fossil fuels

[nibot]

Supposing that we have already passed the time of peak oil production, my question for you is this: in what year will we see fewer cars on California roads than in the previous year?

At what point will the Interstate Highways be fossil roads, abandoned relics, like the decaying steel towns of Pennsylvania, like the Erie Canal?

When will Phoenix be Detroit?

Or will someone invent the coal-powered car and doom us all? (The plug-in Prius actually burns coal.)

Comments

[surpheon.livejournal.com]

Intersates will probably never be abandoned relics. The large, relatively direct right of ways they provide will be valuable for some form of transport as long as we have a civilization (barring teleporters or some other impossible tech appearing).

Now, when the 30 min commute disappears is a bit more fun to guess at. I give it 15 years before the current driving society paradigm collapses. I see it being replaced to a great extent by telecommuting. Not little-screen telecommuting, but a room with a couple full wall screens and HD camera that acts as a real cubicle. It'd be always on and you could 'walk by' other people's cube and pop in for quick comments or even just to toss a hi in the 'door.' This is a logical extension of current video, bandwidth and camera tech curves.

[metamouse.livejournal.com]

Nanosolar's new thin-film solar panels can produce energy more cheaply than coal. Maybe we'll make it through this... maybe...

Nanosolar

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of these people. This will be very cool if it works!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar

solar

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Thermal solar is pretty much the most obvious thing ever, and Los Angeles is the ideal place for it. There is no reason anybody here should be burning natural gas to produce hot water, and yet everybody does. I have not seen a single water-heating solar panel in southern california.

I suppose it's just more evidence for how cheap fossil fuels really are / have been. And for how shortsighted we are: the break-even time on solar panels for heating water must be very quick.

Re: solar

[surpheon.livejournal.com]

Simple payback on solar hotwater is typically 1-3 years. It got a bad name back when Carter goosed the market with incentives, resulting in hundreds on new products, then the incentives got yanked, resulting in thousands of orphan installations when companies folded. Orphan installations with no service or parts structure resulted in really poor reliability, not to mention many of them were slipshod hacked-together products to start with.

Modern solar hot water is a no-brainer in non-freezing climes with unobstructed Southern exposure.

[jes5199.livejournal.com]

or, even without that, we could design cities where people could walk to the office.

[chris-acheson.livejournal.com]

We don't even need to design those. Just get rid of zoning laws that prohibit mixed-use commercial/residential buildings, as well as other similar sprawl-subsidizing legislation.

the renaissance plan

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Your comment reminds me of this opinion piece, published in the local paper here today:

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/city-plan-santa-1947873-new-officials

It's sad and funny on so many levels. You lose track of which form of "urban renewal" or "redevelopment" the city is advocating, and which they are mocking as a previous failure. Their project is called the Renaissance Plan, the same name as the same thing in Rochester. How many cities in America have these Renaissance schemes, and how many have failed? The city wants to replace successful light industry with pretty yuppy condos.

The real delicious part is this: while suburban Orange County is expanding as quickly as it ever has, its center has already been subject to multiple redevelopment projects.

Re: the renaissance plan

[chris-acheson.livejournal.com]

Go go gadget gentrification. That's the other reason talk of urban planning/"renewal" arouses my suspicions. When it's not superfluous, it's pernicious.

[janviere.livejournal.com]

The Roman roads are still around.

If we don't have enough energy to drive ourselves around in the future, I'm pretty sure that we're going to have difficulty powering server farms.

My bet is that the first life-altering crisis will happen with food, when the real cost of trucking everything we eat across the country starts to show.

I have no concept of "when", though.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Not just trucking. We get fruits flown in from South America, New Zealand, and South-east Asia. I can buy a bottle of Italian wine at Trader Joes's for less than $4. I do not understand how this is possible.

[surpheon.livejournal.com]

I can blame a lot of my CO2 footprint on server farms - I'm getting flown around to optimize 'em. The cost of running a server farm is high enough that the big guys are seriously looking at optimizing them. You can typically take off 25% of the total (including racks, basically halving the HVAC energy) energy consumption of a server farm if given a cleansheet design, it's easy. (http://hightech.lbl.gov/documents/DATA_CENTERS/06_DataCenters-PGE.pdf) Plus computation is getting more efficient per flop. I'm pretty sure that server farms will be OK (at least 'my' babies will be:)