A Few Comments About Energy — for the Scientifically Disadvantaged*
There is a simple fact about energy that most people who are uneducated in science simply don’t grasp: fuel is just a way of getting energy from the point where it is collected to the place where it’s going to be used. That is just as true of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen of the space shuttle as it is of a Kalahari Bushman gathering firewood, or of uranium being mined, refined, and trucked to a nuclear reactor.
The !Kung system, however, is many times more efficient than the others. It required no energy apart from sunlight to grow the wood, a little water, some minerals, and the muscle power needed to carry the wood to the communal fire pit, the fuel for which was also gathered on the spot in the form of meat and veggies.
When we begin to speak of turning sunlight into other forms of energy, such as alcohol, things get much less efficient and require a lot more energy — which must also be subtracted from the overall efficiency of the fuel.
Gasoline is the current way that we carry energy around to power most of our cars. It is more efficient for that purpose than running a hose to underground deposits of decayed prehistoric vegetables and dragging it behind the Ferrari wherever we go. We also use it because our cars are heavy and we insist on driving them at high speeds. These both take a great deal more energy, and thus require large amounts in concentrated form.
In the case of ethanol (ethyl alcohol, the drinkin’ stuff), we have — for the purposes of further fattening a bunch of rich folks’ wallets — been duped into accepting, by lack of education and right of approval, a “solution” that is horrendously wasteful of a number of absolutely critical resources, prohibitively expensive economically, and not even as efficient as gasoline for transporting energy. It is the worst possible choice we could have made, in terms of simple science and common sense.
The principles above, by the way, also apply to the production of hydrogen as fuel. Think about it. Trace all the forms of energy back to their source. If you go far enough, you always get back to solar — even with nuclear, which simply uses fuel from a different star, long gone.
Why did the powers that be choose ethanol? You can’t control and profit from the collection of sunlight, the rich folks and friends already owned a lot of land that could be easily converted to production, and they figure the environmental cost will come due in the future, and that they’ll be able to buy their way out of the disasters down the line.
The Bush family, for example, recently bought 70,000 hectares in Uruguay, right on top of South America’s largest aquifer and next door to the only air base outside of Montevideo that’s capable of handling big jets — improved by the US and protected by US Marines. (Oh…you didn’t hear about that? Must have been the Liberal Media’s fault.)
Is it any wonder that our students have been systematically dumbed down in science over the past few decades? Is it any wonder that evolution and cosmology scare the oligarchs to death? We can’t have the common folks knowing too much about the way things work, can we? Made that mistake in the mid-20th Century. Led to all sorts of problems.
Think I’m wrong? Read some basic science while you’re waiting for your next serving of Kool-Aid — or ethanol.
*Oh. You’re not “scientifically disadvantaged?” Explain, in plain language, the three Laws of Thermodynamics. You don’t have to get technical…just the high points will do. If you can’t do that, you don’t understand the very facts of science, needed to understand this article. Bet you don’t know what a scientific theory is, either. Look it up.
6 Comments
A Few Comments About Energy — for the Scientifically Disadvantaged « CrackerBoy
October 13th, 2007
at 11:09am
[...] The !Kung system, however, is many times more efficient than the others. A Few Comments About Energy — for the Scientifically Disadvantaged* ~ Digital Zen [...]
the oracle
October 13th, 2007
at 11:52am
You’re right, but I think you miss the point that the public, in general, is being pointed to the importance of removing the need for OPEC oil as the first principle, above all others.
Any means to get away from dependence on oil as the method of energy is seen as good, and not further examined.
If the economics of the ENTIRE situation was accounted for, we would be told that using coal, to produce electricity, with proper scrubbing at the plants to remove effluent nastiness, and then powering cars with electricity would 1] eliminate dependence on Mid East oil 2] lower emissions of sulfates and CO2 3] improve the US economy, as we have coal for the near and possibly not so near future domestically produced, and the cash flow to the Middle East would drop to near zero, which would 4] eliminate many cash streams to the terror factions, and 5] remove our need to be in that area in any military capacity.
But that makes too much sense.
Todd B
October 19th, 2007
at 8:24am
Hot Damb! Nice to see someone point these things out. This is why I ask my daughter, age 11, questions like, “So what is it that makes that tea pot whistle when it gets hot?” She may need a bit of hand-holding to get the details right but it gets her thinking and wondering about the physical world around her, the basis of all learning.
Grannar Olice
October 19th, 2007
at 10:37am
Thank you. Good article.
Gene
October 19th, 2007
at 11:06am
A “rumor” that George Bush Senior bought land?
WOW!
Now that’s news.
Ah, so what?
Ah, so what?
That’s entirely up to you, sport.
Steve Hobberstad
October 19th, 2007
at 5:22pm
Hmmmmm…..
I musta missed something, Gene. I didn’t see the word “rumor” anywhere in this article. And it ain’t so much the LAND part (well, sort of) as the MARINES part (and the United Fruit Company part, and the Pinochet part).
Do people need to wake up, pull their heads out of the sand (or wherever) and start paying attention? To quote a recent oil company ad campaign: PEOPLE DO!
Science is a great place to start exercising one’s brain.
On an impulse, years ago, I bought a lever-operated bottle pressurizer that snapped onto the top of soda bottles and was SUPPOSED to preserve the carbonation in any left-over soda. A few days after using it for the first time I discovered that the remaining soda was just as flat as it would have been without the $5 gadget. Then I remembered back to high school physics: “partial pressure” didn’t care how much AIR I pumped into the dam bottle—only additional CO2 would have kept the drink carbonated.
I assume the manufacturer of this gizmo knew it wouldn’t work but proceeded with its distribution in the best spirit of entrepreneurship.
In that same spirit, don’t be surprised when—after having decimated Iraq and killed or displaced millions of people—we end up paying double-digit prices for a gallon of gas, even though the price-per-barrel of oil will have dropped for the oil companies…which will unabashedly show record profits.
NOTHING (including Global Warming) is so arcane that “the average person” can’t understand it. And they’d better start trying, before it’s too late…
Extremely well said!
I’m one of the education conspiracy theorists, myself. I firmly believe that the American people have been systematically “dumbed down” over the past 3-4 decades by cutting education funds, sustaining poverty, and giving lip service only to quality education. The result has been a full generation of people who lack the scientific understanding to “get” most of this stuff, and an upcoming generation that — it was hoped — simply wouldn’t care. The Web, thank Tim, may reverse that somewhat. We can only hope it’s not too late.
When I was in high school, we were taught chemistry, biology and physics (an elective), along with a year of civics, a year each of American and World History, and a half year of logic and debate. That was in a public high school in a small Southern town. When’s the last time you heard of any kid getting an education of that caliber — IN COLLEGE?
Ignorance is not only bliss, it’s malleable.