Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

The weather was gorgeous on Sunday evening, so I decided to take a stroll around the western slope of Phinney Ridge where what stroppy_baggage calls the real estate porn is abundant. I had just spotted a house with solar panels on the roof when, as luck would have it, a family was walking in.

I hurried across the street and asked them how they liked their solar panels. Very much, said the lady of the house. They'd only had them a year, but partly thanks to incentives, they'd already paid for themselves. And that was before the prices for panels dropped, she said.

Solar panels, covering much of the roof of a medium-sized old house in Seattle (which is above 47°N), and paying for themselves in under a year. I wasn't sure I'd live to see the day. This looks to me like the start of something big.

This post from costume goddess trystbat got me all exercised about waste, energy, and greenhouse gasses. Having promised her to pontificate, I'm about to deliver.

The problem with disposal of plastics is way bigger than even trystbat's post suggests; most of you have probably heard by now about all the trash collecting in a large area of the North Pacific.

What is to be done? Recycle, I hear you say, but for much if not most of the weight of plastics produced, recycling processes consume so much energy that nobody uses them. I would list incineration as the conceptually simplest example of these processes. It's a fine idea as long as you incinerate waste all the way to gas and then do something non-destructive with all of the gases, of which carbon dioxide is bound to be a major component. (Never mind the CO2 that a fossil-fueled incinerator produces just to operate.)

What is that non-destructive thing that you do with the CO2 from plastic, or any CO2 for that matter? In a word, reduction. For those of you who've forgotten your high school chemistry, that's the reverse of oxidation: un-burning. It's how the energy gets into fossil fuels. Once burning fossil fuels is out of the question, reduction will be the only way to obtain hydrocarbons for applications where they're indispensable, like jet travel.

Where's that energy going to come from? No prize for you if you guessed "some way that doesn't release greenhouse gases". That leaves nukes and renewables. Yes, I know there are a few nuke enthusiasts on my friends list, and unlike most people I'm willing to listen to their arguments that nukes of modern design can be operated safely enough. The trouble is that the question of what to do with nuclear waste is no closer to solution than that of fossil fuel waste; just because the problem is partly political doesn't mean it's less real. Oh by the way, the technologies for nuclear power and nuclear weapons have an awful lot in common, too much for my taste.

Renewable energy is moving all of the air, water, and land on this planet every minute of every day, and it'll be around until the oceans boil away. We only need a small fraction of what's available. Surely we can figure out how to get it.

(I felt so strongly about this I wrote it in EMACS.)

Bus commutes in the last week: 5
Miles not driven: about 30
Gallons of gasoline not burned: about 1.25
Pounds of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates not emitted: at least 9, but theoretically as high as 30. Since manufacturers (and owners) try to keep emissions of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and particulates as low as they can, the true figure is probably not much less than 30.

Fun fact: the specific gravity of gasoline is about 0.9, sayeth the great oracle Google.