Yeah, fixed the number error in a rely to Solandri - I was thinking insolation in the Southwest, which is indeed ~5kWh, but that's only directly relevant to solar-thermal uses.

I think you badly overestimate the summer-versus-winter variation, though I'll grant you that areas prone to long winter storms might indeed be that bad. But regardless - yes: the biggest problem with solar and wind is variability - the answer is some combination of storage and/or a high-efficiency long range distribution grid. Both of which are technologies under active development. After all, Arizona's insolation doesn't vary all that much over the year, and you'd only need to cover 60% of it with solar panels to provide the entire nation's energy needs. Double our PV and energy usage efficiencies and you'd only need to cover 14% of it, then you just need a superconducting grid backbone and a few days worth of batteries to power the nation.

Whoops, my bad - I was thinking insolation where I live in the Southwest: clear skies and lowish latitude translate to roughly 5 hours of peak solar equivalency per day, and the solar thermal systems which interest me as a tinkerer can easily approach 100% efficiency (1kW/m^2 at peak). At 16% efficiency that's still about 0.8kWh/day, but not nearly as impressive as 5kWh. On the other hand as you get into more overcast areas further from the equator the appeal of solar thermal increases, and high capacity thermal batteries (aka insulated water tanks) are cheap. Even in northern Montana a DIY thermal installation can pay for itself in a few years, and unless it's replacing wood or geothermal heating that's a big win.

But even PV isn't as bleak as you make out: let's use your number: 0.435kWh/m2/day w/current solar panels. Double that for the high efficiency panels to 0.87kWh. Then halve per-capita energy consumption to get in line with European efficiency:123.5kWh/day. That's still only 142 square meters per person. Three times my flawed estimate, but still not terrible. That's ~44,600km^2, or an area about 30% larger than Maryland, to supply the entire US with all its energy needs. Even with current energy consumption and cheap silicon PV we'd only need an area the size of Missouri to do the job.

And remember: the vast majority of that energy is consumed by businesses rather than individuals, and they are already beginning to roll out solar in a big way, because the $/Watt has already fallen to the point that it's notably cheaper than today's grid electricity over a 20-year amortization period, and businesses are accustomed to dealing with everything in terms of amortized costs. Let the price of fossil fuels keep climbing and the price of PV continue to fall, and it won't be long before PV is cheaper than burning coal on-site in many areas.

>He is fighting the system from within the system, something I didn't think was possible
Quite. I have my doubts as to how successful it will actually be in the long term*, but the only other alternative seems to be violent uprising, about which I have even greater doubts as to the wisdom and efficacy of. So I've got my fingers crossed and am cheering him on mightily.

* I'm betting there's 160 or so people who will gladly donate a few tens of millions each out of their pocket change to lobby against such reform if this movement becomes a credible threat. But we are still at least superficially a democracy, and staging a public lobbyist battle against the populace could backfire badly at the polls.

Actually there are - it fluctuates of course, but there is a normal range of fluctuation - ice cores going back over the last million years show fluctuations between about 175 and 275ppm, with the highest peaks occasionally, and very briefly, just breaking 300ppm. At ~400ppm we're currently almost as far beyond the highest historical peaks as the peaks are above the troughs.

But that's neither here nor there - reread that sentence, I was discussing the density of *grazing animals*, not CO2. Since the ecosystem changes occurred at a nearly geological pace as our ancestors gradually spread across the globe it didn't cause significant changes in atmospheric CO2 levels - but intelligently reversing desertification could potentially increase biomass dramatically in a matter of decades, stripping an enormous amount of CO2 from the atmosphere in the process, in addition to producing enormous numbers of well-exercised meat animals and converting vast near-desert regions into thriving grasslands. And as long as we stay away from the serious methane producers like cows that should be a dramatic win for slowing global warming, possibly even reversing it for a while. Of course we'd still need to cut way back on fossil fuel use, but we could potentially buy ourselves several decades, possibly as much as a century, of extra time to do so, which should be enough for new energy technologies and market forces to start implementing a long-term solution in a far less painful fashion.

Yeah, but we've made ourselves a really convenient target for them to enrage the masses at. Nazis, "commies", etc. were mostly people just like us, under the leadership of a different group of sociopaths, but look how worked up our leaders managed to get us at them. We were full into witchhunt mode and even had internment camps where we imprisoned over 100,000 American citizens for the crime of being of Japanese descent. Similar thing today with the terrorists - the folks on the ground are mostly just poor angry schmucks who've been getting the the short end of the stick for decades, but the fact that they can legitimately lay some of their grievances at our feet (The installation of Saddam in the first place, 10s (100s?) of thousands of civilian deaths at the hands of our military more recently, to name a couple of the most grievous) makes it really easy for their leaders to whip them into enough of a fury to throw their lives away in suicide attacks against both us and local collaborators. Cynical manipulation by sociopaths for their own ends? Of course. But we did more than our fair share in producing fertile ground for them to work with.

Quite so. Tangentially related, have you seen this talk on reversing desertification? The fellow seems to be on to something, and even if you're mostly growing grasses and meat, if you can drastically increase the biomass in areas where vegetation is currently extremely sparse that's an enormous amount of carbon sequestration potential, in addition to the numerous other environmental and climatological benefits of nurturing a thriving biosphere.

  http://www.ted.com/talks/allan...

If you're producing plastics, or anything else that doesn't involve burning the fuel and producing CO2, then you're not really contributing to global warming so it's not a particularly urgent problem. Sure there's still some geopolitics involved, but I'd bet good money that we'd care a lot less about the Middle East if we only needed their oil to produce cheap plastic crap rather than to fuel all aspects of our civilization.

Sure we can - our current usage is rife with waste. We could easily cut US energy consumption by 50+% simply by wasting less energy, we'd only need to drop per-capita energy usage to levels comparable to such backwards wastelands as the UK and France - and even they've really only taken advantage of the low-hanging fruit so far.

Meanwhile even at current energy consumption levels US per-capita energy consumption is 308 million BTU per year, or 247 kWh per day. At 5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day (a conservative number achievable almost anywhere with low-to-mid-range solar panels) that's only 49.5 meters of panels per person, or 532 square feet. A little high, but not unachievable.

Meanwhile we've recently made some great breakthroughs in solar panel technology, for example discovering that panels made with relatively common and non-toxic magnesium salts can perform on par with our current best-of-breed panels based on gallium arsenide and other extremely rare and toxic elements. Let that hit mainstream and we can cut those panels to 266 sq.ft. Add in European-class efficiency and we'd only need 133 sq.ft. of solar panels per person. Eminently achievable - all we need is decent batteries for daily power buffering and we're set. And advances in virtually "immortal" ultra-high-power liquid metal batteries look quite promising, not to mention businesses like Aquion that are already scaling up production for grid-focused saltwater batteries. And if you happen to live in mountainous areas pumped water gravitational batteries are a moderately mature and inexpensive technology already, if not quite so efficient.

So basically you're saying that now is the perfect time to be doing this research so that it can possibly reach useful levels by the time fossil fuels have been largely phased out within some jurisdictions? After all even if we shut down all fossil fuel plants today, we'll still have a century or so of elevated CO2 levels and continuing warming if we only rely on natural processes.

On the other hand, this fellow seems to be on to a way to capture atmospheric CO2 much faster and more profitably with nothing more than stone age technology informed by a bit of modern science. Reverse tens of thousands of years of human-initiated desertification simply by restoring something resembling pre-human densities and behaviors of grazing animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's even some evidence that you don't even need direct human intervention to start seeing the benefits, you can just reintroduce top predators such as was done with wolves in Yellowstone, and let them encourage similar grazing behavior as occurred in eons past. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

>and in the process, suck up to barely-literate savages who hate us

I think you've got cause and effect a bit confused there - most of those people are barely literate and hate us *because* we've been mucking up their country for so long in our efforts to secure energy and access to ancient religious sites.

Perhaps. Economically is the key word though, and that filter is going to have to be phenomenally cheap and effective to make it worth it for recovering oil from seawater. How many barrels of oil at $100 per barrel do you suppose $100 worth of filter can filter out? And then you have the fact that the filtered oil is going to be thoroughly contaminated with salts, plankton, diatoms, and everything else found in seawater that's either oil soluble or bigger than an oil molecule, which could potentially increase refining costs considerably. Plus the costs of operating all the ships and pumping equipment necessary to chase an oil slick around the ocean and filter all that seawater in the first place, which is probably going to dwarf the cost of filters.

This could be a great thing for spill cleanup, It might even help to substantially defray the costs of performing it. But I suspect oil companies will still have to be legally forced to clean up after themselves - after all, they generally don't own the oil until after they've pumped it, and pumping more oil is going to be far more profitable than filtering a spill.

>For the white guy to pick lettuce the wages would have to be so high that EVERYBODY will pick lettuce, thus resulting in lettuce becoming unaffordable.

A little hyperbolic, don't you think? If "everybody" will pick lettuce at the offered wage, then reduce the wage until only enough people are willing to satisfy the need - that's econ 101. Not that I'm endorsing the opposing position, but hyperbole is the enemy of intelligent conversation everywhere.

Heh. I don't imagine I will convince anyone myself - but one can only hope that repeated application of functional truth will gradually shift the tide. Gladly would I do more if I could imagine a more effective option for somebody with negligible socioeconomic impact.

Obviously - if you can name an external appendage without extensive erotic potential I'd accuse you of a lack of imagination. What's your point? Personally, if I were modifying my genes for erotic potential there are far more... interesting options available, if not quite so closely related. Dolphins for example - why settle for a prehensile *tail*? Biology is after all a many-splendored thing.

If you continue to profit from your grandfather's crimes, while the descendants of his victims continue to suffer losses, there is an argument to be made that the crime is ongoing.

Certainly we all exert a certain measure of control over the course of our lives, but the simple fact is that our culture is heavily biased towards capital over labor - a rich man must be rather incompetent to avoid getting richer, while a poor man must be moderately talented just to avoid getting poorer. In such a society can you truly say there is no moral debt in the fact that my family has been getting richer for generations off of wealth my ancestors stole from another, while their family has been struggling mightily just to survive?