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Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e07ff67
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Perversely, the most enduring consequence of the 1970s belief that energy supplies were running out was not to use less, but to look for more. In this quest, Jimmy Carter, arguably the most ecologically minded president in U.S. history, endorsed policies that today seem like environmental folly. Notably, his administration sought to offset the approaching decline of oil and gas by tripling the use of coal, a much dirtier fuel. Just as peak ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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c62da42
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Today, about 85 percent of Israel's wastewater--more than 100 million gallons a year--is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.
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Charles C. Mann |
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893bd66
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Israel provided incentives for farmers to switch to drip irrigation, in which pipes with tiny holes provide small, precisely adjusted flows of water. Ideally, drip irrigation provides water at just the rate at which it can be absorbed by plant roots. Invented by the Israeli engineer Simcha Blass, it can use half or less of the water used in ordinary irrigation to nourish the same number of plants. At the same time, drip irrigation is one of..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8782fc1
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Escaping from fascism, European Jews had poured into Palestine--more than sixty thousand in 1935 alone. Arab residents reacted angrily to the flood of immigrants. The British government was convinced that the hostility was due, in part, to the region's lack of resources; the immigrants were exceeding Palestine's "absorptive capacity" (that is, its carrying capacity). The limit to absorptive capacity was water--British experts argued that re..
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Charles C. Mann |
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da43e4b
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Britain had just converted its entire fleet from the unsteady power of wind to the constant force provided by coal. Now, Churchill declared, Britain had to transform its navy a second time. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. An oil-fueled ship could thus travel roughly twice as far as a coal-fueled ship of similar size. Oil's greater energy density meant that it, rather than coal, was..
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Charles C. Mann |
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d2d3094
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Typically such reports focus on urban water supplies. The emphasis is understandable: most people live in metropolitan areas and water from their taps is what will make them sick if contaminated. But most freshwater is actually used by agriculture--almost 70 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Just 12 percent goes to direct human consumption: drinking, cooking, washing, and so on. (Industry takes the rest.) Fo..
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Charles C. Mann |
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5b75d0b
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the world of 10 billion, water experts project, the demand for water could be 50 percent higher than it is now. Where will it all come from? New supplies will not be easy to find. Few lakes and rivers are unexploited, and aquifers are being depleted. Equally difficult would be stretching existing water supplies by reducing waste and encouraging thrifty use. Adding to the pressure, climate change is shrinking glaciers and drying streams.
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Charles C. Mann |
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01d9384
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To overcome rubisco's lassitude and maladroitness, plants make a lot of it. As much as half of the protein in many plant leaves, by weight, is rubisco--it is often said to be the world's most abundant protein. One estimate is that plants and microorganisms contain more than eleven pounds of rubisco for every person on Earth. The biological chain seems clear: more nitrogen = more rubisco = more photosynthesis = more plant growth = more food ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8703bd5
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This symbiosis was fantastically improbable. In 3.5 billion years of history and trillions of trillions of interactions between protozoa and cyanobacteria it seems to have happened exactly once.
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Charles C. Mann |
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295b727
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This symbiosis was fantastically improbable. In 3.5 billion years of history and trillions of trillions of interactions between protozoa and cyanobacteria it seems to have happened exactly once. But this single incident had huge effects--it is responsible for the existence of plants.
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Charles C. Mann |
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921b335
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Lacking a real theory of petroleum formation, early petroleum geologists had assumed that oil and gas deposits must be located in zones similar to those where oil and gas had been found before. They looked, so to speak, for more Pitholes. Because few such areas were known, researchers believed that petroleum deposits therefore must be rare. In reality, new oil was found repeatedly--by wildcatters who, unaware of expert opinion, searched for..
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Charles C. Mann |
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78c96fe
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To Hubbert, this kind of thinking was sheer mysticism. Earth, being finite, contains a finite number of hydrocarbon molecules in a finite set of locations. Supplies are therefore limited
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Charles C. Mann |
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dfdf155
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the production curve of any given species of fossil fuel will rise, pass through one or several maxima, and then decline asymptotically to zero." Decline asymptotically to zero! The potential consequences were vast. Hubbert believed that the fossil-fuel explosion had created the population explosion--that consuming coal, oil, and gas had provided the impetus to drive our species up Gause's S-shaped curve. Because the amount of the world's o..
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Charles C. Mann |
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117faa2
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Hubbert's views echoed those in The Road to Survival, published the year before, except that he thought in terms of physical limits, rather than biological limits. Still, he ended up in the same place: capitalist-style economic growth was not only unsustainable, it was actively driving humankind beyond its limits to disaster. "The future of our civilization largely depends," he wrote, on whether humanity will be able "to evolve a culture mo..
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Charles C. Mann |
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a79749d
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Propelled by the oil shock, fears of scarcity wafted across the nation like a bad smell. Rumors of shortages in any number of goods--gasoline, salmon, cheese, onions, raisins--caused brief, unwarranted episodes of anxiety, some of them about commodities one would never imagine could run out. The Great Toilet Paper Panic of 1973 occurred after talk-show host Johnny Carson joked about a shortage, causing frightened consumers to buy out stores..
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Charles C. Mann |
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6b77391
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As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock "seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth."
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Charles C. Mann |
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Both Hubbertians and McKelveyans agree that an oil reserve is a physical stock: a finite pool of hydrocarbon molecules. To Hubbertians, the implication is clear: pump out too much and you will eventually empty it. How long you can pump depends primarily on the size of the pool. To McKelveyans, though, what matters most is not the size of the pool, but the capacity of the pump. The reason for this apparently counterintuitive belief is that a..
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Charles C. Mann |
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802b999
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a company's engineers develop new equipment that can pump out more petroleum at a lower cost, the effective size of the reservoir increases. Not the actual size--its physical dimensions--but the effective size, the amount of oil and gas that can be extracted in the foreseeable future.
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Charles C. Mann |
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44ce72a
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Stories like that of Kern River have occurred all over the world for decades. After hearing them over and over again from geologists, I realized Hubbert and Limits were going about matters the wrong way. An oil reservoir in the earth is a stock. If it becomes too costly or difficult to extract, people will either find new reservoirs, new techniques to extract more from old reservoirs, or new methods to use less to accomplish the same goal. ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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7f5beaa
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It is commonly asked, when will the world's supply of oil be exhausted?" wrote the MIT economist Morris Adelman. "The best one-word answer: never." On its face, this seems ridiculous--how could a finite stock be inexhaustible, when a constantly renewed flow can run out? But more than a century of experience has shown it to be true. As a practical matter, we know only that there is more than enough for the foreseeable future. That is, fossil..
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Charles C. Mann |
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ba9398f
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Rapid urbanization is a hallmark of our age. In 1950 fewer than one out of three of the world's people lived in cities. By 2050, according to United Nations projections, the figure will be almost two out of three. Meanwhile the world's population will have more than tripled. In 1950, 750 million people lived in urban areas; by 2050, demographers project, 6.3 billion will--more than eight times as many. For the most part, farmers have kept u..
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Charles C. Mann |
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16199c7
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cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference. French cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania's cities lose almost a quarter; cities in KwaZulu-Natal, t..
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Charles C. Mann |
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c7301e3
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About 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater consists of dissolved salts, most of it table salt. The most common way of removing the salt is known as "reverse osmosis."
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Charles C. Mann |
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0424e85
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In 1966 Israel invited a California scientist, Sidney Loeb, to spend a year at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva (the new Hebrew name for Beersheba). Loeb had worked for industry after taking an undergraduate degree in engineering in 1941. Feeling restless, he quit his job at the age of forty and went to graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles. Like the researchers in Israel, scientists at UCLA had been seeking prac..
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Charles C. Mann |
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e23f973
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The drumbeat of negative forecasts had its effect: the United States and the European powers rushed to control every drop of oil in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In light of the last eighty years of history in these regions, it is hard to view these moves as enduring successes.
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Charles C. Mann |
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9c80d0b
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Could the doomsayers have been correct, but rung the alarm a little too early? After all, Earth is finite, so the amount of energy it contains must also be finite. Isn't it wholly rational to expect fossil fuels to run out?
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Charles C. Mann |
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78dcc88
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Hubbert, one of the nation's most important petroleum scientists, built much of the intellectual framework for the environmental movement. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet.
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Charles C. Mann |
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cd7cad9
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Augustin Mouchot was far from the first to realize that the sun's energy could be tapped. For more than two thousand years Chinese architects had been aligning windows and doors with the southern sky to let sunlight flood into rooms during winter, heating cold interiors. Thousands of miles away, Greek savants expounded the same architectural principles to their disciples. So, later, did the Romans, according to the solar-energy chronicler J..
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Charles C. Mann |
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0c920aa
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But Mouchot was learning the limitations of solar power. Sunlight is plentiful and free, but it comes as an intermittent flow, not a reliable stock. Mouchot's engines were useless at night or on cloudy days--and French skies were often cloudy. Even when the sun shone, the mirrors were costly. One skeptical engineer noted in a review of Mouchot's work that running a typical one-horsepower steam engine required "about two kilograms [4.4 pound..
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Charles C. Mann |
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b4b5636
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Historians estimate that in 1800 all of the steam engines in Britain could generate perhaps 50,000 horsepower. By 1870 the figure had soared to more than 1.3 million horsepower, a twenty-six-fold increase. Nobody was going to wait for solar enthusiasts to fiddle with mirrors that didn't work on rainy days. Mouchot was trying to persuade society to switch from a stable stock of coal to an inconstant flow of sunlight. And society was not terr..
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Charles C. Mann |
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9750cc6
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Hubbert laid this out in the Technocracy Study Course: Should the fruit flies continue to multiply at their initial compound interest rate, it can be shown by computation that in a relatively few weeks the number would be considerably greater than the capacity of the bottle. This being so, it is a very simple matter to see why there is a definite limit to the number of fruit flies that can live in the bottle. Once the number is reached, the..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8832ac1
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Politicians and economists who argued for perpetual economic growth were deluded, Hubbert said. The population of the United States would hit a maximum "of probably not more than 135,000,000 people" in the 1950s, and after that the nation simply would not contain enough new consumers to need more consumer products. Hoodwinked by the fantasy of continuing growth, the ruling class had lost sight of these basic scientific realities. They were ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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fc1e600
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Hubbert visited a friend who was attending a big natural-resource conference sponsored by the new United Nations. At the conference Hubbert was startled to hear a prominent geologist assert that the world still had 1.5 trillion barrels of obtainable oil, enough to last centuries. "I nearly fell out of my seat," Hubbert recalled later. "I was up here, relaxed, visiting with my friend--and good God Almighty! And nobody said boo." A trillion-a..
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Charles C. Mann |
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d1e8f72
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These ideas might have been expected to draw fire from Hubbert's employer--he had become second-in-command at a big Shell Oil research center in Houston. But they attracted little notice until 1956,
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Charles C. Mann |
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0b3047a
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Because energy is critical to modern life, these utilities, as we now call them, became so politically important that many governments seized them as essential tools of the state; other nations contented themselves with heavy regulation. Either way, utilities have become a prominent feature of the contemporary landscape. Economically speaking, the advantages of Wizard-style, hard-path centralization and scale were so overwhelming that until..
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Charles C. Mann |
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1b7aecd
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Solar research had been the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety faded, so did the interest.
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Charles C. Mann |
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c2252fe
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President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the "imminent exhaustion" of fossil fuels and other natural resources--"the weightiest problem now before the nation." Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued "the present rate of in..
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Charles C. Mann |
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b2c302f
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becomes as hot as the sun? Earth, he knew, reflects some heat back into space. But why isn't all of it reflected? What keeps our planet cozily warm, Goldilocks-style, and not too hot or too cold?
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Charles C. Mann |
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27131f8
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of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don't pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth without concern for the consequences--littering on an epic scale. People were doing the same with carbon dioxide.
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Charles C. Mann |
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69fa7a9
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To Margulis, the Great Oxidation Event had lessons for today. The first was that people who thought that living creatures couldn't affect the climate had no idea of the power of life. The second was that the onset of climate change meant that Homo sapiens was getting into the biological big leagues--we were tiptoeing into the
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Charles C. Mann |
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02ed57e
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Wizard-style renewable advocates like the venture-capital-backed firm that built Crescent Dunes scoff at these ideas. Even in the best of circumstances, the process of replacing the present coal-and-gas grid with a new, renewable-energy grid--all the while keeping the old grid running--would be long, expensive, and risky even if it weren't being sabotaged by the people who are supposed to support it. Insisting on using small-scale component..
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Charles C. Mann |
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Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e1ae55e
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Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes--they are Borlaugians through and through, hard-path advocates in solar guise. But many or most renewable-energy supporters are Prophets who view Big Solar and Big Wind with almost as much distaste as the Big Coal and Big Oil they seek to replace. From its inception, Crescen..
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Charles C. Mann |