconductors. Fusion may well be around the corner for real.
LED lighting has made lighting a negligible part of our energy budget.
The price of solar panels has plummeted.
China has gone from bicycles and hand operated rice paddies to industrial superpower. India is following suit. Even sub Saharan Africa is modernizing.

That last bullet is a big one. When the Tree of Woe wrote that we had just 47 years of oil reserves I did a double take. I've seen similar dire results from angst-worshipping fearmongers many times over the years. Peak Oil was quite a fad -- just before fracking turned the United States into an energy superpower. Was The Tree suckered in by such thinking? Or is it real this time? I did some research, and yes, it's looking rather grim. Back when I was seriously on top of this subject, the United States was consuming 1/4 of the world's fossil fuel production. This is no longer the case! The clock is ticking faster.

The good news is that fighting global warming is nearly identical to preparing for the end of fossil fuels. So all of y'all who have been in denial need to give Al Gore a big apology.

Even if global warming is a century+ old hoax promulgated by gay space aliens, the resulting panic has the world working to replace fossil fuels before they run out. Unfortunately, the Conformunist Left has jumped on the issue first, and so the United States oscillates between denial and dumb solutions. Since the beginning of this year I have been imploring my readers to go Machiavellian and steal the global warming issue from the Left and use it as an excuse for Reactionary Goodness:

The Democrats have gone Brown. The deep environmentalists who shop at the organic food coops are Trumpier than Trump. We can be Greener than the Green party while pushing a mix of law and order, tari…

A Green Old Deal

10 months ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Fabius Minarchus

And for ye unmarried men in the audience, greening up is the way to bridge the political gender gap.

OK, over nine of the past ten postings I have handed you the keys to putting the Left Coast back into play. I have given you the keys to reestablishing a conservative, nay outright reactionary, footh…

Act Now and Get a Wife!

8 months ago · 22 likes · 16 comments · Fabius Minarchus

So, even though I have been caught off guard on how fast we are running out of fossil fuels, I've been doing relevant contemplations, since I have been looking into the global warming issue, and I'm not super keen on injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool things down.

There is one difference between peak fossil fuels and global warming: the timeline. Those who are freaking out over global warming -- including Ahnaf's main source, Dr. Simon P. Michaux -- are trying to replace fossil fuels long before they run out. This strengthens the call for a lifestyle downgrade. (On the other hand, staying in denial can result in a future lifestyle downgrade.)

Proven vs. Actual Reserves

Before getting into solutions, let's clarify the problem a bit. "Proven reserves" do not measure how much energy we have left. The term "proven reserves" has legal meaning; it is meant to keep energy and mining companies from inflating their stock values. Proven reserves are those reserves that have been adequately explored and are economically extractible given the current price and technology.

In other words, a simple price change can change the proven reserves figure. Technology can also be game changing. Back in the late 70s the difference between known oil deposits and proven reserves was huge. Extracting oil from shale and tar sands was still in the experimental stage. Today, these sources are being tapped, though at times the profitability dips due to OPEC dumping extra product on the market in order to fend off competition.

To get a longer term view of what is available, we need to factor in contingent resources and prospective resources. According to Wikipedia, contingent resources are resources which have been discovered, but conditions need to change in order to exploit them. Prospective resources are an estimate of what is still out there to be discovered. Here's a deep dive on the differences by Ryder Scott, a company that certifies petroleum reserves.

Trying to find the current gap between proven reserves and what could be tapped if the price goes up has proven to be a challenge. This article in The American Oil and Gas Reporter claims that the United States has the most recoverable oil reserves in the long run, at 264 billion barrels, with the lowball proven reserves being 29 billion barrels. Russia is close behind with 256 billion barrels followed by Canada with 167 billion barrels. Unfortunately, the terminology differs from the classifications given in the Wikipedia article.

But here is the grim part: this same article puts the lowball proven reserves for the world at a mere 381 billion barrels, and the most likely estimate for eventual recovery from existing fields at 1.152 trillion barrels -- which is less than the 1.57 trillion barrels in the Worldometer value cited by the Tree. And the best case value for the world is 2.092 trillion barrels. That's about 70 years worth at current production. Yikes!

Score one for Team Doom. The odds of having self-sustaining space colonies within 70 years is rather slim.

The Aenean Journey is Long

The frontier is pretty much closed – unless you want to colonize the frozen far north or the driest deserts. Humanity has multiplied and subdued the Earth. Reckless growth threatens the world we live…

20 days ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Fabius Minarchus

And as Ahnaf pointed out, the materials needed for the planned alternative energy economy are in short supply, and then there is that Demographic Transition thingy and the fact that most of the world's governments are deep in dept.

We have challenges. I have solutions.

The MAGA Strategy

The world may be running out of energy, but the United States is not. We continue to burn foreign oil because it is cheap, not because we have to. If we close our gates and let the rest of the world go its own way, we can maintain our current GDP, and that's good enough to support a space program. When the SpaceX Starship is fully shaken down, we're talking dirt cheap space program compared to the NASA of yore. A reusable Saturn V replacement is a really big deal.

Once you are in orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System -- if you are doing leisurely Hohmann transfer orbits.

So, just how much of an economy do we need to support Elon's space program? According to Wikipedia, the Starship booster uses 6 million pounds of liquid oxygen and 1.5 million pounds of liquid methane. The Starship proper has a propellant capacity of 2.6 million pounds, which comes out to 0.52 million pounds of methane using the same ratio. So call it 2 million pounds of methane total. Google's AI says it takes 10-15% of the energy of the methane to liquefy it. I'll presume that it takes similar energy to liquefy the oxygen. So we are looking at the energy of 1-1.5 million pounds of methane to do the liquefaction. Let's be conservative and say that each Starship launch uses the equivalent of 4 million pounds of methane.

Methane at 20 degrees C has a density of 0.0417 pounds per square foot. So a pound of methane at 20 degrees C is about 20 cubic feet. So a Starship launch uses about 80 million cubic feet of natural gas. Ten launches per day comes up to a bit under 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The United States currently consumes 32.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per year. So for less than 1% of our current natural gas consumption, the United States could launch of equivalent of ten Apollo moon shots per day. Energy for the propellant is not the bottleneck!

For less than 1% of our current natural gas consumption, the United
States could launch of equivalent of ten Apollo moon shots per day.

The real bottleneck is finding enough money to keep SpaceX profitable. Government money can fund some of the R&D for developing landers, Earth-Moon shuttles, etc. There are military applications of outer space, and a moonbase on the far side of the moon would be a great place to put radio telescopes. Craters are a great starting point for making truly giant parabolic dishes. But the government does not like it when contractors make a high profit margin. Better to burn man-hours doing needless paperwork.

Sending people to Mars is not going to be profitable this century. Going to Mars is going to be like going to Antarctica, only less pleasant. SpaceX will be sending expeditions to Mars because that's what Elon Musk wants to do, not because it's going to be profitable in the foreseeable future.

Space mining, on the other hand, might well be profitable in the foreseeable future. It's basic physics. When a planet is molten, heavy elements sink to the core. A small planet, or a moon, is going to cool more quickly than a big planet, since the surface area to volume ratio goes down as 1 over the radius. Moreover, higher gravity means faster separation. Chemists use centrifuges for this reason. Logic thus indicates that we should find more heavy elements on the Moon than on the surface of Earth.

And on the off chance that the Moon is truly made of lighter stuff overall, such as if the Moon was originally part of the surface of Earth, there is still the fact that the Moon was bombarded by a lot of meteorites, and we can see the big strikes from Earth. They are called craters. Washington University in St. Louis reports that typical iron meteorites have 5-30% nickel and 0.2-2% cobalt. Nickel and cobalt are handy for rechargeable batteries. Elon Musk makes money selling rechargeable cars...

And then there is the asteroid belt. It may be farther away than the Moon or even Mars, but the gravitational wells are next to nonexistent, and if the belt is a broken up planet, then belt mining is like sending mind shafts down to the core of a planet.

With cheap heavy launch to Earth orbit capability, SpaceX could mass produce exploratory probes to the asteroids. Sell the data to some big Wall St. firms if nothing else.

MAGA will be in power starting in January, but will it stay in power long enough to make spacefaring self-sustaining? I won't count on it. If the U.S. continues to prosper while the rest of the world eats the bugs or worse, liberals will cry. And Lavender RINOs will cry with them in order to import cheap servants. So let's save the world while we are at it.

The Solar Option

Another big change from my high school research days is the huge drop in the price of solar panels. A quick search on Alibaba yields monocrystaline solar panels priced at fifteen cents per watt of capacity. (12 cents in bulk.) The panels are rated at 22.84%! If memory serves, the top of the line solar panels used in space back in the 70s were only 14% efficient. Progress has been made.

So, how much solar capacity would we need to replace fossil fuels? The Tree of Woe says we use 600 quadrillion BTU/year, 81.5% is from fossil fuels. A BTU is a bit over 1000 Joules, so we are looking at roughly 500 million terajoules/year. (I did some rounding up.) This number might be too low. The World Counts expects global energy consumption to reach 740 terajoules/year by 2040. In the big study cited by Ahnaf [page 4] they state:

The estimated sum total of extra annual capacity of non-fossil fuel power generation to phase out fossil fuels completely, and maintain the existing industrial ecosystem, at a global scale is 48 939.8 TWh.

A Watt-hour is 3600 Joules, so 50,000 times 3600 = 180 million terajoules. Dr. Michaux's number is lower than the other numbers because he is using electrical energy vs. heat energy. Converting electrical energy into useful work is much more efficient than converting heat energy into useful work -- if you have the motors and batteries to use solar energy as electricity. That's a big if. Solar electricity is not clean electricity, as B.F. Randall details on his substack. It varies across the day. It varies by time of year. It varies with weather. It varies with how much dirt is on the panels -- or snow if your are silly enough to deploy solar panels far north.

To use solar efficiently as electricity requires immense batteries or giant hydro storage facilities. To use it directly for transportation entail yet more batteries, batteries which need to be compact. And it requires lot's of high power density electric motors. With present technology we are looking at mass quantities of copper, lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements. We might not have enough. On this basis, Ahnaf is possibly right about the need to deindustrialize.

But this unfrozen caveman physicist foresees a more primitive way to use solar energy, a way that is so primitive that even George W. Bush could understand it: just convert solar energy into hydrogen. Breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen is middle school science project technology -- albeit with significant energy losses. But Australian company Hysata has a capillary electrolysis cell which can split water with 98% efficiency. I presume one can burn hydrogen in a gas turbine with efficiencies similar to burning natural gas. So with hydrogen as our storage we can get near 100% efficiency into the electric grid when the sun is shining -- for panels close enough to human population -- and around 60% efficiency when using stored hydrogen.

But where do you store the hydrogen to get through the night -- or through winter? Hydrogen is a bulky fuel. We need billions of cubic feet of storage. That's a lot of tanks.

Think back. Where have you heard the phrase "billions of cubic feet?" You might have even heard "trillions of cubic feet." The United States alone consumes over 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas every year. The space that gas occupied is available for storing hydrogen. Duh! No exotic materials needed. The existing oil and gas companies get to apply their existing strengths to participate in green energy. The political winds are favorable. (And hydrogen can also be used to store electricity from windmills.)

If natural gas can be profitably piped from Russia into Germany, we can profitably pipe hydrogen from the American Southwest to New England. We probably cannot use it to replace natural gas for home use -- hydrogen is a bit trickier to deal with -- but for electrical generation and some industrial uses it should work.

Europe could get hydrogen gas piped in from solar plants in the Sahara Desert. China has the Gobi Desert.

The Transportation Problem

Thousand cubic foot gas tanks for the family sedan are impractical. And we need gas stations in places which aren't next to a depleted natural gas well.

Liquid hydrogen is more compact, but keeping it cold enough is a challenge. Active refrigeration or outgassing is required. Leaving the family car in the garage when the refrigerator gives out could make things go boom in the night. Not good.

You can compress hydrogen to get the volume down. You can go down further by having lithium in your tanks to form lithium hydride. You can also reduce the amount of hydrogen needed by using fuel cells instead of an internal combustion engine. But fuel cells need nickel and platinum. Between those and the lithium, we are back to using scarce elements. And since compressed hydrogen is dangerous to work with, we'd have to turn the United States into Oregon, where the average person is considered too stupid to operate a gas pump -- a managerialist's dream.

No, the safest way to compress hydrogen is to bond it to carbon -- to make hydrocarbons. One of the simpler ways to do this is to combine hydrogen and carbon dioxide under high pressure in the presence of a catalyst to make methanol. There's a book on the subject:

Methanol is a great automobile fuel. It is safer to handle than gasoline. It is less explosive and if you spill it on the ground bacteria digest it in short order. Methanol has a very high octane rating, so you can use a higher compression ratio, resulting in higher efficiencies. Methanol for internal compression engines is old technology. Indy cars burned methanol back when I was a child.

We are talking redneck compatible technology -- which makes managerialists sad. Not only that, methanol can be mixed with locally produced ethanol, which is very redneck friendly. CBS did a documentary series on the subject back in the day:

Exactly how much energy is used up converting the hydrogen into methanol is a number I cannot track down directly. The basic reaction is to take three moles of hydrogen and one mole of carbon dioxide to make a mole of methanol and a mole of water. This reaction is exothermic and the catalysts mentioned in The Methanol Economy are reasonably common elements. According to Wikipedia, three moles of hydrogen have a combustion energy of 858 kJ while a mole of methanol has 715 kJ. So we retain 83% of our energy. Not bad! However, the reaction has to take place at a high pressure. If we split our hydrogen from water at said high pressure, we don't expend much energy pressurizing the hydrogen. As for the carbon dioxide, if we start with dry ice, simply exposing to ambient temperatures in a closed container will produce high pressures.

Extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere involves work, but while we are in energy transition, we can use carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of coal and natural gas electrical generating stations. This extraction is already being done to sequester carbon dioxide. I'm suggesting we use that carbon dioxide to make motor fuels.

In the future, when the fossil fuels run low, we can still get carbon dioxide from burning garbage. According to The Methanol Economy p. 359, seawater has 140 times the CO2 concentration as the air, and this is easily extracted by acidifying the water using an electrochemical acidification cell. The US Navy looked into using this process to make jet fuel on the fly using the energy from nuclear generators.

My numbers for converting electricity to methanol may be a bit optimistic, but even if we lose half our energy, treating solar electricity as equivalent to fossil fuel heat energy seems conservative overall. Some of that solar energy can be used directly as grid energy -- where the solar panels are close enough to where people live. Where electrical costs are a really big deal, such as data centers, Bitcoin mining operations, and electrochemical refining of metals (such as aluminum and copper), industry will move to where the panels are and operate when the sun is shining.

And with evil gasoline replaced by a mix of solar methanol and bioethanol, we can go back to big ass American cars, with comfortable seats, trunks big enough for two "business associates", one finger steering, and style.

Just say no to hybrids, fifteen speed transmissions, variable valve timing, and dystopian spyware cars. Maybe even ditch the computers altogether and make carburetors great again!

What About Conservation and Efficiency?

The very notion of going back to big, comfortable, American cars is bound to horrify many an eco-puritan. "The inefficiency! It burns! It burns!" It runs afoul to two different human drives:

The Ascetic Drive, the drive to be virtuous through denial. It is the drive to become monks, anchorites, fakirs. It is the drive that motivates preachers, priests, and pharisees to add to the Laws of God.

The Aesthetic Drive. There is a beauty to efficiency, the kind of beauty appreciated by an engineer or a mathematician. I can relate to this.

And there are also rational reasons for some conservation and efficiency. We don't want to cover the entire planet with solar cells. And there is something to be said for stretching our fossil fuel economy. We can deploy alternative energy more slowly, working out the bugs. We could delay mass use of solar until the cells become even cheaper and more efficient. We could delay mass use of solar until somebody invents a better battery, one which uses abundant elements. And finally, efficiency and conservation make getting off the grid far more economical. I like getting people off the grid for political reasons; it keeps alive the pioneer spirit which made the United States free.

But we need to keep conservation in perspective. Most calls for conservation are environmental yellow pilling. We aren't going to save the planet by keeping our tires optimally inflated, adjusting our thermostats, using low flow shower heads, or eating beans. If you are a hardcore environmentalist, go ahead and do these things; taking the Yellow Pill is better than despair. Just don't demand that everyone do these mostly symbolic measures. (Some of these measures are also useful economically, and adjusting the thermostat towards what is going on outside is probably healthier than maintaining the same indoor temperature year around.)

There are a lot of dumb conservation mandates out there: over extended Daylight Savings Time, toilets that don't flush properly, dishwashers than run for two hours and leave a residue on the dishes, washing machines which don't adequately rinse the clothes, etc. Perhaps my biggest pet peeve is the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard. The full size family car is basically illegal -- so families buy hulking trucks and SUVs instead. This is hardly efficient!

And it is penny wise pound stupid to make vehicles overly complicated and expensive in order to squeeze out a few extra miles per gallon. The real way to burn less gasoline is to drive less. The telecommuter who drives a Lincoln Town Car burns less gasoline than the government worker who commutes from Fredericksburg, VA to Washington DC in a Prius.

People who do drive to work wouldn't have to commute so far if we had more core cities instead of expanding the existing city cores to the point of creating commuter hell. And there are good political reasons for doing this as well:

Rule 6: Break up the Blue Zones

When I read the deeper reaches of the far Right blogosphere, I come across writers who are ready to break up the United States: let the Blue states become part of Blue countries and let the Red state…

3 years ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Fabius Minarchus

Let us also remember what started suburban sprawl in the first place: heavy-handed liberal social engineering. It began with integration. It went up to eleven with forced bussing. And today, we have wokeness and Celebrate Racism Theory to destroy Martin Luther King's Dream where it was working. Throw in BLM riots to trash the downtown shopping districts, Soros prosecutors, and defunding the police and it becomes super easy for right wing extremists to be Greener than today's Demoncrats:

Opportunities Abound! The Democrats Have Gone Brown!

What happens when you let homeless people camp out in your city parks and sidewalks? What happens when you stand aside and let anarchists (the bad kind) occupy neighborhoods for months at a time? Wha…

a year ago · 30 likes · 11 comments · Fabius Minarchus

As someone who doesn't commute and lives in a big old house, my carbon fuel use is dominated by heating and cooling. Were I rich, I'd buy or start a heat pump company. Today's "efficient" heat pumps and air conditioners are noisy and not as efficient as they could be. For summer, a high SEER rating means a lower pressure ratio which gives better thermodynamic efficiency at the cost of needing to blow more air and use thinner tubing. This same lower pressure ratio means less warmth in the winter and more need to resort to gas or electric heat strips for backup. Not so efficient! And what's the deal with blowing cold air through the house in order to thaw out the outdoor coils? How about using a barrel of water in the basement as a heat sink? Duh!

With some extra valves and pistons, it is possible to make a variable pressure ratio heat pump, and you don't need a condensable refrigerant. Any gas will do. (Ditto for refrigerators and freezers.) Up the pressure ratio when it is very hot or cold outside. Lower the pressure ratio for maximum thermodynamic efficiency when it's merely cool or a bit too warm outside. Finally, for humid climates -- such as the southern coastal plains of the US -- have a dehumidifier mode which doesn't use the external coils at all. I often run the air conditioner when it's merely 75 degrees outside because the humidity is 80%. At reasonable humidity levels, 75 is perfectly comfortable if appropriately dressed.

For the frigid north, heat pumps don't buy you as much, though Mr. Cool has a two stage heat pump that they claim works in North Dakota temperatures.

But there is perhaps a better way to play games with thermodynamics in the north. Using flame -- be it from gas, wood, or oil -- to warm a home wastes valuable negentropy. The more efficient path would be to use the fuel to run a generator and use the waste heat to warm your home. (The heaters in petroleum powered vehicles use this principle, though they only use part of the available waste heat.) A Stirling or Ericcson cycle engine would be quieter than any internal combustion engine, and would also work with wood.

Then there is the issue of insulation. Have a look at The R Fairy Tale. The laboratory conditions under which R values are calculated do not match real world conditions. The author is in the polyurethane spray foam business, and I admit that I am a bit leery of living inside a house insulated with plastic foam. But the principles should apply to ceramic foams as well.

Today, we waste energy because it is cheaper than human labor. We use giant machines to tend to giant monocrop fields to grow animals in monstrous concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The arrangement is brutal to the meat animals and the environment. We could cut down on the machinery and brutality by growing animals in pastures like in the old days. Say goodbye to herbicides and plowing. Say hello to restored biodiversity and better soil. But it does require human labor. With people doing real work on real farms, who is going to fill our prisons, make-work jobs, and public housing projects?

Then there is the excess energy consumed by feminism. Raising kids at home and preparing food at home cuts down on transportation and the number of commercial buildings needed. But it does lower GDP, which makes Keynesians and Supply Siders sad.

Gross Domestic Fraud

Aug 2

Gross Domestic Product or GDP is an alleged measure of the economic performance of a country that supposedly represents the total monetary value of all finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period, typically calculated on an annual or quarterly basis. GDP is widely — and wrongly — used as an indicator of a co…

The Sunny Details

So, how much of the planet do we cover with solar panels and where do we put them?

Rooftops are an obvious place -- for those getting completely off the grid. Feeding solar from rooftop panels into the grid strikes me as a nightmare engineering challenge. All the inverters have to be in sync. Maintaining a narrow voltage range is likely quite difficult. And there are dangers: linemen need to disconnect all homes in a neighborhood in order to work on a downed power line. Maintaining the lines is roughly half the price of residential electricity. At least, residential electricity is about twice as expensive as industrial electricity. Part of the cost of industrial electricity is also transmission.

I'm not too keen on deploying solar cells in cloudy areas or at high latitudes. Dr. Michaux' report mentions solar panels in Germany. Not exactly the land of sunshine. Northern Europe is pretty darned far north. Rome is at the same latitude as Chicago. Germany is further north yet.

Recall that fifteen cent per Watt figure for solar panels. I presume that is for full sunshine. You need a thousand hours of full sunshine for a panel to pay for itself at residential rates. Double that for industrial rates. Multiply further still for using the panels to generate hydrogen for later electricity or making liquid fuels.

Deserts are the natural place to put solar panels. The more barren the desert, the better. Less environmental impact. We don't want to kill too many joshua trees and desert tortoises. On the downside, locating solar power plants in the deep desert means longer transmission to where the people are. This is not that big an issue if using the solar power to make methanol, but it is a big deal for using solar to directly feed the electric grid. A quick search indicates that transmitting energy via natural gas pipeline is half the capital cost of high voltage power lines. I presume without proof that transmitting hydrogen would have similar economics. (But we might also want to transmit the oxygen as well in a parallel pipeline for reasons to be discussed later.)

The World Bank has created the handy-dandy Global Solar Atlas which is a world map color coded by how much solar energy is available. It's quite powerful. You can tell it how you want to deploy your panels and click a spot on the map and get some nice numbers on the energy you will get. For example, if I set up a solar energy farm in Germany with a megawatt's worth of cells tilted at 38 degrees, I should get one gigawatt hour's worth of energy in a year. Do the same deep in the Sahara Desert I get twice as much energy -- and the panels are tilted at just 24 degrees. The less you tilt the panels, the less gap you need between rows of panels.

(I expected the difference between Germany and the Sahara to be much bigger. But there is also the factor of covering sand vs. covering good forest and farmland.)

Now we come to the big question: how much of the world's deserts do we need to power the planet? This depends both on how we compare a Joule of solar electrical energy vs. a Joule of replaced fossil fuels. If we turn the electricity into hydrogen for burning in gas turbines, then a Joule of solar electric matches a Joule of natural gas rather nicely. If we use the solar electricity directly, then a Joule of solar electric is worth 1.67 Joules of natural gas and 3 Joules of coal, since natural gas turbines are 60% efficient and coal fired power plants are only 33% efficient. For electricity used to make methanol we have a big question mark. We cannot be better than 80% efficient based on earlier reasoning. I'd guess we are probably down around 50%. The pessimistic figure would still put solar electricity above the harder to get to crude oils. Maybe even the medium grades, since energy is used for refining any crude oil and methanol can be burned more efficiently than gasoline due to higher octane rating.

So it seems to me that it's conservative to treat a Joule of solar energy as the same as a raw Joule of fossil fuel. Using the Tree of Woe's numbers that means we will need 500 million terajoules/year. In order to allow some economic growth, I'll look at 750 million terajoules/year as well.

Pulling up the Global Solar Atlas and poking around the Sahara Desert I see numbers between 2200 kWh/m^2 to 2400 kWh/m^2 for global horizontal radiation. I'll use 2000 to make the numbers easier and allow for a bit of extra spacing between the panels. (Note that we are looking at the amount of ground shadowed, not the area of the panels themselves, here. The panels would be tilted and spaced a enough to stay out of each other's shadows.) At 20% efficiency we get 400 kW*hr per square meter.

One kW*hr = 1000 * 3600 = 3,600,000J
400 kW*hr = 1.4 billion Joules

A square kilometer is a million square meters, which would provide 1,400 terajoules. We thus need to use roughly 360,000 square kilometers of desert to get 500 million terajoules/year and 540,000 square kilometers of desert to get 750 million terajoules/year.

Mauritania alone has a million square kilometers and a population density of 3.4 per square kilometer. Behold, my eeeevil solution to our Mauritanian refugee problem! Deport them all and give them high paying jobs as translators and cultural ambassadors for energy companies. Make Mauritania rich.

OK, I was being a bit silly. You'd probably want to space out your solar power plants to limit environmental impact. (Fun theory: covering too much of the Sahara with solar panels would raise the temperature and thereby bring in more rain.)

Also, my estimate assumed a generous 20% average efficiency. I should probably cut that in half to take into account dust and oblique angles during parts of the day. (More playing with Global Atlas is in order...) And maybe I should add in more space for electrolysis plants and methanol synthesizers, etc.

Speaking of greening the desert, it takes between 4.2 to 22.4 kilowatt hours to desalinate a cubic meter of seawater. Even using the higher figure, one square meter of ground taken up for a solar farm can irrigate around 20 square meters of land. This hints at a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: buy up a big plot of desert land that has some shoreline. Deploy enough solar panels to power enough desalinators to make the desert bloom. Declare New Palestine. Offer the disgruntled Palestinians several times as much land as their ancestors had before Jews started returning en masse. Hint: Western Sahara has ten times the area as Israel...

Homework assignment: compare the cost of this project with our foreign aid budget to Israel. Compare it with the cost of our meddling in the Middle East in general.

Food

The human population of Africa has exploded in the last few decades. Dire diseases are now being cured but traditional cultures have not adjusted to this new reality. How do we feed this expanded population without wiping out the amazing variety of interesting animals for which Africa is known? Do we tell them to stay out of game preserves and eat the bugs?

I think not.

Watering parts of the Sahara is one option, but there are much bigger deserts to tap...in the oceans. While the oceans have plenty of water [duh!], most of the world's oceans have limited nutrients to feed the plankton. Dissolved minerals sink unless you stir up the water. The best fishing areas are where currents bring nutrients to the surface or where runoff from the continents provides nutrients.

Back in the days of gas lines and Peak Doom, Jerry Pournelle wrote a series of articles in Galaxy Magazine suggesting high tech solutions.

I gave out many copies of this book back in the day. Some of the ideas therein are also found in Pournelle's early short stories, such as those in the High Justice collection.

One of those solutions was Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). Even in the tropics, the deep ocean water is cold. Run a honkin’ big ammonia refrigerator in reverse using the temperature difference between the warm surface water and the cold deep water, and you can turn an electric generator. The idea at the time was to use the electricity to make ammonia for fertilizer. Today, we might make methanol.

But the truly interesting thing about OTEC is not the energy; it's the environmental side effect: lots of fish. By pumping cold water to the surface the experimental OTEC generators were adding nutrients to the surface.

For years libertarians have been contemplating artificial floating islands in international waters as a means to escape Big Government. Well, here is both a power source and a worthwhile reason for creating seasteads, something better than floating drug dens, bordellos, and money laundering centers. If a seastead has sovereignty, then it can regulate the fishing in the surrounding now rich waters. Seastead fish is to farmed fish what pasture raised beef is to CAFO beef.

Put the seasteads in the warm waters that feed hurricanes and they will cut back on the number of CAT 5 hurricanes. It's rather like the global warming solution proposed in Futurama.

We do need to careful with the idea. Too much cooling of the tropical surface waters might change major ocean currents. But we can get a lot of fish before worrying about such things. The oceans are big, three times the size of the Earth's land, three times the entire surface area of Mars.

The Nuclear Option

For those who don't like covering deserts with solar panels, or don't want to be dependent on desert countries for fuels, there is the nuclear option. Today, we are barely tapping into the available nuclear energy. We just use uranium 235, which is just 0.7% of the world’s uranium. With fast breeder reactors we could convert most of the uranium 238 into plutonium, and have all the power we would need for ages. But we'd also have lots of chemically separable bomb materials. And the fast neutron reactors needed to efficiently convert U235 into U238 use liquid sodium as a coolant. Yikes!

Enter thorium. It's even more abundant than uranium, and when you give thorium a neutron you get uranium 233, which is fissionable. I'll let Kirk Sorenson tell the rest of the story:

It's a beautiful story, but is it just vaporware? I checked the Flibe Energy website to see if they have built a reactor yet. The answer is no. Indeed, it appears that they are diverting resources to develop a molten salt reactor to run on conventional uranium fuel, with a target date of 2040. Ever since that Pepsi Syndrome incident, the United States has been gun shy when it comes to moving forward with nuclear energy. I don't expect the US to go nuclear fast enough to meet the current carbon neutral targets related to global warming, but we could get the ball rolling fast enough to have bountiful nuclear energy before we run out of viable fossil fuels.

But Flibe Energy hasn't given up on using thorium. Their latest press release says they have more plans to work with the government to develop thorium breeder technology.

The real bugaboo is that any breeder technology will produce chemically separable fissionable materials. A bomb made with uranium 233 is possible. But it is less likely than a plutonium bomb. The thorium breeder creates nasty gamma emitters to go with the uranium 233, so making a suitcase nuke is out of the question. There are also spontaneous neutron emitters, which would make a bomb unstable. See the video above.

The government is still worried but they have been working with Flibe Energy to come up with enough safety measures to prevent a Bond villain from diverting U233 on the sly. A preliminary report from a couple years ago can be found here.

Deploying thorium breeder reactors in stable countries and countries which already have nuclear weapons looks like a viable option. Solving the entire world's energy problems with such reactors is a bit problematic. That's why I like desert solar as a significant part of the mix. Another possibility would be to make methanol in the nuclear powered countries to sell to unstable countries. In between there is the possibility of breeding uranium 233 in safe country reactors, mixing it with uranium 238 and deploying the mix in countries we want to prevent from having nuclear weapons.

Or, fusion could become viable before we've worked out all the safety issues with thorium breeders.

Garbage and Toxins

When we use renewable electricity to get hydrogen, we also get pure oxygen. As BF Randall points out that oxygen is very useful. Use it instead of air to burn any fuel and efficiency goes up. We can use the oxygen to better burn the hydrogen or we can use it to burn our garbage completely. No more garbage barges, no more mounds of tires. We might even reduce the resulting ash with some of that hydrogen in order to recover minerals. (Whether that is practical is well outside my expertise.)

Let's clean up the water while we are at it. Long lasting birth control chemicals in our water supply are one of the possible candidates for what is making the West gay. So let's add a final stage to our urban sewage treatment plants. Pipe the the treated water to artificial wetlands. Grow cattails and other wetland plants to absorb the nutrients and other organic compounds. Use the starch in the cattails to make ethanol. Burn the rest to make heat and to recover the phosphorus that was dissolved in the water. [See David Blume's Alcohol Can Be A Gas!: Fueling and Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century.]

Since we are now recovering the phosphorus, we can put phosphates back in our detergents and make our appliances great again.

Materials Shortages

The solutions I have presented depend primarily on elements that are abundant in Earth's crust: silicon, iron, aluminum, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon. In particular, I did not include electric cars in the mix:

Should Green RINOs Drive Electric Cars?

Electric cars. They are quiet. They have huge crumple zones. They have a frunk. They have incredible acceleration. I understand why some people love them…

10 months ago · 6 likes · 23 comments · Fabius Minarchus

From my perspective the main purpose of electric cars is to keep Elon Musk rich so he can plow ahead with SpaceX. So we can chill out about rare earth elements.

But the rising price of copper is worrisome. Even without windmills and electric cars, demand for copper is rising simply because more people are upgrading to modern standards of living. But there is also aluminum, which is abundant. Aluminum has a lower electrical conductivity (aka high electrical resistivity) than copper, so aluminum wires need to be thicker for the same current. But aluminum is also less dense. Multiply density times resistivity with figures pulled from Wikipedia:

Copper: 8.9 * 17 = 150
Aluminum: 2.7 * 27 = 73

Aluminum wiring is lighter than copper for the same amount of conductivity. But it has a lower tensile strength and is prone to corrosion. Searching around, it appears that aluminum wire is used in some transformers and generator windings. Copper is better, but having to switch to aluminum would not be civilization ending. Some comparisons between aluminum and copper can be found here.

The Geezer Factor

Then there is the geezer factor. As societies throttle their population growth, the ratio of old people to dynamic young people grows high. This has several possible dire consequences:

Too many old people means too many dependent people vs. workers.
Western governments are deep in debt and providing promised benefits for the old just makes the problem worse.
Adherents to the Santa Claus School of Economics yearn to keep the pyramid schemes going by importing millions of strangers, leading to a low trust society or worse.
Old people lack the creativity of the young. Where are we going to get the new theories? The new technologies?
Old people are small-c conservative. A gerontocracy is not going to reach for the stars.

I think that covers Ahnaf's concerns. I may have even added a concern or two to his list. These are real problems, but they are surmountable.

The Retiree Surplus

Back during the Great Depression, unemployment was a big problem. FDR's brain trust, employing the brain power of an entire tribe of Gilligan's Island headhunters, decided that one solution to unemployment was to encourage the old to retire early. Social Security was born.

Social Security was a very successful anti-poverty program. Saving up enough for retirement is an unnatural act. Traditionally, the aged were cared for by their children -- when said aged were truly too feeble to take care of themselves. The problem with Social Security is that it encourages full retirement at too young an age. Donald Trump is 78 years old now and will be starting a four year term as President of the frikken United States come January. President of the United States is a difficult and important job. There are easier jobs available for those in their 70s.

My ex-accountant did my taxes until a half year before he died. When my heat pump misbehaves, I call up a technician who is now in his 80s.

People do slow down as they enter old age, especially those who do hard physical labor for a living. I'm not as sharp as I used to be and my joints and tendons don't recover from injuries the way they used to. But there are many tasks I can do better than my younger self thanks to accumulated wisdom. I have no intent to retire any time soon even though I could start collecting Social Security in a few months.

Raising the retirement age for Social Security is a political non-starter. But so what. Thanks to bogus inflation figures the government has been implicitly cutting Social Security payments for years. Were I to retire upon eligibility, I'd get enough money to pay my mortgage, my water bill and maybe my electric bill. If I wait until 70, I'd get almost twice that amount. There is zero benefit to retiring later.

So here is my super ultra politically feasible trick to save Social Security and deal with labor shortages: extend the bonus for delaying taking Social Security. Make the payment for waiting until you are 80 to be more than twice what you get if you start at 70 -- even if your contributions during that decade are minimal. Old people do slow down long before they have to stop. Any citizen who waits until they are 85 to start collecting Social Security should get a comfortable guaranteed income -- enough to hire part time servants even -- even if they haven't saved a dime. Saving for retirement should be mandatory only for those who want to play during their golden years.

And while we are at it, eliminate the penalty for late enrollment in Medicare.

The Debt Problem

The US national deficit is appropriate for fighting a world war. Our accumulated debt is even more frightening. Fortunately, we still have capital for financing business because we are still a safe place to store money. We are Switzerland with nukes.

But I'd like to balance the budget and even pay down that monstrous debt. Deficit spending is like a price support program for the already rich. This is where the John Birch Society Crowd was absolutely, positively right. Too bad they had to mix that message with hard to swallow conspiracy theories.

You cannot have Objectivist utopia and democracy at the same time. When the wealth gap grows sufficiently wide, The People will vote for some kind of wealth transfer. This is rational self-interest i…

Populism is the Way

a year ago · 23 likes · 30 comments · Fabius Minarchus

Well, we have a Department of Government Efficiency on the way. I doubt that they can cut spending by two trillion dollars per year, but maybe they can get spending down to what it was under Trump just before COVID 19 hit. Then, the deficit was "merely" a trillion dollars.

Our host has a solution to come up with a trillion dollars per year: 30% across the board tariffs.

The Physiocratic Platform: Tariffs

Oct 19

If taxation is to be morally legitimate, then (a) it must be in service of a morally legitimate government; (b) it must be imposed in a manner that is reasonably related to the government’s services; and (c) its cost should be born, not by “the poor” or “the rich”

I endorse this measure. Indeed, I endorsed it right from the beginning of my blog. It's Rule 1!

Free Trade is great! It allows countries to specialize in their strengths. For example, the United States has huge tracts of land suitable for growing corn, but very limited area suitable for growing…

Rule 1: Free Trade Isn't

3 years ago · 10 likes · 10 comments · Fabius Minarchus

My reasoning was unfrozen caveman reasoning compared to our host's contemplations on tariffs:

Against Free Trade

April 19, 2023

For most of my adult life, I was a doctrinaire free trader. As a youthful disciple of Austrian economics, free trade was more than just an economic belief; it was a principle. Like most supporters of free trade, I relied on the fundamentally Ricardian analysis of free trade, which holds that free trade creates positive gain by allowing nations to specia…

Use my reasoning when you want a quick rhetorical kill shot against those who cite Ricardo. Use our host's reasoning when you have time to finish the job and/or want to get a dollar figure on how much money we can raise using tariffs.

Note that raising tariffs will increase the Social Security burden, since tariffs will raise consumer prices. On the other hand tariffs will lower our able-bodied welfare burden since bringing work back home will raise the market minimum wage bigly.

I don't want to just balance the budget, however. I want to pay off the national debt. For that, we need more spending cuts and more "revenue enhancements." I expect DOGE to cut federal programs that are already being done by the states (Department of Education) and assorted giveaways to lefty NGOs as part of the trillion/year cuts predicted earlier. For further spending cuts we need to cut some "meat."

War is a big part of the meat of our budget. We have spent trillions of dollars attempting to impose democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan to negative avail. Part of the problem is that our model of democracy does not work for deeply divided countries. Either we should be more willing to redraw borders or promote a better model, such as this one:

Where All Else Fails, Change the Rules

Democracy is great — when it works, which is far less often than advertised. The history of U.S. war policy since World War I ended has largely been attempts to clean up the mess from failed democrac…

a year ago · 10 likes · 7 comments · Fabius Minarchus

Or we could wise up and recognize that some countries really aren't countries; they are zones occupied by warring tribes. Afghanistan comes to mind. Solar is the solution. Solar power does not require power lines. Power lines (and roads, and railroads, and pipelines) require strong central government. Areas with weak or nonexistent government need non-grid utilities. Solar meets this criterion. Instead of supporting unsustainable central governments in tribal areas, we should provide subsidized solar, even if it's Chinese solar panels. It's cheaper than sending troops. (BTW, Europe went through a LONG period of weak centralized utilities, from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the 1800s. No need to invoke human biodiversity.)

Then there is that pesky Palestinian problem. I already offered a win-win solution. 'Nuff said.

The other big opportunity for savings is healthcare. The US federal government is an insurance company with nukes, and much of that insurance is health insurance. As much as I love markets, it is hard to shop while you are bleeding to death. Some form of insurance -- private or public -- is in order for part of the healthcare industry.

This is why I am excited to see RFK Jr. as part of the second Trump Administration. Americans are clearly being poisoned and it is upping our healthcare costs -- as well as making democracy unviable; democracy requires a sane majority. Yes, this opening the door to Nanny State governance, but I'm OK with restrained Nanny State governance.

I support your right to smoke tobacco, even in public places. But you should pay the social costs. This is the system that we had before the grand Tobacco Settlement. Most states already had high excise taxes on tobacco products. A few states, such as North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, had low taxes because tobacco was bringing in revenue via other channels.
I support your right to Big Gulps and unlimited drink refills, but maybe a tax on high fructose corn syrup is better than a tax on labor as a way to pay for the government's burden for supporting enormous blobs who ride around on electric wheelchairs as a result of excess sugar consumption.
I support your right to smoke marijuana, but a tax on marijuana to pay for those who suffer from laziness, schizophrenia, and/or voting Democrat as a result of their drug of choice is utterly appropriate.
I support your right to drink alcohol, but I'm also cool with an alcohol tax to pay for the resulting recklessness, violence, and liver disease footed by the government. Alcohol taxes go back to the earliest days of our republic. George Washington quashed the Whiskey Rebellion even though he was in the liquor business himself.

Our government taxes the crap out of domestic labor. Our government buys a crappe tonne of domestic labor. A government which taxes itself is a very expensive government. I suggest we rethink our tax system and go back towards our original system of tariffs and excises.

Santa Claus vs. the Cost Disease

Previously, I put forth the idea that Austrian Economics is the foundation for true Sustainable Economics. I went even further and chastized Supply Side Economics as being Keynesian Economics' retard…

9 months ago · 9 likes · 20 comments · Fabius Minarchus

We also need to move away from economic systems which require growth to work. Fractional reserve banking comes to mind. This is a huge subject, and this post is already huge, so I'll just drop a couple of links:

The Physiocratic Platform: Banking

September 13, 2023

I wanted to open this post by extending my gratitude to everyone who took the time to comment or email in response to my last post. I tried to respond to everyone but at a certain point the volume of commentary became so high that I lost the struggle. Nevertheless, I read everything. Thank you all for your kind words, suggestions, and ideas.