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The Forum > Article Comments > China’s calls for global energy governance: implications for East Asia > Comments

China’s calls for global energy governance: implications for East Asia : Comments

By Lloyd Bradbury, published 16/10/2012

The University of California Berkeley research demonstrates that there is actually an inordinately large increase in energy consumption as households move out of poverty.

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No. We do not need global energy governance. We do not need another excuse to try to establish world government. What inevitable follows to run such an organisation is world taxation. Then the snowball starts rolling: what would follow would be ever increasing taxes, bureaucracy, laws, international courts, lawyers, then global police force to police the laws and global laws, and of course a global military to enforce the laws on incalcitrant nation states. The last thing we need is global energy governance.

Instead, what is needed is to remove the impediments that are preventing the world from having cost competitive alternatives to fossil fuels. Without removal of the impediments to low-cost, low-emissions energy, the world will continue to burn fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate. By far the greatest contribution to global emissions will come from the developing countries and the countries that have yet to start the emergence from poverty that China and India are now going through (e.g. most of Africa and much of Asia).

A major impediment to cost competitive alternatives to fossil fuels is the impediments preventing the world from having low-cost nuclear power. Whereas the impediments to low-cost renewable energy are technical (physical constraints), the impediments to low cost nuclear power are ideological and political; they are caused by widespread radiation phobia and paranoia about nuclear power. These can be overcome by education and leadership.

The next US President could make a valuable contribution to reducing global emissions by leading the USA to implement policies to remove the impediments to low cost nuclear power. The focus should be on developing small, modular nuclear power plants that are suitable for use anywhere in the world. They would be built in factories, shipped to site, and returned to factory for refuelling and decommissioning.

In summary, we do not need global energy governance. We need to remove the impediments to cost competitive alternatives to fossil fuels. All that is needed is leadership and then allow the market and competition to do the rest.
Posted by Peter Lang, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 9:24:54 AM
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Find myself, once again agreeing with Peter's patent pragmatism!
New straight off of the factory floor, are pebble reactors, that can be manufactured en mass, and then trucked on site as modules, to within days, be producing clean safe power.
Small marble sized balls of fissile fuel are encased in grapefruit sized balls of carbon! This feature means, even where the coolant, helium, is stopped for any amount of time, be it just a few hours or from here to eternity? The rock hard or virtually bullet proof, hardened carbon coating, virtually removes any possibly of the fissile material pooling, in enough quantity or mass, to actually create the reaction, referred to as, a meltdown.
Alternatively, there are thorium reactors, which produce little, far less toxic waste, eminently suitable as very long life space batteries.
Yes sure, thorium reactors require a relatively small amount fissile material to kick start the reaction.
And yes, the green inspired terror campaign is correct?
Inasmuch as, the heat required for the liquidation, that supports the thorium reaction, is high.
However, not quite as high as high heat pure oxygen blast furnaces, that safely convert some of the most toxic products on the planet, back into their more benign components, or indeed, the heat required to produce a fusion reaction, [hotter than the centre of the sun,] all safely contained inside appropriate magnetic bottling and heat resistant materials.
Meaning, for mankind, a thorium reactor/ reaction is a safe as a family toaster in any fair and or scientifically validated, objective comparison!
Clearly, returning to impoverished lifestyles or cave dwelling hunter gather, or exceedingly primitive hand to mouth agrarian lifestyles, and quite massive population reduction that would also be required, as advocated by some green acolytes, is simply not a viable or humane option!
Unless started by them, in a lemming like rush over the nearest long drop zone?
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 12:24:06 PM
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Peter Lang's first paragraph said most of it. The last thing we need is yet another World body, stuffing up that which works quite satisfactorily now.

You don't have to look too closely at the UN, or The World Bank & similar organizations to find the cause of many of our problems.

Apart from orators, the most incompetent people on earth appear to be the diplomats & academics who inhabit, & profit from all these institutions. They have an unfailing ability to make any crisis worse. If I were a cynic I just mite start to believe they engineer problems to make sure there is another talk fest for them to attend.

If we stop feeding these international bodies, many of the worlds problems would simply evaporate, due to lack of fuel.
Posted by Hasbeen, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 1:01:50 PM
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We need to get away from centralised power, with its millions of miles of wasteful transmission lines, with a whole network involuntarily decommissioned by the toppling of a single tower?
Or an unstoppable raging forest fire created by a single vehicle accident against a power pole.
The millions of miles of wire, are responsible for half the carbon created by the coal-fired/hydrocarbon powered industry? And arguably, more than half the transferred or passed on cost!
Small reactors can independently power critical military/defence infrastructure!
The bio-logical waste created inside a village, a suburb, a high rise or a hospital, e.g, can if treated onsite, produce enough methane to independently power any of the aforementioned.
Adding in any food scraps or waste, produced in tons in Hospitals, creates a saleable surplus; as would the replacement of the standard stationary engine, with super silent ceramic fuel cells, which produce free hot water as an almost endlessly sustainable bonus.
Those that advocate a return to simplicity, and a hand to mouth existence have likely never ever experienced it, couldn't hack it if they ever did?
We clearly don't need to create bigger cities, just myriad smaller self contained ones replete with their own CBD's and industrial estates!
Imagine, if the alumina/direct reduction arc steel refinery could be built alongside a power station, you'd be able to produce the same aluminium or steel, for half the energy input, half the cost and half the carbon production; or indeed, if a small modular nuclear or thorium power station was included in the planning stage?
Less overall cost over the life of the project, and little if any carbon production!
Which then would make a nonsense of shipping raw materials halfway round the world, when we could more than competitively produce and export finished aluminium/steel from here?
We need to work smarter not harder, and think globally while acting locally.
We certainly can't ask much more productive others to make sacrifices, we would never ever contemplate for ourselves.
Nor can we wind the clock back to times when everything seemed simpler or more abundant!
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Tuesday, 16 October 2012 4:32:07 PM
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Follow the advise of a brittle, fascist left regime, what could go wrong? The US is having an election; China expels Bo from the Party, pommy expats murdered and a long list...... Chinese Princelings smell money in this scam and they don't believe in giving a mug an even break.
Posted by McCackie, Wednesday, 17 October 2012 8:36:11 AM
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By far the most important topic to hit this forum in an age.

Some Points:

1. Energy units must be the World Currency. Energy = LIFE. Free Energy = Rulership of this planet.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics and its statistical corollary dictate that Energy = Order and intelligence and supremacy over all lifeforms.

2. There are NO GREEN or renewable alternatives. They all depoend on INSOLATION which if it was going to support 7 billion+ humans it would have doine so 2 million years ago at homo sapiens emergence.
All renewable technologies and even Nuclear power depend on OIL and COAL for infrastructure , maintenance and transport issues. Going green without these supports would be the same as lifting yourself up Mt Everest tugging on your bootlaces.

3. #Where is it written the homo-sapiens will last intact within the next 50 years, let alone expand to 10 billion? The dinosaurs had 100 million years history that said they would last forever too! The dinosaurs perished because the Earth's crust thickened and free heat energy just vanished. An asteroid could have radio-chemically precipitated this in the mantle. No way could the massive free energy of an asteroid do anything but enhance life after some initial losses. Alone asteroid impacts even today would enhance LIFE as we Know it, albeit after some time and losses. All up, as Oil and coal cost more to extract and repair their enviro pollution they will no longer offer FREE ENERGY and LIFE as we know it will sit atop the slippery slide of extinction. Just as the Roman Empire did after AD79 when Stromboli, Vesuvius and Etna with their free-energy epicentre at Rome suddenly lost ground pressure for good.

Continued,
Posted by KAEP, Wednesday, 17 October 2012 10:58:20 AM
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