Read the book; it *is* worth it.

On Jan 11, 6:04Â*am, delboy wrote:
On 10 Jan, 20:47, Tom Gardner wrote:



On Jan 10, 8:24Â*pm, Gary Evans wrote:

Quote from the book of Gore, chapter 7, verse 3.

Numbers can be our friend if we use them correctly.

As MacKay says ...

In a climate where people don’t understand the numbers, newspapers,
campaigners, companies, and politicians can get away with murder.

We need simple numbers, and we need the numbers to be comprehen-
sible, comparable, and memorable.

With numbers in place, we will be better placed to answer questions
such as these:
1) Can a country like Britain conceivably live on its own renewable
en-
ergy sources?
2) If everyone turns their thermostats one degree closer to the
outside
temperature, drives a smaller car, and switches off phone chargers
when not in use, will an energy crisis be averted?
3) Should the tax on transportation fuels be signi?cantly increased?
4) Should speed-limits on roads be halved?
5) Is someone who advocates windmills over nuclear power stations
“an enemy of the people�?
6) If climate change is “a greater threat than terrorism,� should
govern-
ments criminalize “the glori?cation of travel� and pass laws against
“advocating acts of consumption�?
7) Will a switch to “advanced technologies� allow us to eliminate car-
bon dioxide pollution without changing our lifestyle?
8) Should people be encouraged to eat more vegetarian food?
9) Is the population of the earth six times too big?

Hopefully yes to question 1 and possibly question 7, and no to the
rest.

"Hopefully" is intellectually lazy; we need numbers and
consequences (e.g. yes, X can happen provided that Y is
halved, or whatever)

MacKay gives such numbers and consequences, and presents
a number of possible futures.

As he says part way through the book

We are drawing to the close of Part I. The assumption was that we
want
to get off fossil fuels, for one or more of the reasons listed in
Chapter 1 –
climate change, security of supply, and so forth. Figure 18.9 shows
how
much power we currently get from renewables and nuclear. They amount
to just 4% of our total power consumption.
The two conclusions we can draw from Part I a
1. To make a difference, renewable facilities have to be country-
sized.
For any renewable facility to make a contribution comparable to
our
current consumption, it has to be country-sized. To get a big
contribu-
tion from wind, we used wind farms with the area of Wales. To
get a
big contribution from solar photovoltaics, we required half the
area
of Wales. To get a big contribution from waves, we imagined wave
farms covering 500 km of coastline. To make energy crops with a
big
contribution, we took 75% of the whole country.
Renewable facilities have to be country-sized because all
renewables
are so diffuse. Table 18.10 summarizes most of the powers-per-
unit-
area that we encountered in Part I.
To sustain Britain’s lifestyle on its renewables alone would be
very
dif�cult. A renewable-based energy solution will necessarily be
large
and intrusive.
2. It’s not going to be easy to make a plan that adds up using
renewables
alone. If we are serious about getting off fossil fuels, Brits
are going
to have to learn to start saying “yes� to something. Indeed to
several
somethings.
In Part II I’ll ask, “assuming that we can’t get production from
renew-
ables to add up to our current consumption, what are the other
options?�