http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/5/164414/053#2
I have noticed a lot of grasping at so-called credibility in the discussion lately.
This seems to involve pandering to conventional "wisdom" that renewable energy is more expensive and only practical for maybe 20% of our power needs.
The Wright Brothers labored in anonymity for 4 years after they flew, giving up in despair for 2 1/2 years. Why?
Because of conventional wisdom. The New York Times, the army, and all of the media of their time ignored them as crackpots. For four years, until a marginal nature publication wrote a story on them.
This energy revolution is suffering from this same conventional wisdom syndrome. Drop that and your audience will grow. People need to know that modern day "Wrights" have the solutions that will work already.
"the only way to achieve that is gradual moving back to agricultural society, which allows overall rate of photosynthesis to be higher than natural emmision of CO2."
There is another way.
How can the greenhouse effect be reversed back to pre-industrial levels?
Right now conservation reserve land in the US absorbs 1/3 of our CO2 emmisions. Expand that effect with new conservation land, like a Prairie National Park encompassing 1000s of square miles of northern prairie that doubles as a site for 1000s of very large scale 1000 foot wind generators.
That could absorb 2/3rds of present cO2 production. Then cut CO2 with plugin hybrids that use 1/10nth of the fuel we now use. Use distributewd renewable energy generation and storage to replace fossil and nuclear power plants.
Global climate disaster is reversible in a 20 year time span if thease steps are taken to actually reduce the amont of greenhouse gases.
Turning fertilizer and manure and other waste runnoff into biogas that is used in fuel cell/turbine power plants would eliminate a huge amount of methane, 20 times worse as a GHG, from the ecosystem. This extra nitrogen runnoff acting on lake and river sediment is releasing this methane now, with a huge greenhouse gas effect.
Then the cO2 from the fuel cell power plant is used to grow algae in solar collectors to produce biodiesel that runs in fuel cell backup generators in electric cars and powdered cellulose that runs in the fuel cell power plant.
And here's another huge effect that has so far gone unrecognized. Each vehicle containing a fuel cell/microturbine backup generator of around 20 kw can supply power for 30 homes when it is plugged into the grid and into a natural gas or biogas source.
100s of millions of these cars would solve the problem of storage AND backup generation for variable renewable energy sources like wind, wave, and solar power. A gas line could plug into your car at home or work, then another line could take the cO2 emmited back to a solar collector algae system for sequestration.
100 million cars x 20 kw generating capacity per car= 2 million mw of generating capacity. Present generating capacity in the uS is around 600,000 mw. So even 100 million of these cars could generate over three times the present electric power we now use. At 3 to 5 time present efficiency levels.
At the same time this plan would eliminate over 80% of present cO2 emmisions plus a yet to be calculated huge amount of methane emmissuons due to nitrogen runnoff from waste.
This along with the increase in conservation land could reverse global climate disaster within 20 years. The other alternative, the status quo, will stop the Gulf Stream conveyor and plunge the uS and europe into an ice age. If WW3 over oil with terrorists using nuclear weapons doesn't get us first.
A distinct possibility given nuclear proliferation combined with petrodollars that support terrorism.