Chocolate could be as rare as caviar in twenty years, due in part to climate change.

…but scientists have figured out a way to potentially use nuclear waste as a fuel source for fusion energy.

The universe may just be a giant hologram.

…I can’t help but get oogy when I read something like “scientists plan to ignite a tiny, man-made star.”

Look, I know how fusion energy theoretically is supposed to work and I know that the “star” will be tiny and not innately self-sustaining. But even so, scientists really have to come up with a better way to explain fusion energy, because I’m the sort of person predisposed to be on their side, and when I hear “we’re going to ignite a star right here on Earth,” my gut reaction is “places to ignite a star that would be better than Earth = anywhere else in the galaxy.”

Seeing as how, Monday night, they will get to see the largest smiley in the universe.

It’s Frankendog.

…but it is a flying car.

I’ve been trying to avoid getting sucked into Fallout 3 while I have schoolwork to do (yes, even during the strike). But now it appears that Bethesda Softworks is, through some invisible manipulation of the world I do not quite understand, trying to turn our world into the Fallout world.

Study shows that women who perform fellatio on a regular basis may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to forty percent.

PICK JOKE:

1.) There is as yet no study about whether allowing men to watch sporting events likewise reduces risk of breast cancer, but I shall be sure to keep an eye out.

2.) Once again, SCIENCE HATES LESBIANS.

3.) The study also says that they have to swallow, so guys, remember, if you want to come on a girl’s face, it’s officially now a health risk for her. (As well as for you if she tries to hit you with something because you didn’t ask first.)

The world’s first commercial-scale wave power generators are online in Portugal.

Scientists invent thin-film silicon solar cells which can be wrapped around something as small as a pencil.

Does anybody have a good site for information about potential oceanic methane sequestration technologies? Google-fu is failing me, and I’m looking at it as a potential topic for a law school research paper (specifically implementation of same on a global level and interactions with the law-of-the-sea treaties).

UPDATE: Quixim, in comments on the previous post:

Do I detect a hint of scorn at the prospects of nuclear power?

I know that you’re aware it’s perfectly clean, and even less radioactive than coal power, not as damaging to ecosystems as hydroelectric, and more feasible than tidal or wind… So… for something that can essentially hold us indefinitely until we find a permanently sustainable form of energy, it’s sure getting a lot of flak here…

There are a multitude of reasons not to seriously consider nuclear power (beyond those installations already in place). Here are some of the major ones, and I’m not even going to address the issue of waste.

1.) Nuclear power is expensive. It has never, ever been cost-efficient on a private-sector basis; Mr. Burns is a fictional character, and there is no nuclear plant in the entire world capable of operating without very large government subsidy. This does not apply to solar (particularly so) or wind or any renewable energy source worth considering. On a cents per kilowatt-hour scale, nuclear right now tends to linger around 12 to 15 cents. Compare that to wind (4-7 cents) or tidal (2-3 cents) and it’s a joke. Solar energy two years ago was at 15-20 cents, and with the recent advances in solar technology making them vastly more efficient and with cheap fuel cell technology essentially perfected allowing us to more or less store solar energy overnight, solar’s costs are going to drop exponentially in the very near future.

(If we got fusion running, it would still be better than solar in many respects, but the two are essentially complementary technologies anyhow.)

2.) Nuclear power is a mature technology and it doesn’t work with economies of scale. More bluntly: it’s not going to get any cheaper because of scientific advances (pebblebed reactors are still going to cost buckets of money), and it’s not going to get cheaper if we make a lot of them. (Actually, all evidence points to the fact that nuclear plants actually get more expensive the more of them you build.) On top of that, nuclear plants represent massive infrastructure investments that just don’t exist for the likes of solar and wind.

3.) Nuclear plants are not like solar panels or windmills, which you basically just set up and then check on every once in a while. Nuclear plants are gigantic complicated fucking things that require continuous expert staffing, and for good reasons (most of which involve the word “radioactivity”). And we want safer nuclear plants, but the problem is that safer nuclear plants means more oversight, complicated devices, and staffing – meaning that the safer you want the plant, the more expensive it is to operate.

4.) Nuclear plants need enriched uranium to use as fuel. Nuke-fans, when discussing the prospects for nuclear fuel, typically point out that there is shitloads of uranium left on the planet. The problem is that we’ve already used up most of the naturally occurring enriched uranium in nuclear plants already, and most of what’s left isn’t easily accessible. This means for the long term, we have two options: 1.) strip-mining to get at the last naturally enriched uranium and 2.) refining the raw, low-grade uranium that is most of our planet’s supply into fuel-grade uranium. Either of these skyrockets the cost of nuclear power.

5.) The new “safer” reactors nuke-fans love to talk about barely exist. Pebble-bed reactors are still an experimental technology. We are decades away from mass installation of pebble-bed reactors.

Now let’s take that pin out of the meltdown and waste issues and discuss it rationally without talking about two-headed mutant babies. We don’t have a foolproof way of burying nuclear waste that can prevent it from seeping into groundwater; even if we did, what you’re then talking about is yet another additional cost assigned to nuclear power that solar and wind do not have in any meaningful context. Likewise, the necessity of preventing meltdowns greatly increases nuclear energy’s cost. Even before we consider things like radioactive risk, nuclear energy is just a bad deal.

Now, the nuke-fan might respond by saying “well it doesn’t matter if it’s expensive or not – wind and solar can’t do the job themselves.” Wind can’t do the job itself, that’s true (it can probably do a good chunk of it, say twenty percent or so, but that’s probably about it at present). Solar, however, can. If you don’t believe me, go ask Popular Mechanics, who used a very conservative plan (which, incidentally, is already outdated less than a year later as scientific advances have rendered solar collection more efficient) and determined that the USA could be fully solar-powered by 2050 for an investment cost of about $1 billion per year.

And that is why I dismiss nuclear power.

(I’m taking a course in climate change law this year, so I’ve been doing a lot of pre-reading for it. This is a series of thoughts I wanted to pass on as I did my reading.)

By this point, everybody except the kooks and the desperate liberal-haters know that global warming is serious business. Most people don’t realize how serious it is, though. We are on a clock that nobody in our political arena is willing to mention.

Many people are aware that four degrees of warming is probably where the catastrophic end of mankind begins – at four degrees of warming, land-based ice shelves melt enough that most of the world’s major cities find themselves underwater. The four degree marker is fairly well known. The problem is that the four degree marker isn’t what we should be worrying about: what we need to worry about is the two degree marker. (One point nine, two point five, it’s somewhere around two and a little bit, most likely.) At two more degrees of warming, most global warming models predict that our climate system will start creating its own warming feedback at such a rate that we won’t be able to stop global warming without some major league scientific brilliance. We will most likely not manage the major league scientific brilliance, and in any case who the hell wants to rely on a Hail Mary pass for the future of the human race?

(Some will say at this point: “but Chris, there’s a reasonable chance that we can afford slightly more global warming than two degrees. There isn’t universal agreement on which model is the most accurate.” And this is true. However, given that the “slightly more warming” models are at best slight outliers, this is not an optimal strategy. Moreover, the other problem is that those models are counterbalanced by equally probable models that are, shall we say, much more disastrous. We should be hoping that the most likely prediction pans out and not get greedy.)

To stop global warming before we hit the inevitability junction of two degrees (and change), we need to cut global emissions drastically. I’m talking eighty-five to ninety-percent by 2030-2040 “drastically.”

Yes, it means we have to convince China to stop building coal plants, but contrary to what some might have you believe, when you show that an environmentally friendly lifestyle approach is both economically feasible (and, in a few years, probably economically preferable to a wasteful one) and healthier to boot, most people will generally jump at the chance to emulate you. Chinese people consume American (and increasingly European) culture in mass quantities: they want what we have, not necessarily because it is better but because our lifestyle has become a status symbol.

And yes, it means giving up a few things, but the trick here is not to think of these as sacrifices but rather trades. I don’t just mean “trading pleasures of life right now for the good of the planet later on,” either. I mean trading one set of pleasures for another.

My favorite example of this is the supermarket. Supermarkets are ridiculously wasteful of energy. You know this – you’ve been in one. Supermarkets have giant banks of open freezers without doors. They have hot lamps shining down on the fresh fish, which have to be laid out in ice to keep them from spoiling because of the intense heat the lamps generate. They have hot air blasters at the front door to keep the store warm in winter, which in turn mean the freezers have to be even more powerful when the hot air blasters are on.

But consider this: the abandonment of the supermarket entirely, and instead opting for delivery. Most supermarket chains already deliver anyway, and there are already delivery-only grocery companies. And deliveries will already be made just about any time of day. So let’s make it universal. I mean, just about everybody has a phone now, or net access, so ordering is pretty much a done deal. There’s no need to operate a massive, wasteful supermarket – you can just deliver from the warehouse. (The additional delivery jobs should make up for the loss of supermarket jobs, at least partially.) The need for bags, reusable or otherwise, disappears entirely. And best of all, consider this as a consumer. You don’t have to make a trip to the supermarket. You get to hang around the home – at a time convenient to you – and you get the time you would have spent on a half-hour or hour long shopping trip for your own purposes.

That’s what I mean when I talk about looking at “giving up” as a matter of trading. But enough about supermarkets. Let’s talk about air travel.

When it comes to emissions control, air travel is the giant in the room absolutely nobody wants to talk about. It’s obvious why: we like to fly. We really, really, like to fly. We like it so much we’ve spread our families all over the world, and we’ve come to regard it as a right to be able to visit them if we want and can afford to. On the whole, we’ve got a point, too: air travel has made the world smaller, and mostly for the better. Our societies grow more mixed, and understanding grows ever greater. (Not fast enough, of course, but certainly faster than in the days of mass xenophobia.)

But air travel as we know it isn’t sustainable. There are no fuel alternatives for airplanes. There are no “electric planes” waiting in the wings. Airplane manufacturers claim that fuel-efficient planes are coming soon, but they haven’t got any proof of it and every incentive to lie to you, so as a general rule not trusting them worth a damn generally pays off.

And airplanes are terrible carbon emitters. They emit plenty all on their own, but worse, they do it at high altitudes where the damage from their emissions is more pronounced. Worse yet they emit other gases that are also warming gases you don’t want high up in the atmosphere. George Monbiot, in Heat, estimates that on a single one-way flight from New York to London, a single passenger on a full plane is responsible for 1.2 tons of CO2 emissions.

There’s no easy way around this: jet planes have to go, save for emergency flight and super-extreme-high-end luxury. If we need to cut eighty-five to ninety percent of our carbon emissions, it’s going to be hard enough everywhere else without having to cushion for the frigging jet plane emissions we refuse to cut because we’ve always wanted to visit Tahiti.

“But Chris,” you say, “you were talking about trades and how it doesn’t necessarily have to be a sacrifice! Was that bullshit?” And the answer is “well, a little bit,” but only in the way that you bullshit a kid to get them to eat their creamed spinach by pretending it is tasty rather than creamed spinach, which is the most disgusting edible thing on the planet. (Yes, it’s worse than maggots.) The point is that there’s something good coming as a result of the sacrifice.

And there is something good. See, when I said we didn’t have the technology to make non-environmentally-damaging aircraft, I was only half truthful. Because we don’t have the technology to make non-environmentally damaging airplanes.

But zeppelins? We can do zeppelins.

(I know it’s in vogue to call them “airships,” but fuck that. They are zeppelins. I know I am being technically incorrect, but “zeppelin” is a cool word.)

We had commercial zeppelin travel over eighty years ago. Now, understandably, the Hindenburg explosion soured people on it, and then the advent of supercheap oil made airplanes more economically feasible than zeppelins – planes were faster and used less fuel, and also they didn’t have trouble when trying to pilot into a headwind.

But apart from speed, none of that is true any more. (Well, zeppelins still have trouble piloting into a headwind, but air maps are a lot better than they used to be and we can minimize the impact of it.) Zeppelins don’t use hydrogen to fill their balloons any more; they use helium, which doesn’t explode and is in fact a fire retardant. And in terms of fuel, new zeppelin design emphasizes their large, flat tops to stack solar cells across them – using the solar energy to power rotors and store energy during the day, zeppelins could feasibly be permanently and cleanly self-powered.

In terms of speed… well. Turtle Airships, the most prominent neo-zep design company, claims their maiden ship will fly up to 200 mph, which would make for about a 17 hour trip between New York City and London – not jet speed, to be sure, but certainly not bad. Unfortunately, that figure is probably crap in the way that all optimistic engineering estimates produced for press releases are probably crap. But even if their ship’s top speed is only half that, you’ve still got a one-way trip of 35 hours, which while not short is good enough to keep international travel alive and well. (Business travel will probably diminish some as a result, but, as Garth Ennis once wrote, well, that’s just fuckin’ tough. They can teleconference, after all.)

Zeppelins also offer what planes can’t – comfort. Planes, after all, are uncomfortable for a reason – they have to pack a whole lot into a giant metal tube that is basically shot into the sky, and making that cost-effective is tricky. Compare to the original zeppelin flights, which were more comparable to luxury cruises – you serenely glide over the ocean (or mountains, or whatever), looking down on the world. Turbulence isn’t particularly an issue. Imagine going up into your personal cabin on the zeppelin – nothing fancy, but your own little room for a day or two as you fly to your destination.

When I titled this post “It’s Only A Matter Of Will,” I meant it; building an airship fleet to replace, say, ninety percent of all jet planes within ten years’ time won’t be cheap, but it’s nowhere near impossible or even that difficult. In exchange for discomfort, increasing expense and environmental damage – instead we can have a relaxing zeppelin ride. The only thing we have to sacrifice is our own desperate need to get there now now now. Is that so much to ask?

(And one more thing: airships, unlike planes, are not innately explosive guided missiles, lessening their security risk immensely.)

Next week: The biggest carbon emitter you probably never even knew about.

To pair off with that revelation in making solar cells more efficient by using glass panels to increase their capture ability (discussed here), guess what the folks at MIT did: they invented a cheap, efficient and stable fuel cell so that solar cells can store energy more efficiently for night-time use.