Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Yours Truly contacted NASA Chief Scientist Dennis M Bushnell and hooked him up with KMO at the C-Realm Podcast for an interview and KMO gave me credit for it just before he began the interview. Thanks KMO!
I had found a 2007 interview featuring Bushnell called Leading Thinkers and Scientists on Energy - Dennis M. Bushnell, NASA Chief Scientist and came away from that article thinking that Bushnell (and perhaps NASA as a whole) were energy optimists. And since KMO had already featured Nate Hagens and others of a more Doomer-esque persuasion, I thought Bushnell would be good counterpoint.
He talks about Algae Fuels/Biofuels as a way to totally replace fossil fuels in 10 - 15 years if we crunched down on the problem and 20 years to replace coal.
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 9:16 am Post subject: Re: NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis M Bushnell, on Peak Oil
The knock-on effects of biofuel production were perhaps slightly difficult to predict but this one looks like a plotline from a Michael Crichton SF book.
"Scientists genetically modify a type of algae to produce copious quantities of methane and they brew it in this reservoir but seagulls driven in land by an unusual storm feed at the reservoir and then take the algae to the ocean where it multiplies phenomenally due to wave breaking and quickly spreads out covering large areas choking the marine life and allowing the water to heat up 20 degrees higher than usual fuelling hurricanes and meantime the algae is burping up tons of methane which adds catastrophically to global warming..."
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:59 pm Post subject: Re: NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis M Bushnell, on Peak Oil
Strange interview. It starts out as one would expect from a NASA Chief Scientist but becomes quite surprising. You should hear this guy go on about machine intelligence. It's apparently right around the corner and is going to put even intellectual workers out of a job.
NASA Chief Scientist Dennis M. Bushnell wrote:
KMO: Dennis M. Bushnell, as I mentioned, is the chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. He is responsible for technical oversight and advanced program formulation with emphasis in Atmospheric Sciences and Structures, Materials, Acoustics, Flight Electronics, Control Software, Instruments, Aerodynamics, Aerothermaldynamics, Hypersonic Air-Breathing Propulsion, Computational Sciences, and Systems Optimization for Aeronautics, Spacecraft, Eploration and Space Access.
During his 43 year career he has authored 247 publications and major presentations and 280 invited lectures and seminars. And he's also the holder of five patents. He is a member of the national Academy of Engineering and a fellow of ASME, AIAA the Royal Aeronautical Society, and serves on the advisory board of the light boat foundation. He holds numerous awards and distinctions from governmental agencies, professional societies and academia. He has served numerous national and international organizations as consultant or committee member. He has served as editor and reviewer of 40 journals and other publications. And with that introduction fresh in your mind, here is my conversation with Dennis M. Bushnell.
KMO: welcome to the C-Realm podcast. I am your host, KMO, and joining me on the line is Dennis M. Bushnell, he is the chief scientist at NASA's Langley research Center, Dennis, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast.
Bushnell: Very glad to be here, Sir
KMO: You are very articulate in spreading a particular message about energy, climate, the near future and some possible reasons to be optimistic about the long-term future regarding our energy needs and the state of the climate. And I know you've been giving a lot of presentations on that topic. And if you would just go ahead and share the message with a C-Realm audience that you have been sharing with other audiences at the various conferences that you've been addressing.
Bushnell: the message is composed of several parts: the first part is why are we worried about energy. If you're buying gasoline you know. Peak oil was an '05, '06, and '07. The world produced about 86 million barrels a day during those years and the production is expected to go down. Alternatives from tar sands Shale and oil from coal is expected to be much more expensive and produce much less energy and also produce far more CO2. So there is a current economic reason for wanting to replace petroleum which is becoming rather too expensive. Going forward, just like there is a peak petroleum in the current age, we expect a peak uranium in 2025 or so with the once-through fuel cycles, and even some people have done studies on Peak Coal in the 2050 - 2060 timeframe. The price of coal is going way up the price of uranium is going way up, its all going up.
So we have to do something. So economics is the first reason why we need to do something else for energy. The second reason, of course, is warming, and the current IPCC predictions are for the Globe by 2100 some 5 to 6 degree, and maybe up to a meter on ocean rise. The IPCC has not included various feedback loops because the science is not yet solid enough for them to include it. But these feedbacks include the escape of massive amounts of fossil methane and fossil CO2 out of the tundra and out of the oceans. So today's for example there are huge melt lakes in the Siberian Tundra, the size of France and Germany where the methane is bubbling out very fast. And methane is 22 times worse than CO2. So the initial human CO2 emissions are inciting various positive feedback mechanisms.
And also as the increased CO2 goes into the ocean, the ocean becomes acidic, a weak carbolic acid, and as the temperature rises the ocean can take up less of the CO2 which is a problem. All of these positive feedbacks produce yet more albedo changes, melting ice faster, and then these changes are happening much much faster than anyone thought. Five years ago, the IPCC predictions were ice free Arctic in the summertime maybe by 2100 based on the way the ice has been melting. Three years ago know they said it's not 2100, it's 2040. And then just last December, they came out and said "No, the way the ice is melting now, it's really more like 2014". So we really don't know what's going on except that what's going on is going much faster.
Then there is a book which, I believe, will be considered a milestone in this whole energy and warming discussion and that is Peter Ward's recent book called Under Green Sky. Peter Ward is a paleo-botanist and he's been looking in the fossil record at previous extinctions in geological ages. This is not any recent Ice Age; its way back in the geological history. They're been five major extinctions: one was the KT extinction, which was the asteroid into the Yucatan, but the other four were warming events and the worst was the Permian extinction where some 95% species became extinct. What happened in the Permian and this warming event? It was triggered by CO2 coming from Siberian volcanoes the so-called Siberian Trappes (?) , at a rate estimated at one 100th the rate at which humans are currently putting out CO2.
What happened in the Permian was that positive feedback loops were engaged, and once that shut down the oceans went anoxic -- and we're currently losing chunks of the ocean today the size of Texas each year to these vast low oxygen conditions. Once the oceans went anoxic in the Permian, certain bacteria started growing that grow in low oxygen conditions, these bacteria produce massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide. The hydrogen sulfide entered the atmosphere in turn and made the atmosphere toxic and unbreathable, The hydrogen sulfide also severely damaged the ozone layer. In the fossil record, according to Peter Ward, you can see in the fossil record where are the vegetation received was fried by abnormally high radiation.
The life forms that survived the Permian were in deep pockets of the ocean that still had oxygen. So, it looks like now we are on the past apparently to repeat the Permian, only this time the inciting activity is not volcanoes, but anthropogenic CO2. This is not good. With the feedback mechanisms by 2100 were looking at 12 to 14°C, and beyond 2100(20, 30, 40 years beyond 2100) all the ice melts including the Antarctic , extensive ocean rise which would drown out the current domiciles of something like 2.4 billion people - about one third of the population. So what do we do about it? My message is straightforward: we need to replace the 80% of our energy that humans now use which is derived from fossil fuels. This includes petroleum, coal and natural gas.
To replace petroleum, i.e. heavy fuels for transportation mostly, the way to do that is with biofuels (only not ethanol which is not good for many reasons Even cellulosic biofuels is not good because cellulosic biofuels are produced on arable land, require fresh water, and compete with food crops, and create all kinds of other problems. So where do we get the biofuels? And the answer is we have a global revolution using deserts and wastelands, seawater, and plant stocks including Halophytes, plants that grow in salt water or brackish water.
On the shorelines of the Indian subcontinent, they've had a salt water/irrigation for centuries growing food and father with brackish water. About 44% of the land mass worldwide is deserts and wasteland. This includes Western Australia around the Persian Gulf in the Middle East, The Sahara, and the Southwest US. These areas all have salt water near them. Besides Halifax one could also use algae, in salt water, and also cyanobacteria. The algae is much more productive however: you can harvest algae every couple of days, compared to the plants which you can harvest 2 -3 times a year. The Halophytes would produce about 600 gallons per acre per year; the algae is capable now in a demonstration plant of producing 33,000 gallons per acre per year. And I think I could go to at least 51,000 gallons per acre per year for algae.
So you could produce algae with municipal plant wastewater, you could produce algae in the great Salt Lake and the Salton Sea, you could make the eastern equatorial Pacific off the South America part of an algae plant. The estimates are that if we did something straightforward like plowed up a big chunk of the Sahara, and irrigated it with the Mediterranean sea water, using just Halophytes (none of the algae or cyanobacteria), we could produce all of the biomass needed to replace all of the fossil fuels, replace all the petroleum, produce all of the food, because these plants can be used as food, and that would allow fresh water to be returned to conventional agriculture - to come back to human use because were also running out of fresh water!
We could also produce all of the petrochemical feedstock out of this biomass which we need for all our plastics and we would not need to use hydrocarbons again. So it's biomass using wasteland sea water or brackish water wastewater and Halophytes, algae and cyanobacteria. There is a huge capacity there to replace petroleum.
To replace coal, there are five approaches: the ones that are 24/7 base-load are drilled geothermal and burnt biomass. Drilled geothermal -- this is not the geothermal that is used by the guys in Yellowstone or Iceland where the hot rock is up on the surface - this is drilling down about 2 km (the oil well people can drill down about 10 km) and is possible on about half of the land mass worldwide and you get 200°C rock which then provides the heat for a fuel-less power plant. The other approaches are of course wind, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics. Each of these approaches, wind, biomass, drilled geothermal, solar thermal, solar photovoltaics - have the energy capacity which is an order of magnitude greater than what's required to replace fossil carbon. So the capacity is there. It's a matter of doing it. How soon can we do it? In the case of the biomass, if we very seriously when after it probably 10 to 15 years. To replace coal, maybe 20 to 25 years by the time we get all through.
Many of these technologies are very supportive of a distributed energy production approach which is where you can buy now, with a credit card, both manifestations for in plans for a home which is totally off the grid -- off of the energy grid, off of the water grid, off of the waste grid, and even off the food grid. And so distributed energy production via photovoltaics, via wind, via passive solar and whatnot is a very viable thing. In Denmark, about 50% of their energy is now produced via distributed system.
In terms of cost: the estimates are by the National Renewable Energy Lab andr MIT, and are as follows: For Biomass, by 2020 the estimates are a dollar a gallon which is a whole lot less than what we're paying now. Coal currently costs five to six cents a kilowatt hour. If we sequester carbon from coal that boosts the cost up to about 9 cents per kilowatt hour. Wind is currently 6 - 7 cents. Biomass is eight to nine cents. Drilled geothermal and 6 to 7 cents, solar thermal by 2010 is expected to be 7 cents, solar photovoltaics by 2010 is expected to be something like 8 cents. All of these renewables will be cheaper than coal with sequestration prices. Energy prices will be going up somewhat but with more technology will be able to pull those prices back down...
Last edited by Dearth on Thu Jun 26, 2008 8:23 am; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 4:55 pm Post subject: Re: NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis M Bushnell, on Peak Oil
Quote:
KMO: Well that was quite a bit of information, and I hope you don't mind if I ask you to repeat elaborate on some of it. To start with, we're talking about replacing fossil fuels with a variety of biofuels that are produced using marginal lands are wastelands or things that we cannot use for agriculture, so that kind of eliminates the objection to biofuels that it competes with food.
Also, you said earlier this week, the types of fuel that we would get from these processes, particularly from the bacteria, is basically crude oil -- which means that we can use the existing oil infrastructure to move that liquid fuel around. Do I have that right?
Bushnell: Yeah that's right. Back in 2001, there was some serious talk and work about a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen just stores energy. It would need a separate infrastructure that biofuels do not. Except for ethanol. Ethanol burns through seals and so forth. But by and large, biofuels can use the existing infrastructure. With hydrogen, you would have to build an infrastructure that would be almost unaffordable. Also it's hard to store hydrogen and biofuels are easy to store. So it's essentially a direct replacement. The books are now selling a bioreactor that sits on your back porch, as I understand it, and you put in your grass cuttings your kitchen scraps leaves and other refuse and you produce the oil to run your vehicle.
Algae is particularly interesting because algae is a lipid. It's about 60% boil so in olive oil presses suitable to produce something that's burnable and then using various post-processing which is far less expensive than what we've now do for oil refining, and that can be done in a distributed fashion. One can make just about any fuel that you want. We've been successful in taking our salt plants, Halophytes, and converting that into JP fuel for air craft.
KMO: Now there is the question of carbon. When we burn fossil fuels we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere which was essentially sequestered by nature several million years ago so we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. When we produce oil, even though it is functionally just like oil we get out of the ground, the carbon in biofuels is carbon that was sequestered just recently when we were growing the plants or the algae or whatever it is we were using as a biomass to make the stuff. So, does that make biofuels carbon neutral or even carbon negative?
Bushnell: They can be carbon negative. A lot of these plants have very deep root systems, and when you use the top of the plant for biomass, you don't pull the roots out, so all of the carbon that is sequestered in the roots tends to stay there. The special ------- soil in the Amazon, which are very productive -- it turns out the 800 hundred to 1200 years ago, the Indians down in the Amazon basin in these areas, produced a lot of charcoal which they buried under the soil and made the soils extremely productive. Of course, this is another way to sequester. But, you are exactly right. Biofuels are a closed carbon fuel cycle. You would take CO2 out of the atmosphere, the plant takes it up, you burn the upper part of the plant, the CO2 goes back into the atmosphere, and then you pull it back out.
There are other ways to generate energy that are being looked at, and we will probably touch on those as we go through the interview. One of them is an effort done in Germany and one at UC San Diego, and later joined at Livermore and that Sandia, where people have extracted carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and used solar energy to strip and that I'm off, to create carbon monoxide, which is fuel. It has the heating value of about one quarter of conventional hydrocarbons, and can be made into other more usual hydrocarbon fuels. So it is possible without using plants to directly re-process, researcher late, in a closed system the atmospheric CO2.
KMO: concerning the question of global warming, one thing that I've read in interviews with you that I've read elsewhere online, that you like to distinguish between two different kinds of warming. And if you would, tell us about those.
Bushnell: The CO2 warming is where we are trapping heat in the atmosphere. The second type of global warming we won't have to worry about for another 150 - 200 years, but we will eventually have to worry about it. And it stems from the fact that as humans use energy, the second Law of Thermodynamics says we have to reject waste heat. And there are now enough humans using energy, particularly as the rest of the world comes up to the level of US energy use, to reject enough waste heat that the whole earth has to warm to reject that waste heat to space. That space rejection process is altered or modulated by atmospheric warming. But, we're about two orders of magnitude away from the whole ball having to warm. It means long term, we need to generate energy through processes that do not generate new waste heat. Anything solar does not generate new waste heat - whether it's a wind or solar-thermal or solar photovoltaics, and also tidal energy particularly doesn't generate new waste heat. But others do. That includes fossil carbon, that includes even geothermal -- because geothermal heat was below the earth it wasn't up in the atmosphere where we had to radiated away. And it includes anything nuclear.
But we have to solve the current warming problem first. We have to quit putting up all the CO2 that stays up there forever and creates atmospheric warming, causes feedbacks, and eventually leads to the release of hydrogen sulfide -- which if that occurs, warming becomes existential. It's far more than a hot day and wet feet. This is serious.
KMO: well since you bring up the word existential, let me just bring up the topic of existential risk. In addition to being the Chief Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, you are also on the Advisory Board for the Lifeboat Foundation. So if you would, take a moment and talk about existential risks and the mission of the Lifeboat Foundation, and what your role there is.
Bushnell: Well, I am on their advisory board, as are a great number of other people. The purpose of the Lifeboat Foundation is to try to anticipate the potential existential risks to humans going forward as we prosecute what is essentially something that we've never done and seen before which is a simultaneous IT, Bio, Nano, Quantum Energetics, double exponential tech revolution. All of these tech revolutions are frontiers of the small but feed off one another synergistically and they're all changing things in massive ways.
Those changes can have potential existential effects upon humankind. Now there are some existential risks which are not connected to human activities such as asteroid impact and things of that nature. But, in fact, many of them - in fact one that I was working on this morning - has to do with... Currently, we have, since 1959, seen computer speeds increase 10 million times. We are currently at about a petaflop. The human brain speed is 20 petaflops. We will be at human brain speed by 2012. So the machines will be as smart as human brains.
Beyond that, as we leave silicon and go on to Bio, Optical, Quantum, Nano, and Molecular computing, we are looking at an additional speed increase beyond human brain speed of somewhere between 10 to the seventh and 10 to the 11th power by 2030 to 2040. That's some massive, massive, machine capability. So the speed will be there to produce an intelligence beyond human. Well, what about the software? The software comes from either the current self computing ------ algorithms and (AGI) or are from biomimetic's.
IBM has a major effort run out of Switzerland, which is where most of their scientists and technologists are. It's called the Blue Brain Project. IBM started this, I think, in' 05 and they have made great progress. And what they've done is, they've nano-sectioned the neocortex -- the higher part of the mammalian brain, and they're replicating that in silicon down to the molecular level. So essentially they're growing in artificial human brain.
Then there is 'Emergence'. As far as we can tell, there is no general intelligence wiring in the human... each piece of our intelligence evolved in the usual billion year evolutionary context over which we developed as today's humans to handle specific problems within that evolutionary context, almost all of which was in the hunter-gatherer realm. Any general intelligence that we have is wholly emergent -- ie. make something complex enough and it wakes up.
So between emergence, biomimetic's, and self computing, people are betting that by 2025 to 2030, we will begin to approach or exceed human level machine intelligence. If this happens it may become an existential threat -- one of the existential threats that are being looked at by the Lifeboat people. Because once the machines get smarter than us, they can do things that could take us down even inadvertently. You don't even have to postulate an evil machine to do this. And so how do you work this going forward to make sure that in the brain stem of the machines, in the lizard part of the brain..., ok?... that they understand, and it's built into them from the initial stages, not to harm humans in any way shape or form. So we have to define what "harm" is...
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 5:39 pm Post subject: Re: NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis M Bushnell, on Peak Oil
I remember reading that some top scientist in the UK was interviewed and he mentioned that the likely cause of human extinction will be intelligent machines. I think it was in that book "A World Without Us".
Joined: Apr 06, 2006 Posts: 3626 Location: 3 miles NW of Champoeg, Republic of Cascadia
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 6:44 pm Post subject: Re: NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis M Bushnell, on Peak Oil
Thanks for transcribing all that, Dearth. You get kudos from KMO on his blog too.
The name of that Amazonian soil you weren't sure how to spell is Terra Preta. _________________ Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
C'mon man, who're you gonna believe?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 7:42 am Post subject: Re: NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis M Bushnell, on Peak Oil
TheDude wrote:
Thanks for transcribing all that, Dearth. You get kudos from KMO on his blog too.
The name of that Amazonian soil you weren't sure how to spell is Terra Preta.
Thanks, and you're welcome. But I think the opinions of Dennis M. Bushnell are of the type that are not welcome here on PeakOil.com because, although he accepts Peak Oil and Global Warming, and even though he is alarmingly out-spoken -- he is a technology optimist.
If he logged on here anonymously and started talking about technology in such a manner, he would be stoned to death and his skull placed on a stake as a warning to others who dare to transgress!
Here is the last section of the interview transcribed:
Chief Scientist NASA Langley Research Center, Dennis M. Bushnell wrote:
KMO: Originally, Dennis, I asked you onto the program to ask you about energy and our prospects for change into a new energy infrastructure and to ask you to describe the suite of technologies that would be more sustainable to the environment and to the economy, but you have just segued into another field of discussion which will be very familiar to the C-Realm audience, and that is the idea of artificial general intelligence and the so-called Technological Singularity. You brought up the singularity and the advent of superhuman intelligence as an existential risk, a risk to the existence of humanity. That is something that you discuss with the other people at the Lifeboat Foundation.
I've had some guests on the program recently who have sort of pooh-poohed the notion that we are undergoing really radical technological change right now and also cast some serious doubt on this notion that, even if we do have a continuation of Moore's Law and of the general improvements in processing power, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to have the software to emulate human intelligence. But you seem to think that that is not necessarily trivial, but is at least a manageable problem given the general project of mimicking biology -- particularly mimicking the functionality of the human brain.
Bushnell: There are, as I indicated, three ways forward toward the software part of machine intelligence. You might be interested in tracking how far we have already come. Although we are nowhere near human intelligence, we have made steady progress; people might be interested in Hans Morvec's (?) work where he's tracked how that progress is occurring.
We are in a jobless economic recovery. Some people allege that there are about 4 million jobs missing. A million of them were globalized and off-shored and people have agonized over that. The other 3 million have essentially disappeared due to productivity improvement due to robotization and automation. The percentage of people employed in manufacturing, people tell me, in China, is going down, even though China is now the world's manufacturing center. In the US, manufacturing employment has dropped from something like 55% in the 1950s to about 11% today. And it's heading to 2%. When we mechanized the farms we went from 97% of the population in the US in 1800 working the land on subsistence farms to now less than 2% farming. Manufacturing is now headed down to less than 2% as well.
The machines are already eating in to the service occupations. There are vast numbers of service jobs which have disappeared because of the machines. And the machines are already starting in on the intellectual jobs. And so this is kind of another quasi-existential thing -- which is, as the machines get smarter, as the robotics gets better, as robots become more autonomous, what jobs will we need humans to do versus what jobs will machines perform? And, you know, there are some people who have looked out 20 to 30 years, and come to the conclusion that there really aren't any jobs that humans have to do. The machines will be doing them far better, faster, cheaper... And so, what will the humans do all day? This is something will have to come to terms with in terms of the human existence theorem, i.e. What is the meaning of work? What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to be human when the machines are getting so many more interesting characteristics?
We had once thought that we would need human touch labor in the out years and in the nursing homes etc., but the Japanese are now putting robots into nursing homes today. And the patients seem to love them better than the human attendants.
KMO: as much as I am tempted to pursue the artificial intelligence conversation, I would like to go back to the energy discussion, just because there are a number of things that I would like to have you clarify. The first, I think -- and this is the most important for me -- is just coming to terms with the fact that, no matter what ideological position one wants to take with respect to global climate change, one can find folks who have seemingly bona fide credentials who say whatever it is that you want them to say. What needs to be done in order to convince those who would like to believe that there is no problem and who have experts who can point to to verify or to bolster their claim that climate change is not a problem? What can you say to perhaps get these people to reconsider their position?
Bushnell: Well, you know, I'm an engineer by training. I'm fairly objective or at least try to be. And it's a matter of the evidence. The IPCC is a very distinguished group of scientists and technologists who have studied this problem long and hard and they have reached a consensus with some very solid evidence. All the people wandering around in singlets, doublets, and triplets compared to thousands of the best people on the planet -- I would tend to believe the thousands of the best people on the planet.
What worries me is not that the IPCC is a right, what sometimes even terrifies me, is that the IPCC may be exceedingly conservative, because they have not included all of these feedback mechanisms that I mentioned. Their predictions do not agree with the data -- the data indicate that things are changing far, far faster, the ice is melting far faster, the oceans are warming about 50% faster than our scientists and technologists thought, CO2 levels are rising much faster than people thought.
Now we've got this Peter Ward book, Under Green Sky, which casts this whole thing in a much broader and far more worrisome context. But I don't have to wave the warming and energy thing very much at all to get people to consider changing the energetics. Changing our energetics, I think, is absolutely a slam-dunk economic case. Not only is the price of gasoline going up so fast that it will change our lifestyles immeasurably, but it turns out that there are major geopolitical issues. If there were no oil in the Middle East, would we be doing what we're doing?
And also, some half, at least, of our huge current account deficit is due to OIL. And it is that huge balance of payments deficit that is responsible for the devaluation of the dollar. And that balance of payments deficit is greater than the entire world's net savings! We can't keep doing this! We are a huge debtor nation. And getting off of oil and going to domestically produced biofuels... if you went to cellulosic biofuels, it would take an appreciable amount of the US landmass growing stuff in order to replace petroleum -- like 30 to 40%. If you go to algae, you're down less than a percent or two. That's a very big difference.
And, along the way now, this whole conversation has to be put in the context of ever more aggressive conservation. If we went to serious conservation, we could reduce US energy consumption by about 30%. You could reduce the amount of energy that you need, develop the technology right away so that you can generate most of what you need locally, and this would have a major impact on the security of the power grid and all kinds of other infrastructures which right now are vulnerable to terrorism. So there are all kinds of national security, geo- political, geo-economic, and plain old pocketbook issues here surrounding petroleum use.
As for coal, coal is much harder. From an economic point of view, if you don't sequester CO2 from burning it, coal is cheaper now. In 15, 20, 25 years, it may not be, particularly as these renewable technologies are developed. So the warming and energy thing has a great impact on when we do something about coal use and what we do about it. But in terms of petroleum, you don't have to go near the environmental issue in order to successfully replace petroleum.
KMO: the person who initially contacted you about this interview -- his name is Carl -- he sent some questions along that he asked me to put you. And there are several questions here; I'm going to read them all at once and just lets you pick and choose from among them:
If you were Barack Obama's energy czar, what would you suggest as a policy? Do you advocate an energy Manhattan Project? A global energy summit as the Saudi's have been suggesting? How should all the countries of the world best cooperate so as to be most sensible about energy and development, globalization, and the environment moving forward?
Bushnell: Those are essentially two questions. One is: "What should be the national energy policy?" and the other is, "What should we do about international cooperation?" Obama DOES have a national energy policy. I don't think you need a Manhattan Project. I don't think that you need an global energy summit. I'm a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and the Academy recently had some kind of an energy summit where we had the boards from all sorts of energy companies in and talked over all of these options at length.
The national energy policy should be to set regulations and laws such as carbon sequestration to encourage the private sector to go work and enable renewables. Going to renewables, going to carbon neutral, is, in my opinion, far less of a technology issue then it is a "sunk costs" issue -- that is, getting past the financial arrangements needed to amortize existing investments -- pay them off. Another barrier is people's innate aversion to change. There is this part of our brain called the amygdala which acts specifically to make sure that we act conservatively in all the things we do. Because if you change too much too fast, in the hunter-gatherer context, the other animals end up eating you. But at the same time, without change, there is total stagnation. So this is always been a tight rope in our human development. But I think there is sufficient power in regulation policy and a few statutes to really turn this thing around. And, you know, do it rapidly. Now, you can't do that without upsetting some iron rice bowls. Things are going to change, some boats are going to rise others are going to end up on the mud flats -- but overall, the estimates are that with conservation, the energy prices should come way down. The estimates of biofuels and the dollar per gallon out in the 2020 timeframe, well, I find all that very intriguing.
The other issue is, "Well, what do we do about international cooperation?" Internationally, we all share the same atmosphere. As I understand it, China and India are waiting for the US to take the lead on carbon sequestration and carbon taxes and reducing carbon seriously. Once we do it, I think they'd commit to join us. In fact, China has a huge renewables industry going on, and if we're not careful, and they're going to beat us to this new source of jobs and economic growth. Once whatever further evidence is acquired to convince the bulk of the people that this warming and energy thing is very real and very worrisome to our existence, I think you will see the peoples of the world come together in a global consilience that we have never ever seen on any other subject. Because this is a common enemy, as it were.
Currently, with the way people are living globally, the estimates are that we are short about a third of a planet. We need to avoid taking down the entire eco-system. There is just too many of us living too well for the eco-system to sustain us. If the rest of the world comes up to US living standards, then we're going to need three to four more planets. The ecosystem is going down! And the rest of the world is, in fact, coming up to US living standards. So we are going to HAVE to do something! Okay? The litany of changes occurring include all kinds of disease, droughts and floods and everything else.
Let me give you one example: I talked about, initially, a large amount of fossil methane in the oceans and the tundra. There are large amounts off of the seacoast -- large amounts off of the Carolinas, for example, large amounts all over the world. This methane, as the seas warm (and they are warming), could BURP! And if methane deposits burp, such a thing could slump the continental shelf and produce a tidal wave which could take out MILLIONS of people on the US East Coast. There was a fairly large methane burp off of San Diego, as I remember, last year. In fact it was on television. They had pictures of it gassing out. So, in terms of the international context, I think we will have, for the first time, a common cause for the peoples of the world once the evidence is into the point and once people have swallowed the fact that change is required.
KMO: Well, you mentioned the prospect of a common enemy, that being global climate change and the effects that it would fall out from it, providing the conditions for a sort of global consilience is, as you called it. And I know that some people, and I've mention these people before -- they're the ones that choose their scientific view on climate change to match their political views -- they are very fearful that this whole notion of climate change is largely a ruse concocted by elites in power to soften the way that, or prepare the way, for the advent of a global governance that does not exist at this time. And I don't expect you to really take on that kind of, some would say, "paranoid" view head-on, but what I would like to stress is that you are not necessarily calling for a new world order in order to address climate change. In fact, you've talked about doing this on a very distributed scale and even doing it at the level of the household. You wrote somewhere about bio-refining on a household level. So, if you would, talk about how we can organize ourselves globally but not in a way that creates enormous power structures which could be abused or used for other ends.
…And, I hate to overload the question and this will have to be the last question, but when I talked to you last week you said that you were not in favor of vertical farming -- that we need to disperse the population rather than continue the trend of aggregating people in urban centers. And I think that that is all of a piece with doing things on a very distributed or decentralized model.
Bushnell: As I said, we are on a simultaneous IT, Bio, Nano, Quantum Energetics, tech revolution -- the earliest of which and the most major one is the IT revolution. The IT revolution is having massive impacts upon human lifestyles and economics. What's evolving is a "Tele-Everything" situation. Take, for example, telecommuting: there are now purportedly some 46 million American telecommuters. This has been growing by leaps and bounds. 46 million is almost a third of the workforce. Going forward, there's no reason to believe that that number is not going to increase further tremendously. Something like 212 million Americans do some sort of shopping on the Web, as I understand it. It's called Tele-Shopping. So, so far we have Tele-Work Tele-Commuting and Tele-Shopping. And then there is Tele-Medicine which is coming along and robotic surgery and those kinds of things. There are now machines which will print human organs so you can print your own stuff and then a tele-surgeon can put it in your own personal ---------.
Also Tele-Manufacturing: there is Mechantronics. The books are selling a ------- machine that sits on your desk top and and prints/produces by growing most anything with multiple materials including electronics up to something like 30 cm. So this is where this thing is going.
Tele-Travel: There are government estimates that by 2014 we may lose up to 30% of the business traveler traffic off of the long haul airplanes due to Tele-Traveling. Tele-Commerce is obviously an endemic. So once you no longer have to drive to work physically, there is not much reason to congregate in built-up areas. I mean, we have, in the latter part of the industrial age, put automobile-enabled suburbs around 18th-century seaports and 19th century rail heads. And some 80% of the population lives within 150 to 200 miles of the seacoast in this country and that includes the Houston ship Channel and the Great Lakes and so forth. So vast amounts of this country are not that highly populated. And you could, if you telecommute, have your own 20 acres on a mountaintop somewhere. Generally, when people get rich, that's the first thing they seem to do is they go buy 20 acres on a mountaintop somewhere. And so these energy technologies, which are available now, I mean, you can with a credit card, as I mentioned, buy both the manifestation of and plans for an off-the-grid house right now. And going forward, with the nanotechnology, with the energetics technology, this will only get far better, far less costly, and so forth.
So what could evolve is an individual electronic cottage which is largely or wholly self-sufficient. And that will be part of the way people live as they realize they can do this. I've got all kinds of friends in the technical business who are looking at living in all kinds of weird places -- and they're not in cities -- because they can do it now. Because they telecommute.
That brings up Tele-Education: the most successful university in the country is the University of Phoenix. It has 344,000 students, as I recall, and its private, totally on the web, and fully accredited. I briefed some of the Senate staffers once on the future of education, once education got into the tele-business, and a bunch of them stood up and said,"Yes, Dennis, we were educated on the web". Universities like Stanford are offering courses on the web and in the classroom. And the on-campus students are increasingly staying in their dorm rooms and taking the courses on the web instead of going to class. And so Stanford appears to be approaching a state of a $52,000 per year social club.
The energy business is not occurring in any kind of isolation. There are all kinds of massive changes going on otherwise. Massive changes in human life expectancy, in machine capability, in robotics, humans will are becoming cyborgs -- ie. Cochlear implants, artificial retinas, artificial hearts, brain chips... For example, we have put brain chips in congenitally defective brains and we are now working on brain chips to improve normal brains. It's perhaps speculation on my part but you could speculate that in 20 to 30 years you'll need the latest brain chip in order to compete.
So I wouldn't worry that there will be some kind of a global government that that will take over everybodys lives. In fact, Tele-Everything is driving it all in exactly the opposite direction. The power of the central governments, with web communications, and the information on the web -- all of this information availability is, in fact, reducing the power of the central governments of the world.
KMO: Dennis Bushnell, you have raised some very tantalizing possibilities, but I'm afraid we will not have time to pursue them in this conversation because we are out of time, but I'd like to thank you very much for joining us here on the C-Realm and for sharing your ideas on these notions which you articulate so well.
Joined: Apr 12, 2007 Posts: 1198 Location: Central NC
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 8:08 am Post subject: Re: NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis M Bushnell, on Peak Oil
Interesting stuff to be sure. _________________ "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…"
Sir Winston Churchill
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