There is No Such Thing as Renewable Energy
Renewable energy is a physical impossibility. It would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Energy dissipates down a one way street. It goes from hot to cold, from high level to low level. There is no turning it back. Can't be done. You can always get more high level energy from somewhere, but once you use it, it always dissipates to become lower level energy.
That's the way the world works. When we use energy, we're just catching it on its way down, doing with it what we will, and letting it go after "using it up" or depleting it to an unsuably low level.
So what.
It's just that the meaning of the term "renewable energy" is a little vague. There is widespread and growing support for it in the public mind. That's good. Or I suppose its good. But when proponents of nuclear energy begin to claim it too is renewable, I begin to wonder if we have a problem. The trouble is, we can't very well inform Houston about this as the Apollo 13 crew did of their problem, now can we?
That's the way the world works. When we use energy, we're just catching it on its way down, doing with it what we will, and letting it go after "using it up" or depleting it to an unsuably low level.
So what.
It's just that the meaning of the term "renewable energy" is a little vague. There is widespread and growing support for it in the public mind. That's good. Or I suppose its good. But when proponents of nuclear energy begin to claim it too is renewable, I begin to wonder if we have a problem. The trouble is, we can't very well inform Houston about this as the Apollo 13 crew did of their problem, now can we?
2 Comments:
Indeed physics tells us that our spectacularly energetically diverse universe of powerful stars, speeding planets and great frozen seas of cosmic dust and rock will one day (although how will we know it is day without a sun and a rotating planet) be a vast lethargic lukewarm wasteland with no potential for interesting flows of energy. We are like a ball of clay dropped once from great height enjoying the release of potential energy until we splat onto a motionless infinite flat plane. Or, is our universe an elastic ball? I'd like to think that whatever trajectory we're headed toward, there is a chance we could rebound in wildly erratic super ball fashion.
In the end, I think this issue really comes down to our perception of time. The really big deal changes in our universe, or on our planet, for that matter, happen far too slowly for a human attention span. We crave change and invent it for ourselves in every way possible. Because of our obsession with change I think we shy away from embracing the beauty of the quasi-renewable potentialitys of life as viewed from our pathetically short windows of experience, because the lack of a long-term (human time scale) changing trajectory makes us feel like we have an even shorter existence and an unproductive one at that. We fill our days with change to tell them apart. There wasn't a strip mall in that field when I was a kid. Oh, what a long life I've lived. Oh, the progress of man. But at what price? Certainly more change than we've got in mind. We can't go on like this. Next stop, insect world.
Whew! Super ball fashion! Insect world! I can't take it anymore! I've gotta go make dinner! I'll be back
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