Amazon an international patrimony

Every once in a while i get this text in a chain email, i thought i'd translate it, because i like it... i can't really prove its authenticity, nevertheless...

"During a debate in a university in the States (around year 2000), the then Brazilian Minister for Education, Cristóvão Buarque, was questioned about what he thought about internationalizing the Amazons (a topic that reoccurs often in some sectors of American society, and that bothers tremendously the Brazilians). A young American student asked this question, saying that he hoped to get the answer of a humanist and not that of a Brazilian. This was Mr. Buarque's answer:

In fact, as a Brazilian i would simply argue against the internationalization of the Amazons. As much as our governments don't show the proper care for this patrimony, it is ours. As a humanist, and feeling the risk of the environmental degradation the Amazons are suffering, i can well imagine its internationalization, as well as of everything else which is important for humanity.

If the Amazons, under humanistic ethics, should be internationalized, then let us also internationalize the oil reserves of the whole world. Oil is as important to the well-being of humanity as is the Amazons for our future. nevertheless, the owners of these reserves, feel they are entitled to raise or lower its extraction and raise or not its price.

In the same way the financial capital of rich countries should be internationalized. If the Amazons are a reserve for all the human beings, then it cannot be burned by the will of one owner or one country. Burning the Amazons is as serious as the unemployment caused by arbitrary decisions made by global speculators. We cannot allow that the financial reserves are used to burn entire countries by the lust for speculation.

Even before the Amazons, I'd like to see the internationalization of all the great museums in the world. The Louvre should not belong to France alone. Each museum is the guardian of the most beautiful pieces produced by the human genius. We cannot leave this cultural heritage, like the natural heritage of the Amazons, to be manipulated and destroyed by the taste of one owner or one country. Not too long ago, a Japanese millionaire decided he should be buried with a painting of one of the great masters. Before that, that painting should have been internationalized.

During this meeting, the United Nations are holding the Millennium Forum, but some of the presidents of some countries could not attend due to restrictions at the US border. Therefore, i think that New York, as the home of the United Nations, should be internationalized. At least Manhattan should belong to the whole of humanity. As well as Paris, Venice, Rome, London, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Recife, each city, with its specific beauty, its world History, should belong to the entire world.

If the US want to internationalize the Amazons, because of the risk of leaving it at the hands of the Brazilians, let's then internationalize all the nuclear weapons of the US. Even because they have already demonstrated that they are capable of using them, provoking a destruction thousands of times bigger than the regrettable burns made in the Brazilian forests.

In their debates, the current candidates to the US presidency, have defended the idea of internationalizing the Amazons in exchange for the debt. Let's start using this debt to guarantee that each child of the World has the possibility to EAT and go to school. Let's internationalize the children, treating them, all of them, regardless of the country where they were born, as a patrimony of the entire world. Even more than what the Amazons deserve. When the leaders treat the poor children of the world as a Humanity patrimony, they will not let them work when they should be studying, that they die when they should live.

As a humanist, i accept to defend the internationalization of the World. But as long as the World treats me as a Brazilian, i will fight for the Amazons to be ours. Ours alone!"

Local storing of energy II - a solution

I've discussed this thing of storing locally energy at each house with my friend and colleague Norbert, and we came up with a nice recommendation for a viable solution.

Use a tank of compressed air!

The air can be compressed mechanically from a wind/water mill, or with a compressor powered by cheap electricity at night. Burying the tank to keep the air cool may increase the tank capacity, and also has the advantage of reinforcing the tank such that it withstands higher pressures.

To use the energy you let the air out through a turbine, which can in turn generate electricity from the same motor of the compressor (or a separate one, whatever). The heat generated by the spinning turbine, or heat collected from solar energy can also be recuperated to warm up the compressed air as it comes out of the tank to increase the pressure.

One just needs to calculate how big a tank is needed, depending on how much energy you want to store...

There already exists a car running on compressed air.
There exists also power plants which use compressed air to compensate the periods of high demand from the power grid.

As clean and renewable as it gets!

Local storing of energy

How about this? I'm not an expert in high power networks, but here's a typical load profile for an electrical network over a day (there are other seasonal fluctuations as well):



In theory a network needs to be dimensioned to satisfy the highest demand, and eventually to dump or store extra energy which is not used in periods of less demand (for example by pumping water into dams).

The difference between the highest and lowest peak in the load profile is 20GW, for this example, which i got from wikipedia). The problem I see is that the peak control is made at a macro-scale, requiring the network to be over-dimensioned to meet the demand (for example additional gas plants are required which can be fired quickly to meet sudden peaks of demand).

What if every building (including residences) were to consume and simultaneously store part of the energy they require to operate locally? They would store during periods when the overall demand was lowest, and at the time of high peaks they would use that energy, disconnecting from the electrical network, thus reducing the maximum load and the need for an over dimensioned network - resulting in balancing the load at a micro-level. There is clearly an efficiency problem in the losses due to energy conversion for storage and usage, but the benefit could exceed the loss (somebody should do the math...).

Eventually as new storage technology (batteries, hydrogen cells, nano-capacitors...) becomes available this could turn out to be a good solution to reduce the need for more power plants. Also an infrastructure that supports DC rather than AC might also help, to reduce the number of conversions, and the losses in the electrical distribution. Another advantage is that buildings making use of renewable energy collectors, could re-direct the energy from these sources to this storage system to complement the need for usage of network power.

The control of the charge/discharge cycles of the buildings could be done by digital data transferred to/from the network central, via internet, to the circuits on the buildings and each region could be controlled separately to balance the load as required. An intelligent system which knows the overall power demand, the storage capability of each building and acquires in real time rates of consumption could smartly and optimally manage the charge/discharges cycles. As I said, I'm not an expert, it's just a thought...

Construction Costs of a Power Plant vs. Costs of up-to-date House isolation

I have tried to retrieve information on the actual construction costs of nuclear and thermal power plants and the amount of energy they in average produce per year and to compare them with the costs for up-to-date state house isolations and the Amount of Energy which in average can be saved per year.

The result of this simple comparison was at the first look surprising to me. If the amount of money necessary to construct a power plant would be invested to isolate houses, only 1/10 of the Energy, which would be produced with the power plant, would be saved by the isolation.

Honestly I was a bit disappointed by the result and I found it quite amazing that such sophisticated technology like a nuclear power plant could have such a big advantage in the cost-benefit ratio compared to a quite simple straightforward technology.

But of course there are factors to be considered, which have just not been considered in the comparison and which would probably are in favour to the simpler technology of isolation:

- Maintenance Costs
- CO2 equivalent effort
- Resource consumption on the long term
- Effort for guaranteeing the safety of the technology
- Effective Costs of possible environmental damage due to error in the technology

Especially the last point is difficult to compare as the costs in case of an incident at an nuclear power plant would be very high due to it’s long term impact (long term radio active contamination due to an hazardous incident radioactivity or due to a inadequate final storage).

Let me know what you think!
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Below the actual numbers of the comparison and the links, from where I retrieved the information:

1) Construction Costs and Energy Production of Power Plants

Power Plant Construction Costs Energy Production per year
Gundremmingen DE (nuclear) ~4.0 Mrd € (4*10^9 €) ~20 TWh (20*10^12 Watt Hours)
Lippendorf DE (thermal) ~2.3 Mrd € (2.3*10^9 €) ~13 TWh

2) Example Costs for House Isolations and Amount of saved Energy

Isolation Costs for a house with of 160m^2 surface ~29.000 €
Saved Energy per year 103 kWh/m^2 * 160 ~> 16.500 kWh

3) Calculations

a) 4*10^9 / 29.000 € => 138.000 Houses with 160 m^2 could be isolated.
b) 138.000 * 16.500 kWh => 2.2 TWh Energy saved by the isolation

Links:

Bedeutung von Kern- und Fusionskraftwerken
Kernkraftwerk Gundremmingen
Energiesparen im Haushalt

We can solve it...

Al Gore and his foundation 'Organisation Alliance for Climate Protection' search for people to join:

http://www.wecansolveit.org/

Another change of the economical system?

I think the movie of Annie Leonard contains a lot of truth and important points. For me the key point is the currently established economical system, which requires permanent growth.

From my point of view this system is causing most of the currently observed problems. Such a system could only work for a long time in an environment of unlimited resources, otherwise such a system will hit at a certain time borders. And that is what we are currently facing - the system starts obviously hitting it's borders.

Only these days some people start to understand the impact of the changes caused by us since the start of industrialisation, with it's genius idea of mass production, which lead after about 150 years simplified to a list of huge problems:

- overpopulations of humans
- crisis on energy to maintain the system
- severe interference with the biosphere of the planet (changing the climate, extinction of enormous amount of species - plants and animals - and hence reducing the natural bio diversity)
- Prosperity in limited areas of the planet on the cost of other regions

It is extremely remarkable that it took only 150 years to get to this situation! And still only few people would admit that we have to change!

From my point of view it will be required to find a way to have a economy (I assume there will be no system without), which is based on balance instead of growth.

For a very long period in history the human societies lived in balance with their environment (at least on the level of problems they had to face compared to the once we have to face!!). But why? One reason is for sure that consume had a totally different meaning compared to what it means today in our society. In former times things were bought and produced because they were needed and they were used as long as they could be used. Yes, of course the real rich had some luxury but I would assume that is negligible. So "normal" people had their 1 or 2 pairs of shoes, some clothes, and the stuff they needed for there living. Stuff was inherited from parents and was further used! What is happening nowadays? Out of fashion, old, used? Of course we throw the things to the trash. This is luxury! Of course we do not realize anymore what luxury life we actually live. I would assume that Design, latest Fashion and so on were less important then functionality and durability in previous times.

I am pretty sure that we will need to step back, step back to a system, where the individual will have to limit it’s rate of consumption of goods. To a system with the aim to maintain balance not growth.

The first argument against such a system from industry, companies and so on will be that balance will mean stagnancy. I disagree, even if the overall economy for a society would be kept stable on a certain level of energy consumption, of acceptable impacts on the environment would this really imply that no progress is possible anymore? I doubt that! Why should it? Companies could still compete with each other to get a bigger share on the overall economy and new technology will provide advantages against competitors as they do now.

it goes too far…

who needs islamic terrorists, when there are so many already among us?

Stop the clash of civilizations

the pope reads our blog!!

The pope has apparently been reading our manifesto and came up with similar ideas for his new seven deadly sins. Except for genetic modifications and cloning which we have left out, he adopted environment pollution, social injustice, causing poverty and being obscenely wealthy. He also has "taking drugs" as a sin, which we generally addressed as "respect yourself and your body", under the "respect the other" bullet.

Nothing against it, but Ben, you should quote your sources next time!

What I found interesting in this article is the claim that the original sins are currently becoming virtues, and the part on social sins, when a society sins, who should actually pay for it?

The real cost of things

I looked at the movie that Bruno recommended, and it made me think about the real cost of things. Indeed we are nowadays able to buy goods which cost so little, it is hard to imagine that the cost one pays pays indeed for the work and materials that went into the making of the product.
When one thinks of selling the product of the own work, to price the product one considers all the costs: raw materials, time cost - how much time went into the making of the product- , tools cost - which tools are required, how much they cost and last -, premises - rental cost of the premises, including utility bills, even if one is working at home, these are costs that should be taken into consideration.
Now, you can argue that by making products in Asia or low cost countries, that you pay less for work, the raw materials having the same cost you achieve a lower cost product. this product still must be brought into our shops in the west, and that costs energy.

We take energy for granted. We go to the gas station, complain about the prices, fill up, turn our light switches on, and energy is always there. But just like any other product, when pricing energy one should take all factors into consideration.

But...how do you put a price on the production of oil or natural gas?

The price of research to find where the oil field is, the cost of getting a drilling platform to the place, people to drill it, and boats to get it to where it is needed (not mentioning the extra costs due to political situations), but, what about the raw material cost? How much does it cost to really produce the oil that is there under the ground? sometime in the past huge forests had to be grown and huge amounts of time had to be invested - by nature - in order for us to have that oil there. We are consuming the work nature did during millions of years, and we are not paying back the real value that nature deserves.

It is just like if we get someone to make the most elaborate work, takes him, days, moths, years to finish it, and at the end, we pat him on the back, and kick him out of the door with no reward, consuming the work of all that time in one afternoon. The result...not only we did not truly appreciate the result, but after all that time with no proper pay...there is nobody that can do the same work...

Is it fair to abuse nature like this?