Posts by George Darroch
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That would be surprising. How much energy does it take to produce a wind turbine?
I was thinking of this article, which talks about lifetime CO2, rather than lifetime energy, which is different.
"These studies have shown a large variation in the expected CO2 payback periods from a few months in good locations to situations where they never pay back, in poor locations," the report says.
Which is of course still interesting and relevant.
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Perhaps David Haywood (if I remember this is his area of expertise) can answer why we're not being encouraged to put small windmills on our properties more. I know there was a failed attempt to subsidise solar water heating, is that a more efficient use of money than mini windmills and batteries?
I'm no expert on this matter, but my understanding is that small windmills tend to be very inefficient, when compared to large ones. This is partly a function of their size, partly due to the fact that they are not usually well sited (places with consistent, strong winds do not tend to be where you put houses), and with the technology used for conversion (again less efficient). Many such turbines have more energy used in their construction than they generate in a typical lifetime.
Bigger is generally better.
They can be useful where other energy is impractical and lines are impossible, expensive or cause too much loss (eg boats, back-country houses).
As I understand it, solar panels don't suffer as badly from these constraints, but again the home-sized ones tend to be less efficient (but not as radically so).
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and the current govt's utter contempt for walkers, cyclists and public transport - we need support to get out of our cars (via infrastructure) and somehow I don't think Stephen Joyce is the man to see that happen
I don't see anyone in Parliament who could make it happen, actually. I try not to engage with New Zealand's responses to climate change anymore, because I think that the issue is so damned hopeless. As always, the barrier to change is people's attitudes, rather than technical difficulties. In New Zealand the major attitudinal problem is that the great majority of New Zealanders think of themselves as better than most of the rest of the world, and therefore less in need of bold or dramatic action. Contrary to Helen Clark's egotistical puffery, New Zealand does not lead the world in environmental issues. We're stuck about where we were in the early 1990s, when we were bequested the legacy of a bold Labour Government (with Clark and Palmer doing a lot of this legwork) and a National Government that cemented these policies into orthodoxy. Since then we've stagnated and even gone backwards in many places.
I actually think that places where the pollution is much more visible and thus embedded in the consciousness of the public and decision makers, are going to leapfrog New Zealand on at least some responses.
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By far the majority of our energy consumption is fuel and we can't fix that with windfarms as beautiful as they are.
We can however fix it with zero emissions vehicles.
I have one, and it costs me almost nothing to run. Already 35% of all trips are made by zero emissions vehicle in Copenhagen, and they're moving quite rapidly towards 50%.
The technology is there, we just need Governments to get out of the way and stop their extreme levels of subsidy (to the tune of billions per year) to polluting vehicles.
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We could reduce our power and energy consumption dramatically if we were to progressively institute minimum standards for things like cars, lightbulbs, houses, and appliances.
Oh wait, I think we tried to do that....
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My favourite climate science website is Open Mind. It's worth a look for the graphs which apply statistical techniques to data, which do a very good job of showing how some of the major claims being made by so-called skeptics are completely untenable at best.
I first became properly aware of climate change as a serious issue in the late 1990s. I can't believe that the same arguments are being had, over, and over, and over again, a decade later.
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Oh, and on the subject of the hacked emails - almost everything that has been said about them in the mainstream media is false. They are taken so far out of context that the back-story that explains why is non-existent. It takes only a few seconds to make a claim, but a lot more to prove that the claim is false.
For example, one of the subjects raised is how a few scientists discussed discrediting the journal Climate Research. This was because one of the senior editors in the journal took a paper with very obvious flaws (such that it would have been a bad look for an undergraduate, let alone a publishing scientist) that had been rejected by the peer reviewers and pointed out to the author and the senior editor, and published it anyway. Six members of the editorial board resigned in protest. The move had nothing to do with surpressing science, but was about taking action against people who quite deliberately take moves to undermine rigourous science.
But that's simply more than can be explained in the five second soundbites that this email saga was designed to provide.
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On the subject of nuclear power, one of Australia's leading climate scientists has put himself fully behind inetegral fast reactors, mainly because Australia is so disgustingly dependent on very dirty coal for its energy.
I think some caution is warranted, because these are a largely unproven technology, and thus their viability is unknown.
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A good proportion of the current Government express either very significant doubt or outright hostility to the the things that are unequivocally proven in the science.
I would name Nick Smith, the PM John Key, Bill English, Gerry Brownlee in the first category. As far as I can tell, they believe that climate change is real, but that the problem is not so significant that radical and immediate action to avert consequences is necessary. The entire ACT party falls into the second category.
The rest of Parliament is middling, with the obvious exception of the Greens - although if they weren't so selective about which other areas of science they accepted they'd have a great deal more credibility on this issue.
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I've always said that it isn't the weather, it's the cold, draughty, damp, leaky homes and huge electricity bills that are the killer. We're slowly fixing that up, and when we do we're going to feel a lot more comfortable.