A Tale of Two Planets - our Doomsday prediction and the way out.

We have heard about climate change, global warming, green house effect etc.. but among the general noise of work, advertisements, entertainment, gossip etc they also fade away as any other topic would. In todays well connected, busy and distracting world, nothing can maintain the scope or be in the center of attention for more than a week.

There are other philosophical questions/thoughts as well about who we are and what our goals, purpose are but they too have no chance keeping up with the changing, dynamic, eventful busy world. Human mind has this weakness.. even if it manages to identify what is the essence, most important issues and priorities (once in a blue moon that is).. it cant stay focused on those priorities for much long. If we finally manages to have a long term focus on something, they are usually the less important things like jobs, careers, profits etc.

How dare we say things like careers are less important ? Well, they are less important because there are simply more important things than them, whether we like that or not. However important they may be, once in a blue moon realizations don't have much more of a chance than a snow flake in hell to compete (in terms of grabbing and sustaining the attention and focus of our minds) against day to day issues, matters like economies and careers, gossip, news, hobbies. So we fall back to maintain the status quo and life goes on as usual....

However, there are those rare times when u hear a story..... stories are powerful. A proper story connects with you and your beliefs and values in a way that the message get sinks in like no other. These stories change the world.  Some of Ted Talks have done that for few people, so I have heard. Some of powerful speeches from influential people have done that for some others. It could be Martin Luther Kings 'I have a dream', or Mahathma Gandhi or Steve jobs 'connecting the dots' to some. For most of us, we probably haven't heard the story meant for us, not yet!

This is about such a story... I heard a part of it first from 'Cosmos' TV series from Neil de Grass Tyson. 

I later read the essence of it in the form of a quote from Elon Musk. 

See whether this is the one which was waiting for you!

Story goes like this....


Venus and Earth are sister planets, in that they are very similar to each other. They are close, about the same distance to the sun, similar sizes with hard surfaces and an atmosphere. Similarities were much numerous several hundreds of millions of years ago.

Like its sister Earth, Venus also was a beautiful planet. It had its own nice blue oceans of liquid water. It was a heavenly planet, conditions were very close to that of bearing life. However, there were violent volcanic actions on Venus which continuously put billions of tons of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide levels in the air contributed to Green House effect where the sun light could come through the CO2 layer into the planet but can not get out of it, and hence it traps suns energy, raising temperatures higher and higher. much like how the high temperatures are maintained inside green houses.

When green house effect reaches certain level it becomes like a chain reaction, leading into rapid temperature rises, we call it a runaway green house effect. This is exactly what happens to the Venus, rising temperatures made the sea water evaporate into atmosphere and then leaked away slowly into the space. Venus never saw water again, and the beautiful blue oceans were no more. Meanwhile temperatures rose even faster... Fast forward to few hundreds of millions of years to the present day and we see Venus today is a much hotter planet than even Mercury (which, as you know is much closer to the sun). With high temperatures Venus has a high atmospheric pressure as well. It's dry, hot and very inhospitable to life. A hell, in short....

This was the natural path which was set for its sister as well. Earth also has high volcanic activity those days and writing was on the wall basically. However, a nice twist of things happened here on earth. A thing called trees appeared!

Trees had this habit of taking Carbon Dioxide out of the atmosphere, releasing Oxygen back and storing Carbon in its bodies. Rapid expansion of Trees meant slowly Oxygen levels in the atmosphere rose while Carbon levels were kept in check.

Of course the body of tree eventually die, decompose and Carbon Dioxide (via the activity of micro organisms) will go back into atmosphere. However, this decomposing process is much slower compared to expansion of trees, by the time one decompose, several more tress would grow into take more Carbon Dioxide out.  More importantly, large parts of Trees and Animal bodies got trapped beneath the earth surface and got stored as hydrocarbons. Since this was below the surface these carbon stores were there for millions of years. This made the carbon cycle to break and atmospheric carbon levels never grew into threatening levels capable of creating a green house effect.

Therefore, success of life as we know it on planet Earth is very much indebted to the fact that carbon being stored below earth surface (due to the activity of trees) without getting it into the atmosphere.

Without this storage, earth too would have very well followed its close sisters path.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what we have been reversing in past few decades. In our moment of madness and greed, we are digging up buried carbon, bringing them back up to the surface and burn them into the atmosphere! Currently we add as much as 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year!

Now to the dangerous runway green house effect.. this is the chain reaction when one thing leads to more of the same, until the cycle becomes unbreakable and too late to stop. We are seeing signs of it even now.. increased temperatures mean less ice in polar caps, less ice means less sun light reflected back into space, means further increases in temperatures. Methane (an even more dangerous green house gas than carbon dioxide) buried in the bottom of sea bed get released when sea water reach certain high temperatures, Methane trapped in perma frost get released when those areas in siberia get defrosted... etc. Once these actions reach a certain tipping point, there is no way back and it will be too late to reverse..

Imagine Venus... a hot, boiling, barren hell which was once a beautiful planet with a blue ocean.

Elon Musk has summarized this as follows.
"Burning Fossil Fuels Is the Dumbest Experiment in History, By Far."

Changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans by adding enormous amounts of CO2 that have been buried since the Precambrian Era is a crazy experiment indeed.

Once we see fossil fuels in this angle, we can never go back and see it as a precious resource or as 'black gold' anymore. The most important and possibly the only real use we can get from Fossil Fuels is to keep them safely buried under the ground, never to be dug up ever again! 

The greatest challenge in our generation is to battle climate change. That is to reduce and stop carbon emissions. In other words, to get away from fossil fuels! This is the most glorious battle field there ever can be in our generation, where heroes will be made and villains will be defined. 

Lighting Up The Dark!

(wikipedia)

In the last post we came up with a short term solution to how we can immediately stop (well within 3-4 years that is) the additional carbon emissions by cutting down fossil fuel usage by 50% and save the world while keeping economies going as well. Of course we assumed that rich countries would agree to such a solution and invest money in building few efficient nuclear reactors pretty soon. While even the moderate kyoto protocol which is no where near cutting carbon emissions by half in near future, is not agreed up by the world biggest carbon emitter USA, we may be just dreaming in here.

Still, what we have is a practical solution. A short term one, something like this can happen one day when the world leaders finally realize it's about time to take some real action on carbon emissions. Meanwhile, let's see what could be a good long term solution.

As discussed in the earlier post, dramatically and aggressively increase the production of nuclear energy to about 50% of worlds total energy consumption (currently nuclear energy is at 8.5%) is our short term solution to meet increasing energy requirements while cutting down on fossil fuel. Still, that too will last only for 15-20 years, however, in this time we should learn to power up the ultimate energy source the world has got. Clean, abundant, plentiful, natural, and harm free, all powerful Solar Energy! 15 years of concentrated effort is all what this industry need to deliver goods...

The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses in one hour is more than the annual global energy consumption!

In the main post image, if only the solar power is harnessed in areas covered by black dots, total world energy requirement can be met! Those black dots are all situated in the deserts, the land currently can not be used for any other purpose. This is assuming the efficiency of solar panels will stay at the current levels of 8%-9% but this is something which is expected to rise up to 15% based on recent research.

Using the clean, free and abundant solar energy to fulfill all our energy requirement is a dream which can be realized and achieved in our life times!

Consider following statistics :

• In 1950s at it's start, solar cell based power production cost was $286 per watt and efficiency of the technology was just 4%-5% 
• In 2010 the cost for a watt was $1.80 while efficiency was 8%-9%
• At the end of 2011 the cost is is expected to be $1.50 per watt. Efficiency too is expected to reach 15% in very near future. (wikipedia) 

There are 2 main methods of harnessing solar energy.
1) Photovoltaic (PV) using solar panels, direct conversion of solar energy to electricity (8-9% of efficiency) This field is recording a 20% of annual growth.

2) Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) Using solar power to heat water/oil and then use that to operate a traditional electricity generator. Cost of generating electricity using this type of solar power is now approaching that of fossil fuel based generation. In addition, this method requires less area (space) about 10 times less area than PV methods above. However, CSP is large scale production while PV can be done even in households. Annual growth is 40%.

In addition to these there are other methods like thermoelectric where the thermal different of two sheets will be used to generate electricity or generation of hydrogen out of water molecules using solar energy. 

One thing very noticeable with solar energy research and advancements are that they have grown very rapidly during oil crisis such as 1970-1985 and again from 1997 - 2009 During these periods, governments have put lot of money into research and provided grants and subsidies as well to encourage the use and generation of solar power that has noticeably improve the innovation. During the times when oil was cheap, such as 1985-1997 growth in solar power sector got slowed down.

Recent innovations driven by the necessity in the last oil shortage was staggering and very promising as well as exciting. For instance, new technology of using viruses to convert sun light into electricity cheaply, 3D solar cells which can dramatically increase the efficiencies, thin wearable sheets of solar panels and photovoltaic  inks from nanotechnology etc are only few of several advances.

It is said that once nanotechnology advances and production cost of solar panels become cheap, our roads and highways will be built from solar panels which would power up whole world freely and forever without taking any additional lands! Now, that's just an indication of the potential and how exciting the prospects can be in the advancement of solar technologies...

This is the time world should  invest more on solar energy, it will definitely be able to pay back when we start to run out of fossil fuels and Uranium.

May be equatorial countries can export solar energy to industrial countries in northern hemisphere in the winter! equatorial countries can make some additional revenue from carbon credits as well in future when the world is concentrating on bring the carbon levels down! All this would be good news for the world as a whole and developing countries in particular.

After all, Sun is distributing it's blessings in much more democratic and fair manner than fossil fuels ever have!

End the burning, Cool down and Clean up!

 (treehugger.com)

In our last post which was triggered by some discussions at few other blogs, we discussed the problems of consumerism. There, we found the need for some vital statistics on the effects of consumerism. Anyway, some of most interesting and widely discussed subjects these days are on global warming, oil prices, when the oil going to run out what next etc...

Come to think of it, exactly :

How much Fossil Fuel do we actually have in world reserves currently ?
What are the rate we are burning them and how long will they last ?

On the other hand, can we really afford to burn the remaining carbon fuels in the light of increasing CO2 levels and the threat of global warming?

What are the  alternatives we have?

Well, answers to those are easy to find these days! At least the part of finding the statistics, analyzing them with common sense and existing knowledge and coming up with a set of logical conclusions is not too difficult. Difficulty will be in getting people (or societies, economies) to change their current beliefs and behaviors! not to mention the policy makers.

Anyway let's have a look at the statistics first (from wikipedia) :

Currently we have around 1200 billion barrels of oil in proven reserves. Of which we use about 84 million barrels daily at current production rate. Therefore oil is believed to last 43 more years.

Similarly, about 905 billion metric tonnes of Coal is available with the production rate of about 18 million metric tonnes daily. Therefore Coal will last for 148 years.

Availability of natural Gas is about 180 trillion cubic meters, at current production rates will last till about 60 more years.

These figures haven't taken into account the fact that the demand for these resources increase steadily each year by about 2.3%. However, world production for oil have already peaked, meaning we can not produce any more daily than we are producing right now! Coal and gas too is nearing peak production.

Now to the fun job of analysis :

The reason not to take the increased demand into account (in above calculations) is that it doesn't matter! What ever the demand is, world production is now peaked. Imagine a well with water to last 43 days. Your pump or the tap has a fixed limited rate of which you are taking water out. Now you get visitors and need more water and your well have got it as well. Still, you can not get more out since your output (tap size) is limited, so the well will still last for 43 days, you will just have to manage with whatever amount of water it gives daily until 43 days, after which you will not get even that limited amount. zero! nothing!

hmm that doesn't sound good does it ?  wait.. it's about to get worse! :

Demand increases but the supply stays stable, what does that tell us ? It means more and more fuel shortages and increased price in future. It will get worse in each year until about 30 years after which oil might get too expensive for many practical usages. This will have an impact on coal and gas too as non availability of oil will increase the demand for gas and coal, their prices too will go dramatically up. So we can have following conclusions form our analysis so far :
1) In short term, higher fuel prices and shortages will slow down world economies and growth.
2) In about 30 years, oil, gas and coal all will be too expensive to make their usage impractical for most of tasks.

Only two things can stop this scenario. Let's list them down..
A) Technical advances which enable us to get the same work done by consuming less fuel. (like hybrid cars)
B) Economical slow downs and low growth rates, driving the consumption down. This second outcome is the same as conclusion 1 we stated above, one thing leads to another. Same sad story!

So our only hope seems to lie in technological advances to get more out of same amount of fuel. Remember, this is not about burning less, this is about getting more out of the amount we are already burning per year to meet the growing demand for energy. How practical is that to expect in three decades? Well, history have taught us never to underestimate the advance of science and technology. Hybrid cars and Bloom Boxes are two examples.

Problem is not much about the technical innovations, it's more about peoples capacity and readiness to change and adapt to new technologies. This means relaying of new infra structure (this is one reason why Hydrogen fuel cells vehicles didn't take off), changing attitudes and mindset of people (even after more than a decade of history, hybrid vehicles are still a small fraction of all vehicles running on roads for example), mass production of new technology and survive early periods of trial and error. It generally take time to master a new technology and evangelize it, mass produce with new manufacturing plants etc So even if a technological revolution of increasing the fuel efficiency is possible, we may be running up on time for that. Remember we have only 3 decades left, we may need to start right now!

Now what about other available main energy sources, namely hydroelectricity and nuclear energy? Obviously, Hydro electricity has a limitation imposed by available good enough natural locations. Most available such locations are already being used. Other problems are the impact man made reservoirs have on wild life, environment, soil and eventual filling up of reservoirs by mud deposits resulting from erosion of soil over time. Still, production can be increased but no where near to a level of filling the huge gap fossil fuels going to leave  us with. Currently, hydroelectricity gives us only about 6% of total energy production. That leaves us with the possibility of Nuclear energy.

(wikipedia)

Even if we discard the potential dangers of nuclear plants like the recent tragedy in Japan after the tsunami, nuclear energy too has one big shortcoming. It is non-renewable! Like fossil fuels the fuel needed for nuclear reactors, Uranium is in short supply. According to statistics current known Uranium reserves (type which good enough in quality to be used in Nuclear reactors) which are economically and technically viable to use are enough to generate power for about 100 more years AT THE CURRENT PRODUCTION LEVEL.  Currently we use nuclear energy to cover about 8.5% of global energy need. Clearly, with fossil fuels diminishing and unable to supply the increased demand, Nuclear energy has to contribute lot more if we are to meet the energy demand and to keep economical growth.

This brings us to the next dimension of the problem. Even if we have fossil fuels, we can not afford to burn them anywhere near current rates due to environmental impacts! Now, Here are the statistics for that.

Currently, fossil fuels(oil, coal, gas) amount to 85% of total energy production.
Burning of fossil fuel is producing 21.3 billion tonnes of CO2 annually.
The world eco system can absorb only half of that amount for a year. 
(from wikipedia)

We are producing 10.5 billion tonnes of more CO2 yearly and it is increasing as well! effects of these emissions (global warming, climate change, rising sea levels, floods, cyclones) are well known and we are already experiencing them.

If we are to give priority to save the world and environment (which is nearing a tipping point in terms of global warming) and avert a disaster, reducing the use of fossil fuels by around 50% is a must. With only 50% of consumption from current we can double their life to about 85-90 years! that is enough time for new technologies to come in and make use of fossil fuels much more efficiently, enabling us to keep them for even longer periods! this sounds like win-win!  However, That means only 43% of current energy requirement can be allowed to fulfill by burning of fossil fuels. Remaining 57% has to come by other sources.

Currently, other renewable energy sources (hydro, solar, wind, geo thermal) are all producing only about 7% of energy need in total. Technological advances have to be made in these sectors to grow this amount significantly over the coming decades. Specially Solar energy (more on that later) obviously, this will take time.....

Until those technical advances are made, how are we to immediately fill the gap of remaing 50% of our annual energy need (further 2.3% get added to it annually!) ? The only short term hope is to go nuclear! It's current usage of 8.5% will have to be increased  by about 6 folds! If we remember the Uranium resources statistics, at current rates it was enough for 100 years but once we increase the production by 6 folds, Uranium too will be gone in 16 years!

Hmm looks like all we have a got here is a short term solution after all. What could be a long term strategy for this problem ?

Stay tuned.. in the the next post we will pick up a possible long term solution. We have 16 years for that! (kidding, I'm just splitting my post in two at this point as this is already getting too long)

PS : Just published. To the long term solution ->