onegoodmove

Bjorn has it right, Al doesn't. http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dtbn9zBfJSs

Darn, I almost recommended this yesterday. I never get the "tip to".

Bjorn has it right

Bjorn seems to have trouble understanding that the world is a system.

Global warming increases the Spread of Malaria, encephalitis , and Lyme as insect don't die in warm winters. Global poverty and nutrition are effected by droughts, floods and hurricanes.

Not to mention the possibly catastrophic losses of life from severe climate change and ocean rise.

For the price of preventing a single case of malaria in a hundred years through climate change initiatives you could prevent 30,000 today. Climate change is best battled not through the technologies of today but by the knowledge of tomorrow. In 20 years we will have the capability through nanotech and biotech to vastly affect the environment in ways we can only dream of now. The money should be spent in researching those technologies or on saving people who are suffering today, instead of wasting 300 million on an ad campaign to make rich middle class people fell like they can save the world by washing with cold instead of hot and sticking an inefficient solar panel on their roof.

not through the technologies of today but by the knowledge of tomorrow.

They have been saying that since the 70's and its just not the case.

Facts are if we are driving internal combustion engines, companies will keep developing new combustion engines, If we force them to start producing some non fossil fuel powered vehicles, they will put more resources those.

The technology of the futures will only be profitable to mass produce if people spend money to develop them, companies will avoid doing that as long as they possibly can.

Futureland is a ride at Disney Land not a solution to real problems.

For the price of preventing a single case of malaria in a hundred years through climate change initiatives you could prevent 30,000 today.

Who comes up with that number?

How much of a gamble are they putting on the number of deaths Climate change will cause.

Maybe its a million lives for same amount as the 30,000 today.

Not to mentin the potential cost of relocation and Leveser systems to accomidate changes in climate.

If drought continues in the SE of the US, how much does it cost to move all those people somewhere with water?

Leveser systems = levee and water systems

Its an extrapolation from what the IPCC report believes the cost of preventing cases caused by climate change will be. 30,000 is conservative in my opinion seeing as anti malaria drugs are getting cheaper and implementing them will also have a huge impact on affected third world countries productivity. Regarding the rate of technological change in Biotech, more new information about biology is produced every month in an average bioinformatics company than was acquired in the entire 20th century. This is due to Moore's law, what once took a thousand scientists to work out over a years time now takes a team of five and a supercomputer a week. "The technology of the futures will only be profitable to mass produce if people spend money to develop them, companies will avoid doing that as long as they possibly can." Exactly, thats why I say spend the money on R&D. There is a coming arms race but this time its a race to the bottom, nanotechnology. Russia just announced another $7 billion for its nanotech industry, China is planning on having a $144.9 Billion nano industry by 2015. trying to deal with the climate today is kind of like trying to make a transatlantic flight in 1909, ten years before there was an aircraft capable of doing so. Instead of spending billions to accomplish very little with underdeveloped technology(Al Gore's proposal), spend it on gaining the ability to do so and help people suffering today(Bjorn Lomborg's proposal).

To clarify why nano/biotech are so important. A mature biotechnology would means being able to control though synthetic organisms CO2 levels. Nanotechnology means having batteries with capacities literally thousands of times larger than todays chemical storage methods, allowing for electric cars to vastly out preform combustion engines(they already can in terms of efficiency and energy transfer rate). It will also mean solar energy as cheap as a can of paint, they already have demonstrated solar paint in the lab but it will take millions and alot of effort to get it to production scale, but once it is it will provide far more power than todays silicon solar power(which isn't what I would call environmentally friendly to mine).

Exactly, thats why I say spend the money on R&D.

And that is is exactly why you sign Kyoto and force everyone to comply.

If every car company had to sell a certain number of electric or hybrid cars they would all be researching a way to do it, rather then just leasing the technology from Toyota, which the current state of affairs.

I find it amusing that some hold an assumption that a higher level of technological advancement will fix this problem. It's like saying if we all buy lots more stuff, but more advanced stuff, it'll all be okay.

And some people think science is a hedge against blind faith.

The List

"It's like saying if we all buy lots more stuff, but more advanced stuff, it'll all be okay."

No, its more like saying in the 1950's "Instead of spending money to fight polio with Campbells Soup, maybe we should spend it to find a vaccine.".

Nice list Syngas, better beer and cannibalism lmfao.

Regarding the rate of technological change in Biotech, more new information about biology is produced every month in an average bioinformatics company than was acquired in the entire 20th century. This is due to Moore's law, what once took a thousand scientists to work out over a years time now takes a team of five and a supercomputer a week.

Nanotechnology means having batteries with capacities literally thousands of times larger than todays chemical storage methods,

Air420,

I have writing and publishing papers in the field of inorganic solid state chemistry and related fields for 27 years and reading research proposals in the same areas for nearly as long. If I were reading a proposal or a paper that made claims like these - without mind-blowing ideas and/or data to back them up - your paper or proposal would be rejected - not only by me, but by every other referee too.

Nanotech batteries with capacities "literally thousands of times larger than today's chemical storage methods", eh? I understand how batteries work, and have two former postdoctoral associates who work for Duracell - one of whom worked with Prof. John Goodenough when he developed the lithium cobalt oxide (cathode) batteries that are current state of the art. Unless you know of a way that nanotechnology will somehow repeal the laws of thermodynamics or will somehow reversibly perform nuclear reactions, your claim is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Nanotechnological batteries will still be chemical batteries - all nanotechnology is still fundamentally chemistry (barring the reversible nuclear battery!). The energy density that one can store in a battery is governed by chemical limits - whether its components are nanoparticles or nanotubes or nanoghosts and nanogoblins. The problem with prognostications by Bjorn (and you, apparently) is that the guy is an economist, not a scientist.

No one with any mature knowledge of any branch of science would say that "more new information is produced every month in an average bioinformatics company than was acquired in the entire 20th century" and think it meant very much. "Information" isn't knowledge, and while the field of biology is undoubtedly advancing rapidly, this kind of hyperbole, accompanied by your absurd claims about batteries push your credibility pretty close to zero.

'Nanogoblins'

I like that one Tim! It's even better than 'asshat'

'Nanogoblins'

I like that one Tim! It's even better than 'asshat'

1. I grew up in India, and as far back as I can remember I have always heard success stories of Gober Gas. Wikipedia tells me that there are now over 2 million households in Indian villages benefiting from this decades old technology.

2. My father in Bangalore recently told me of the city mayor's initiative for Rainwater Harvesting. Read more at Rainwater Club.

3. I have heard that Solar water heaters are 'almost' mandatory for all new independent houses in Bangalore. My parents house has had one for more than 20 years.

4. How many of us OneGoodMove readers here would be willing to dry their clothes in the sunshine and skip the electric dryers, if their regional weather conditions so permit?

Why do the big buck solutions to global warming drown out these third world solutions? I am sure that there are more of these innovations out there than just the compact flourescent bulbs that Al Gore refers to in this video.

Air420:

The reason information from science grows exponentially is because it builds on what we already know. The biotech industry of today couldn't possibly put out all of the information it does today had someone not implemented the information that was gained in the 20th century. Sure, they could have sat around and left the implementation to the future, but instead they took what they knew and used it and built on it. Technology doesn't make leaps and bounds. It occurs in increments.

With your rationale, cave men of yesterday shouldn't have implemented the wheel, because it pales in comparison to today's goodyears. They should have just spent time inventing the goodyear instead of trying to transport their stuff.

We use what we have. What we have now is far better than you pretend. If we do this, the technology will follow.

Bjorn has it right

I wish someone else had given that talk. Bjorn has credibility issues.

Bjorn seems to have trouble understanding that the world is a system.

Even "top economists" (a grating phrase the first time he said it) are only as good as their models.

I am sure that there are more of these innovations out there than just the compact flourescent bulbs that Al Gore refers to in this video.

There are. Wind power, for example, was illustrated in Gore's slide show. Worldwide wind power capacity quadrupled between 2000 and 2006 corresponding to an annual growth rate of 26% after accounting for "compounding"). The US added 45% more capacity in 2007. If the US were to sustain 40% annual growth for 10 years, wind power generated electricity would increase from 1% to 25% of total US electrical output. Wind power costs are now comparable to "clean coal" per Watt generated and, obviously, wind power's environmental impact is hugely preferable to almost any other viable power generation technology. Had we not been saddled with our current group of kleptocratic oil shills in the White House, we might be even further along.

By the way, what did you think of the Hawking talk? Of the recent TED talks, I sort of expected Norm to post that one for discussion.

500, 50 even 10 times the current capability will do the trick seeing as there are already commercially available cars that can get 221 miles per charge with today's lithium-ion batteries. A thousand times our current storage capability obliviously wont be achieved in a single paper, for the same reason Alan Turing didn't pop out an intel core 2. But I still don't think its impossible or unattainable in the distant future. "Information isn't knowledge" yes, but the ability to decipher and apply that information is also accelerating parallel to Moore's law. "No one with any mature knowledge of any branch of science would say that "more new information is produced every month in an average bioinformatics company than was acquired in the entire 20th century" and think it meant very much". Thank you for speaking on behalf of the scientific community, I guess I must be aware of some of the few examples of dissenters whose jobs and fortunes depend on this kind information. "The problem with prognostications by Bjorn (and you, apparently) is that the guy is an economist, not a scientist." Right, because only a scientist could make credible prognostications about the cost-benefit ratio of a project using financial reserves. I accept your apology.

We are in the infancy of nanotechnology and Here are some baby steps, Stanford 10x our current storage cap http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html MIT 10-year-plus lifetime http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/batteries-0208.html A123Systems, 90% charge in 5 minutes http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=1606

I have writing and publishing papers in the field of inorganic solid state chemistry and related fields for 27

Tim, Thanks.

All I could tell was, it was bullshit. Nice to have an expert around.

Complex technology doesn't just happen it takes years of research and varying applications before it becomes cheap enough to have broad consumer availability.

Its taken centuries to get the internal combustion engine where it is, and low carbon transportation and electricity may take as long, we need to get all industries researching it pronto.

How much does clean coal cost per watt? Becasue I know that Nanosolar is going to be selling its panels at a dollar per watt.

1.I grew up in India, and as far back as I can remember I have always heard success stories of Gober Gas. Wikipedia tells me that there are now over 2 million households in Indian villages benefiting from this decades old technology. 2.My father in Bangalore recently told me of the city mayor's initiative for Rainwater Harvesting. Read more at Rainwater Club. 3.I have heard that Solar water heaters are 'almost' mandatory for all new independent houses in Bangalore. My parents house has had one for more than 20 years. 4. How many of us OneGoodMove readers here would be willing to dry their clothes in the sunshine and skip the electric dryers, if their regional weather conditions so permit?

shriprem, there are already people who do 2-4; although Gober gas is unfamiliar to me. If it rains, there are always drying racks available to dry clothing inside.

We do need to push to sign Kyoto, or our corporations will never feel the push to go "green." They are too worried about the green that creates their bottom line, and they care nothing for Gore's submission that the old way will kill the business.

Speaking of Gore - don't die your hair, or go back to the way you were when it was black. The new Gore is WAY better. Where were you in 2000, damnit? Only thing is, I can't say McCain's environmental record is too terribly forward looking. Better than Bush, OK, but down to 0 (for not voting this year) from 24? Hardly progressive.

poop. My link isn't working, so here's the url:

http://www.lcv.org/newsroom/press-releases/lcv-releases-2007-national-environmental-scorecard.html

or google mccain ewnvironmental score or Sierra club...

500, 50 even 10 times the current capability will do the trick seeing as there are already commercially available cars that can get 221 miles per charge with today's lithium-ion batteries. A thousand times our current storage capability obliviously wont be achieved in a single paper, for the same reason Alan Turing didn't pop out an intel core 2. But I still don't think its impossible or unattainable in the distant future.

I'm sorry, but the fundamental physical limits to which materials are subject in the areas of information storage and energy storage are entirely different. These differences mean that the improvement of energy storage capacities will not increase by a factor of 500, or 50, or even 10 - notwithstanding the completely irrelevant fact that "Alan Turing didn't pop out an intel core 2" If you understood anything about energy storage, you'd understand that your comparison is, well, stupid.

The electrical potential difference between a battery in its charged and discharged state is, for example, a fundamental chemical/physical quantity than ALL batteries are constrained by. That potential difference can't be even doubled - there are just no materials available now or ever - from which one could conceivably build anodes or cathodes to get even a factor of two improvement. Please stop being a lazy loudmouth and read something about the subject before you make a bigger fool of yourself. Look at the electrical potential of existing batteries. Open up a table of reduction potentials - look at the strongest reducing agents and the strongest oxidizing agents, which themselves could never be used in practical batteries - but range of potentials limits the possible potential difference achievable in an electrochemical cell. That range is less than twice that in existing cells. One might increase capacity further by using lighter materials for the anode and cathode and by finding a material into which more lithium ions could be crammed per unit volume. (You can't do better than lithium - helium doesn't do the chemistry, hydrogen ions would be great, but their chemistry would limit the potential too much.) The anode material is already carbon - only boron would be lighter but boron doesn't form a convenient layered structure like graphite does - for intercalation of ions. The cathode is already an oxygen-rich metal oxide - hard to improve on that - maybe a lighter transition metal - but the chemistry of those is well worked over and they haven't worked out. Even if they did, the capacity would improve only marginally.

So, just because you "don't think its impossible or unattainable in the distant future" doesn't mean that it isn't. Learn a lot more about electrochemistry before you draw fallacious analogies between systems describable by Moore's law and those which aren't. You'll get my apology when you've earned it, pal.

That team at Stanford used silicon nanowires to improve the battery life 10 fold. This was done without the precision placement of the nanowires. The only way currently to manipulate individual atoms is with a scanning tunneling microscope, but if we were to in the "distant future" build a battery atom by atom wouldn't we see in this design considerable gains? At least equal to the previous gains made by the team? Fine, maybe 1000 time increase will never happen, but I still find it hard to believe battery design and capacity will now stay stagnant, and that the only appreciable gains over the coming decades, centuries and millennia will be in the double digit percentage.

Air480, Regarding the links you supplied: Interesting work by Cui's group and, if everything goes well, it could result in an appreciable improvement in battery capacity. However, an assistant professor who wants tenure at Stanford tends to exaggerate a bit! So, some holes in his claims (not in the science, but in the news report hype.): Even if the anode Li-graphite were replaced with Li-silicon, and the Li content is much higher (I don't recall exactly, but in Li-graphite it is something like Li-C12 or Li-C8 - Li-silicon it might be as high as LiSi.), the limiting factor in capacity soon becomes the cathode Li content. In fact, it was once hoped that one could use elemental lithium as the anode, but dendritic lithium formation led to fires in the batteries - remember the burning powerbooks? Cathode materials basically have to be a transition metal oxide or oxyfluoride because that's all that supplies a sufficient potential difference - and that will cap the "gravimetric capacity" referred to in the link I gave you at something only, say, 30-40% better than with existing anodes - Cui's hype notwithstanding. (The guy has grants to renew and tenure to make, after all.) Overall, you can make the most optimistic estimates possible and no one believes that entire working battery battery will have a capacity that exceeds those now in use by better than a factor of 3 - maybe 5 - under the most optimistic scenarios.

physical limits to which materials are subject in the areas of information storage and energy storage.

eg. Moore's law applied to hard disk drives: information storage vs. energy storage.

Bjorn is right?

These "economic prioritization" models seem convincing in the now, however, I wonder how they would resonate in some future where we are cooking in our own skins.

Bjorn is wrong because he doesn't understand that industry investment is what creates innovation and the full scope and longevity of the destructiveness of global climate change is not yet known.

Nothing like saving some one from malaria today only for their region to be wiped out by a 50 year doubt in the new century.

It might be cheaper.