The Third Industrial Revolution and new paradigms for Energy-Environment Strategies (Part 1)

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Luiz F. Lewis

Previously we mentioned the book The Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin.

This subject — of the Hydrogen Economy as we understand it — is of the utmost  importance in so many aspects of our Energy-Environment two sides of the same coin that we plan to continue and evolve our short series about the Hydrogen Economy, for which we have written two parts up until now.

Today we intend to briefly mention Rifkin’s new book. This new book has still to do with Energies Economies.

So recently, on Conversation Network’s Tech Nation podcast, Dr. Moira Gunn talked with Jeremy Rifkin about European energy conservation and what there is to be learned from it from his new book:

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World.

To give a further idea, here follows the book’s description:

The Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiraling into a dangerous endgame. The price of gas and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a sustainable economic game plan to take us into the future.

Here, Jeremy Rifkin explores how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create a powerful “Third Industrial Revolution.” He asks us to imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories, and sharing it with each other in an “energy internet,” just like we now create and share information online.

Rifkin describes how the five-pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the way we conduct commerce, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.

Rifkin’s vision is already gaining traction in the international community. The European Union Parliament has issued a formal declaration calling for its implementation, and other nations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, are quickly preparing their own initiatives for transitioning into the new economic paradigm.

***

Here is a recital of important environment problems and its possible solutions, for instance, exploring the “lateral” (distributed) paradigm that already exists in Social Networks, the side-by-side approach. The idea of laterality in this sense comes to contrast with the term vertical, top-down approach, especially when it’s applied to the energy sector. (The vertical versus lateral approaches mean exactly the centralized versus distributed approaches, respectively.)

Under the vertical/centralized model, in many countries the electricity sector is comprised by large distribution companies, in general, connected to big centralized producers.

Thus this new Third Industrial Revolution paradigm calls for bringing this laterality factor into play.  This way the electricity sector would comprise many distributed renewable energy producers smartly feeding in a system that is capable of optimizing the energy consumption in a more environment friendly way.

That said, we find a union of two fundamental factors, ie, the distributed environment-friendly energy production with the intelligent electricity distribution as energy demand follows its ebb and flow, its tidal moves, through time and space.

Also in the laterality analogy, a network of producers might become “viral” in a positive sense, so that our energy-production matrix may ever increase its renewable sources portion against a should-be ever decreasing non-renewable carbon-emitting fossil percentage.

A lot has to be done for that dream-come-true picture to realize itself: technology needs to evolve, as it does on its own cycles and jumps, so to say; legislation needs to improve, and people need to change consumption behaviours and participate more on these planetary new Energy-Environment initiatives.

Though the space alloted to us here has come to its individual limit, we’ll continue this conversation through next posts. As we return to the subject, we’ll mention among other themes:

  1. the great environmental problems related to energy production and societal habits (Rifkin lists three major ones);
  2. the 5 pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution;
  3. important points of the 2007 European Commitment that Rifkin helped draft and organize.

In the hope of ever improving this conversation, we’ll continue next time.

Till then!

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The capability of measuring temperatures from the past: the various approaches to Paleoclimate Data (Part 1)

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Luiz F. Lewis

One of the wonders of modern science is the  capability of measuring temperatures from the past. This endeavour goes by the name Paleoclimate Science.

There are three basic ideas underlying this possibility:

  1. Geothermal Borehole Paleoclimate Signatures
  2. Tree-rings
  3. Chemical compositions inside ice deposits

Let’s take a brief look at them:

[1] Geothermal Borehole Paleoclimate Signatures

Diurnal and seasonal temperature variations, the encounter of three variables: the Earth’s heat flow, the atmospheric-ground temperature and solar radiation absorption on the ground, produces a “paleoclimate” signal that is left as a “signature” in the temperature curve that is observed on the temperature profiling of boreholes.

[2] Tree-rings

Large trees that form large rings and have a long age on Earth are capable of giving us an indirect clue on how much CO2 there might have been available in the atmosphere. This method in contrast to the previous one is much more indirect due to the fact that a property inside the tree relates to a property on the air that has some correlation to the property “temperature then”.

[3] Chemical compositions on ice deposits

During eons of time, ice formation and accumulation occurred on regions close to Earth’s poles. As water turned into ice, soluble gases on the water became frozen with it, so to say, giving up an indirect signal that may be correlated to past temperatures.

 

***

From the 3 methods above mentioned, the first is usually considered a direct method, but again the method sees, so to say, a signature and tries to “translate” it – this is important to be said for nobody went backwards in time in order to place a thermometer with a chronometer on the ground somewhere – or on various latitudes and longitudes – on Earth.

Why is it important to measure paleotemperatures?

This is very important today due to the hypothesis of Global Warming correlated to increasing levels of carbon concentration in the atmosphere.

In the documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore shows with graphics the important discovery of the correlation between increase of carbon in the atmosphere and increase of global temperatures.

This brings, in its turn, a dreadful nightmarish doubt concerning how dangerous, for more or for less, is this filling-up the atmosphere with carbon that was, before we started heavily exploiting fossil oil, “securely” stocked up in the underground.

The subject here will be continued. We intend to further discuss the following:

  1. Do we have good data for the methods above mentioned?
  2. Do results from different methods agree?
  3. Do these results help ratify the hypothesis of Global Warming?
  4. Are we taking too much risk in spoiling the Earth for future generations?
  5. If so, should we not be more careful and more proactive towards the goal of diminish anthropogenic atmospheric carbon emissions everywhere?

Till then!

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In the pursuit of the Hydrogen Economy (Part 2)

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Luiz F. Lewis

Previously at the end of Part 1, attention was called to the fact that this so-called idealized Hydrogen Economy was still somehow far from us, as it was written:

Thus the Hydrogen Economy is idealized to be the replacement to this ending Petroleum Economy. But there is a catch one must recognize: hydrogen is not yet an economically competitive technology.

We’ll come back in a moment to the subject of the Hydrogen Economy as a possible “natural” “future” replacement to the current, though not environment-friendly, Petroleum Economy.

Meanwhile, let’s briefly take a look at Hydrogen as a fuel itself.

Hydrogen as a fuel

Hydrogen molecule (H2) is not found in nature. It must be made from chemical processes. Usually the first process that comes to mind is the simple hydrolysis process, where hydrogen and oxigen are dissociated from water molecules under the action of an electric current.

This process has some problems in terms of efficiency, then in terms of costs. First, we must bear in mind that we want hydrogen to generate electricity in fuel cells. So if we want hydrogen to produce electricity, using electricity to produce it seems to be an inefficient method, for there are energy losses in this transformation process, ie, more electric energy is used to produce hydrogen than the electricity amount this produced hydrogen will be able to repose back. That’s what engineers and physicists call an inefficient convertion process.

Nevertheless there seems to be a possible scenario for this kind of hydrogen production.

Ineffiency in exchange for Strategy

A plausible scenario for hydrolysis production is one where renewable alternative energy sources such as wind and solar are used locally in-site — ideally at non-urban areas where electricity may be an unfair competitive economical substitute –, with the intent to produce small amounts of hydrogen. These small amounts would then be used — strategically — to generate electricity at peak consumption moments and at moments where the renewable energy source becomes intermittently unavailable.

So renewable energy resource intermittency is a plausible and good excuse for the use of a more expensive hydrogen production mechanism such as hydrolysis, for in such case inefficiency is accepted in exchange of having hydrogen stocks to be used up at the moments when the renewable natural resource is not available: dark periods at night for solar energy and lack of wind for eolic energy.

Criticisms against inefficient hydrogen production methods

Criticisms to the above mentioned idea concern the fact that one might very well use conventional batteries, instead of producing hydrogen via the expensive hydrolysis method and storing it in a somewhat also expensive system. Indeed this whole “strategy” racionale is not easy to prove unless a larger commoditization of the Hydrogen Economy comes around to make it less expensive than it is today.

Thus the easeness to this criticism arrives from a scenario of a highly commoditized hydrogen economy getting up to speed, bringing prices down and improving the overall production technologies.

On coming next posts, we plan to also mention some of the problems with the most economic method known today for producing Hydrogen: the catalytic reform from natural gas. It’s the cheapest way of making hydrogen but it brings into play the problem of atmospheric carbon emissions.

Diversity as a good practice

At the next time, as we go to Part 3, we’ll continue the subject picking up from the idea that “diversity is a good practice” and as the popular saying tells us:

It is not wise to put all your eggs in the same basket, for, if the basket falls down, all the eggs may be lost.

We’ll also pay attention to the following ideas concerning the Hydrogen Economy:

  1. Hydrogen is, as is electricity, a secondary energy source;
  2. Hydrogen then becomes, as does electricity, an exchange currency;
  3. Hydrogen is convertible back and forth to electricity, though nature imposes thermodynamical energy losses for conversions;
  4. Hydrogen has its promise of economical feasibility as a spread-out worldwide commodity.

 

Till then!

 

 

 

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In the pursuit of the Hydrogen Economy (Part 1)

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Luiz F. Lewis

In 2003, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book titled The Hydrogen Economy. Well, perhaps it was written a little too early, giving us important breakthrough previsions earlier than in fact they could happen.

 

But come this Hydrogen Economy will. For come it must and come it may if efforts are set in motion to the proper direction, with the balanced willingness that we all should devote to it.

 

But what is this Hydrogen Economy?

 

To understand it we may start from the point of view that we live in a Petroleum Economy, for most of the industrial world depends on fossil oil to move its engines and produce electricity.

 

But fossil oil brings us a couple of major problems:

 

  1. it is heading towards exhaustion;
  2. before it’s exhausted or it becomes more expensive as it gets harder to find, we must dimish its use for achieving lesser amounts of atmospheric carbon emissions.

 

 

Let’s just improve the two items a little bit:

 

[1]

Fossil oil is heading towards exhaustion as we are yet too dependent on it. Our transport system in a large scale is very much based on petrol fuels.

 

Oil reserves on the planet are, as all planetary resources, finite. As we exploit them out and consume their stocks, the remaining oil starts to become more difficult to explore and exploit. The economic law of demand versus offer will motivate increase in prices. The picture of this situation is that petroleum will become more expensive as less of it is available. It will not end from one day to another, but it will become a more expensive commodity for more “noble” uses, petrochemical applications for instance.

 

[2]

Before oil reserves are exhausted or they become more expensive as they get harder to find, we must dimish its use for achieving lesser amounts of atmospheric carbon emissions.

 

This is for sure an urgent problem due to the hypothesis of Global Warming correlated to increasing levels of carbon concentration in the atmosphere.

 

As guardians of this planet, so to speak, we must watch out and make this effort worldwide, for Earth is our home and future generations depend a lot on our actions now.

 

 

Hydrogen Economy to replace Petroleum Economy

======================================

 

Thus the Hydrogen Economy is idealized to be the replacement to this ending Petroleum Economy. But there is a catch one must recognize: hydrogen is not yet an economically competitive technology.

 

***

 

We have arrived to the end of the space alloted to this article for now. Nevertheless we hope to continue it next time from where we have just left it out.

 

Till then!

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All carbon emissions end up on us in their accountings (the importance of carbon emission neutralization)

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Luiz F. Lewis

In the pursuit of diminishing atmospheric carbon emissions, we all play a role.

Researchers and specialists, they all say there are two practical ways of reducing carbon emissions:

1) one very first way is through continuous breakthroughs in technology, however small they may be, so that the new technology is understood as an improvement over its predecessor, emitting less carbon for the same energy and work needs;

2) the second way is through diminishing individual consumption of energy that is carbon-emitting. This second way befalls on the customs and habits and cultural aspects of our lives. It naturally appeals to us both as a strategic approach to energy that each one of us must search and also as a kind of sacrifice in the trying of consuming less carbon-emitting-related products.

Having said that, we might ask ourselves the question:

How could I, personally, emit less carbon?

There are many ways people can reduce their emissions. One hypothesis might be:

1) “Okay, let’s leave the car in the garage and go on foot this mile to the Shopping Center…”

or

2) “The day is hot enough I can take a room temperature water shower, instead of using the boiler”.

Well, many personal side actions will indeed have economic consequences, but that is a kind of rebalancing on the scales, so to say.

At the end, all carbon emissions end up on us, each one of us, individually, in the carbon emission accounting.

This conscience is important on a second layer of thought: the importance of neutralizing our own carbon emissions.

After emitting carbon, how do we neutralize it? Well, we only know of one initiative, at least on the personal individual level, and that is: plant trees.

On the next post, we’ll continue.

Till then!

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Welcome to the very first post! (Carbon Atmospheric Emission and Earth’s Green-House Effect)

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Luiz F. Lewis

Welcome to the very first post!

Here I will be writing about Energy and Environment. Energy meaning a search for the best environmental ways in which we should produce energy for our societal needs and Environment meaning our concern that we should treat it well, for indeed our lives and those of our descendants will depend upon it.

In the area of energy and environment, we have many problems. One of biggest of them is global warming — a phenomenon that resembles the green-house warming that is caused due to the trapping of infrared radiation within glass walls and roof.

On Earth, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a green-house effect gas. To some extent the green-house effect gives us the temperature range that is just needed for us, humans, in particular, for life everywhere, in general. However, cientists have questioned the problem whether or not a sharp increase in CO2 atmospheric concentration may produce higher increases in temperature that may cause great damage to ourselves, in our countries and cities.

Because of that there is a general agreement, as much in the sciences as in political arenas, that industrial society must reduce atmospheric carbon emissions.

This occupies the space we had allotted  for today. In the next post soon, we’ll continue to develop this so important theme on these post-modern days of ours.

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