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Energy accounting
You can’t get your head around alternative energy until you understand the losses inherent in converting one type of energy to another. The losses are substantial and one reason it’s so hard to develop profitable synthetic alternatives to fossil fuels. This accounting is also the reason we need to start from scratch with a new paradigm. But don’t get freaked out. As I show in other articles, developing a new paradigm is not a hard problem.
The New York Times Magazine recently had a great piece that highlights what not to do to help solve global warming, “Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.”
The article focusses a boom in creating palm oil plantations in the last decade or so in Borneo and the US demand that spurred it. Where to begin? First, read the piece, it’s not kosher to simply replay it here and there’s so much detail that it’s important to providing a big picture. But here are my takeaways.
1. Big corporations bought up or, in some cases, stole land from indigenous people in order to make palm oil plantations.
2. They razed the forests on the land, right up to national parks’ and preserves’ borders to enable them to plant oil bearing palms. In the process they created an ecological nightmare by releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. They had hoped the end products…
