The amount of energy hitting the surface of the earth is constant, assuming that the luminosity of the sun is constant. Photosynthesis as cyanobacteria/chloroplasts/chlorella perform it might be less efficient than a modern solar panel at converting the entirety of the spectrum to energy, but they did it and produced this fuel for hundreds of millions of years. Even if you get 10 times the efficiency gains on them, you reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the same energy to what, tens of thousands of years, at the same surface area as that of the oceans?
Now let's say the electricity generated is used in a way that is an order of magnitude more efficient than using fossil fuels. That takes us down to 1000-9000 years, let's say best case scenario 1000, a surface area the size of the ocean paved, to achieve the energy we have used in 100 years, and that doesn't account for the fact that we need the energy output we have now, not the output we had in 1920 which was orders of magnitude less. Constant output at current levels I would expect we would've used all that oil in under 50 years, but let's ignore that too.
Now, let's assume that that oil were to last us another hundred years at projected energy consumption rates, peak oil and all that. You'd need to pave an area of the earth, in my very rough sketch, the size of all the oceans, and process the entire earths crust for minerals for it, and keep it like this for 1000 years, to get enough energy to last humans 200 years.
I'm probably wrong about a lot of these numbers. Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude. You'd still have to pave an area the size of half the earths oceans to get 200 years worth of energy in 200 years. Exactly how much environmental damage do you think such a project would cause? Would you say that such a project would be more or less destructive than current climate change projections?
It's really pretty obvious, there are only 2 paths forward: get humans into space, where we can build solar panels to catch some of the unbelievably vast majority of solar energy that is not required by life on earth, out of material not currently underneath the ground life lives on, and use the lucky accident of these fuels to do it now before they run out, or take humanity down a few notches, kill three quarters of our population, somehow prevent the CO2 from our decomposition from entering the atmosphere, and start cooking with wood and cowdung again.
Or we can keep pretending that these pitches about carbon sequestration using solar and wind are actually viable and keep being frustrated that nothing is being done to stop it.
I follow your logic but the sun is going to be hitting you for 70+ years. Your body surface area is probably equivalent to my 400W solar panel. That's a few KWh per day for 70+ years. How much oil will your decomposing body produce? How much energy will the vegetation in the Sahara desert produce?
You misunderstand, my decomposing body will produce carbon dioxide.
The Sahara desert is a great idea, probably our best bet. And if we can source all the material needed to pave it with panels right from underneath it, all the better. But that's unlikely, and still, that's 2% of the earths surface. Not enough surface area to cover our energy needs, despite what anyone says. If we really have reached peak oil, that is, used half or more of the oil available to us, in 100 years, that took 75% of the earths surface a billion years to produce, paving the Sahara desert won't make a dent. Even using energy from the sun 100 times more efficiently, that's still 50 times less energy than we need, 2% of what's needed, and that doesn't take into account increasing energy needs worldwide.
>Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude.
No, let's say that you are off by three or four orders of magnitude. Because your first estimate really is that bad, and without it, your entire "argument" falls apart.
So draw me a picture then. Let's say I'm off by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, photosynthesis is .001% efficient or whatever. Show me how you create enough energy, the equivalent of a billion years worth of solar energy shining down on three quarters of the surface of the earth, every 200 years. 2000 years. 200,000 years. Without unfathomable environmental destruction. Or how you reduce the energy consumption of 8 billion people to a point where it is manageable without killing most of them. Give me more than one sentence.
It's not photosynthesis that's .00001% efficient or whatever, it's the whole process, because it's also fuelling the entire lifetime of those organisms before they become fuel in the ground, and all those organisms that don't have just the right conditions for becoming fuel in the ground, and all the fuel in the ground that didn't stay there over those millions of years because it didn't have the right conditions.
And in any case, the problem we need to solve is not at all replicating the amount of energy stored by fuel in the ground. The problem we need to solve is generating the amount of energy we're actually using. And that has the advantage that we know that number quite precisely, instead of having to derive it based on ridiculously imprecise guesses.
And TFA makes a projection for required area using exactly this, and arrives at
> 300 TW of solar generation capacity, occupying about 5% of Earth’s land surface area, and split between roof top installations in cities and dedicated plants on nearby less developed land. For comparison, agriculture uses 18% of Earth’s land surface area, and largely uninhabited deserts are 33%.
And that completely ignores the additional power generation capacity of wind power.
Alright, so I'm off by how many orders of magnitude then? 4? Or 20? If I'm off by 3 or 4, whatever the reason, my previous comment applies, and the amount of energy you need is still off by orders of magnitude! So how many am I wrong by?
wind power takes up surface area too. In fact, wind is just solar energy. The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law and necessarily requires environmental destruction.
Doesn't matter at all because, as I pointed out, the whole approach is ridiculously wrong-headed. We know how much energy we actually need, and it has nothing to do with how much is in the ground and how it got there.
> wind power takes up surface area too.
However, that can even be the same surface area you've already put solar panels on.
> The amount of energy you can get on earth from any source besides nuclear, fossil fuels and geothermal is hard capped by the surface area of the earths apparent disk and the inverse square law
This is correct. But the cap is at about 26000 TW (see https://medium.com/earth-47/how-much-energy-does-the-earth-r...) and the amount we need is about 300 TW, so if we manage to capture only about 0.12% of the available energy, all our needs are already met.
> and necessarily requires environmental destruction.
Sure. But not even remotely close to the degree you're claiming.
Where do we get this 300TW number from? Does this include heating in winter, cooling in summer, fuel for moving goods and people in cars, trains, ships, airplanes, agriculture future energy consumption, and the energy needed to remove CO2 that has been created as per the proposal in the article at the top of this thread?
So the sun shone, for a billion years, to keep it simple, 26000 TW per year, and the photosynthesis on the surface of the ocean only saved what, projected oil reserves another 100 years, 60k TW at best? That puts photosyntheses of the ocean surface chloroplasts converted into oil at 0.0000001% efficiency. Either that or there's triple digits orders of magnitude more oil under the surface we don't know about. You believe that?
And suppose that is true. That would mean the amount of carbon coming from it is absolutely miniscule. Think of the number of tons of carbon dioxide that could've been in the atmosphere when the photosynthesis started, subtract out what would've been locked up to store this miniscule amount of energy, that's what you get, hardly anything. We know that's not true, so we can safely guess that the energy from photosynthesis that was stored was significantly more efficient than 0.0000001%, if it weren't you wouldn't have a climate crisis, which means humans use much more than 300TW. And that's just currently.
Wherever you're getting these consumption numbers from, they're just simply not possible. The carbon that has been produced in the last 100 years outweighs the amount that would be released from oil during that time if it were constant 300TW yearly, let alone with the comparatively small amount 100 years ago.
The amount of energy hitting the surface of the earth is constant, assuming that the luminosity of the sun is constant. Photosynthesis as cyanobacteria/chloroplasts/chlorella perform it might be less efficient than a modern solar panel at converting the entirety of the spectrum to energy, but they did it and produced this fuel for hundreds of millions of years. Even if you get 10 times the efficiency gains on them, you reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the same energy to what, tens of thousands of years, at the same surface area as that of the oceans?
Now let's say the electricity generated is used in a way that is an order of magnitude more efficient than using fossil fuels. That takes us down to 1000-9000 years, let's say best case scenario 1000, a surface area the size of the ocean paved, to achieve the energy we have used in 100 years, and that doesn't account for the fact that we need the energy output we have now, not the output we had in 1920 which was orders of magnitude less. Constant output at current levels I would expect we would've used all that oil in under 50 years, but let's ignore that too.
Now, let's assume that that oil were to last us another hundred years at projected energy consumption rates, peak oil and all that. You'd need to pave an area of the earth, in my very rough sketch, the size of all the oceans, and process the entire earths crust for minerals for it, and keep it like this for 1000 years, to get enough energy to last humans 200 years.
I'm probably wrong about a lot of these numbers. Let's say I'm off (in your favor) by a whopping order of magnitude. You'd still have to pave an area the size of half the earths oceans to get 200 years worth of energy in 200 years. Exactly how much environmental damage do you think such a project would cause? Would you say that such a project would be more or less destructive than current climate change projections?
It's really pretty obvious, there are only 2 paths forward: get humans into space, where we can build solar panels to catch some of the unbelievably vast majority of solar energy that is not required by life on earth, out of material not currently underneath the ground life lives on, and use the lucky accident of these fuels to do it now before they run out, or take humanity down a few notches, kill three quarters of our population, somehow prevent the CO2 from our decomposition from entering the atmosphere, and start cooking with wood and cowdung again.
Or we can keep pretending that these pitches about carbon sequestration using solar and wind are actually viable and keep being frustrated that nothing is being done to stop it.