LifeItself

In the last bog , I told you how the law of mass conservation governs the large-scale behavior of Earth's households - ecosystems - that must recycle all mass on average and export only low quality heat into the cold universe.  Now, I will give you a few useful definitions of cyclic processes, sustainability, and ecosystem productivity. Let me start from stating the obvious:  We live in a spaceship we cannot leave, a gorgeous blue, white and green planet Earth that takes us for a spin around her star, the Sun, each year. But this statement is imprecise. We really live on a vanishingly thin skin of the Earth, her ecosphere .   Think of this skin as of a thin delicate membrane, teaming with life and beauty, but incredibly fragile. We trample on this membrane and poison it.  Then we act surprised when it brakes and shrivels. Practically all life on the Earth exists between two concentric spheres defined by the mean Earth surface at the radial distance ...

Using the approach introduced in the previous post , I will now investigate how electricity is produced and imported in Texas and California.  I choose these two states because I have strong ties to both of them, and they also enjoy very different public images.  Texas is generally viewed as pro-oil, gas, coal and nuclear power, while Californians appear to oppose all of these sources of electricity in their outlets, while touting the green and renewable sources.  It is therefore instructive to look at the main sources of your electricity when you live in Texas or California. For the record, last year, Texas produced twice the amount of electricity imported and produced in California. Most of the difference was caused by air-conditioning everything in Texas, but also by Texas' large base of heavy industry, which is already gone from California, perhaps forever. I start with my home state,Texas, because it is very simple to describe its electricity sources.  ...

Given the noisy propaganda about the positive impact of renewables, or "clean energy,"  or "green energy" on global emissions of carbon dioxide, one expects there would be some.  Unfortunately, there is none as far as I can tell.  In fact, the situation is even more hopeless than I feared in my darkest dreams. Here is the data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), plotted originally by P.F. Henshaw, and replotted a little differently by me. You can click on the plots to see them in high resolution. Above you see a semi-logarithmic plot of the normalized Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP),  Rate of use of energy in the world (Energy),  Rate of global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), and  Dollars of income generated per unit of energy expanded globally per year ($/Btu).   All values are relative to those in 1971, and all curves start from 1. All trends are exponential, so they plot as approximately straight lines on the semi-logarith...