Google Wants To Get Us Into Hot Water

Hmmmm… It has been long known that there is an abundance of geothermal energy. However, and I do not claim to be an expert, but I seem to remember from science and physics classes that a lot of our environment is dependant on the fluid mass at the core of the earth, along with the heat contained at the core. Is it really wise to tap into and release this energy in massive quatity? It seems to me that we would be cooling the core of the earth, artificially aging our planet (which is currently our only home).

What are the side effects of deep drilling and literally removing energy from the earth? As liquids cool (as the core is liquid) and congeal they tend to shrink… what would this do to fault line, dormant volcanoes, oceanic flow pattern, our electromagnetic field and the van allen belt that protects us from much of the solar radiation that our sun puts out? Would our oceans cool?

I don’t know… There is a lot of concern out there that we are causing global warming out of proportion to what the Earth is capable of healing, already changing our climate in ways that may destroy critical ecosystems.

While they list this under the heading of a renewable energy source, I would tend to disagree. They are turning water into steam, to provide electricity. Eventually the steam will turn back to water. And they would have you believe that this is a renewable source….What they are overlooking is that they are litterally taking energy OUT of the core of our planet. While I am SURE this is a huge reserve of energy, in the form of heat. It is finite, and NOT renewable. This is NOT analgous to using solar energy, which is generated at an enormous rate and thrown at and past us continuously… This is using energy in an artificial way from a huge, but still finite well. And yes, I know that even Solar Energy is finite (though the well is several orders of magnitude larger) but there is a huge difference, the sun will put out energy regardless of what we do. In extracting geothermal energy wholesale and on a massive scale we are forever altering a dynamic system and artificially speeding the aging process.

I think that this approach needs to be studied… and studied hard before we tamper with a fundamental force of the only place we have to live…

Barack Obama has included geothermal in his discussions about renewable energy. That along with his distinction between corn-based and cellulose-based ethanol lead me to believe that he has a strong understanding of the ideas and technologies that will hopefully get us off of oil and coal.

As with any of the renewable energy plans, the overall carbon footprint must be taken into consideration. Geothermal, for example, will involve equipment that breaks up the rock and pours in the water. If that equipment runs on gas, then the process will have a carbon footprint. Most of the renewable energy ideas will have a carbon footprint initially, but as the equipment used to build the renewable energy infrastructure (and the equipment to build the equipment) starts to get its power from renewable, non-carbon-producing sources then the whole process and all of our power will eventually be carbon-neutral.