Growth is the key to modern high-energy societies.
According to the text, fossil fuel combustion is absolutely necessary for societies to function. We made our way from using water a an energy source, to coal, and to oil. The coal when burned, however, emits a lot of acid rain. When we moved on to using crude oils, we started to encounter more problems. While yes, oil makes everything easier and more efficient, it also destroys land. Natural gas soon followed, as did more land destruction. Extracting natural gases involves using pipes and iron and a whole mess of other things unfriendly to the earth. Steam engines and waterwheels were the first means of converting energy. However, they were inefficient because of the energy needed to do this was much more than the energy it got.
Steam turbines, on the other hand, seemed to be the best thing since sliced bread. They were smaller and more efficient. When water turbines rolled around, they accounted for nearly 1/5 of the world's electricity generation. As we progressed even further to electric motors and lights, they all gained more efficiency, but this was not without consequences. They require fossil fuels, and the burning of these totally screws the environment and the earth over. We have made leaps and bounds as a species, continuing on to electricity generating machines, blast furnaces, and airplanes, but should we be?
I realize this entry is a bit bias towards not using fossil fuels, but it frustrates me. The human race has undoubtedly made leaps and bounds technologically, but as a result we are destroying our planet, the only place we can live. How messed up is that?
Questions
1. Hydro turbines and nuclear reactors and fertilizers are in the chapter on fossil-fueled civilizations because they all rely on fossil fuels for energy to run.
2. After time, the thermal efficiency of power systems tend to decrease.
My Questions
1. How exactly did people discover fossil fuels generate a lot of energy?
2. The book says societies could not function without fossil fuels. What about Native Americans before we destroyed their land? I think they were doing a pretty good job.
3. What's the point of nuclear weapons?
On a side note,this was a lot of homework for just one night. Because I've never used excel before, it took me two and a half hours just to complete that one assignment. I even had to enter over 150 calculations in by hand before learning how to do chain calculations. Talk about awesome! I feel that if we had more than one day to complete all four assignments, (for instance, assign it on Tuesday and hand it in Thursday), the task would have been much more manageable.
On the homework, it would have been easier if I had paced myself better and done more Excel demo in class. I apologize for that.
ReplyDeleteHydro turbines and nukes are actually sources of energy, rather than being driven by fossil fuels. (The fertilizer is a different story.)
On the discovery, I'm not sure. Probably just trial and error. Look at this rock, it burns. Hey, it burns pretty hot. Look, there's more of it. That sort of thing.
I think the book is saying that _modern_ societies can't function without fossil fuels. Many societies functioned before them; Plato, Shakespeare, and Mozart all went to their graves without the fossil fuels having played any significant role in their lives. Native Americans were doing a pretty good job in some ways, certainly, but their technology was less powerful than that of the Europeans. Rightly or wrongly, that meant they tended to lose out.
Nuclear weapons seem to be just the latest stage in humans' quest for ways to kill each other: stones, spears, arrows, catapults, guns, cannons, mortars, bombs, missiles, and finally nuclear devices. Anyone who's making them can always justify them by the fact that somebody else has them (or has some other powerful weapon), so if I don't have one, I'll be vulnerable. At the same time, there are calculations that it will only take about 100 warheads exploding for the world to be cast into nuclear winter, with half or more of the global population dying of starvation. So it seems hard to rationalize an arsenal any larger than that, yet ours is considerably larger.