I also don’t understand why people don’t try to come up with a list of characteristics of the “perfect” energy source, and then try to move towards that energy source.

My list of characteristics of the “perfect” energy source would be:

1) Potentially low cost,

2) Low air pollution, water, pollution, and solid waste,

3) Very “dense” (a large amount of power can be concentrated in a very small space,

4) Fuel source is available from anywhere, particularly free nations,

5) Fuel source is not intermittent,

6) Energy can be located near demand (e.g, the amount needed to power a city can be located near or even inside a city).

Coal with CCS doesn’t even come close to being even in the neighborhood of being a perfect energy source. It is horrendously dirty; it’s much more polluting of air and generates more solid waste than any other energy source (except perhaps oil from tar sands).

Here would be my list of top energy sources, in their nearness to “perfection”:

1) Fusion,

2) Thorium fission,

3) Traveling wave reactor fission,

4) Natural gas/photovoltaics (tie).

How much money is being spent researching the top 3? Or even the ones tied for 4th? (For example, how much money is being spent to study methane hydrates as a potential energy source?)

I’ll bet the total worldwide research on items 2 and 3 is less than $100 million each…and maybe even 2 and 3 *combined.* In other words, the world spends over $1 trillion on energy, but it doesn’t even spend 0.01 percent of that amount on researching these potential nearly “perfect” energy sources.

There are publications that have demonstrated that most fallen trees in the Amazon can be readily spotted by satellite. In the Amazon and Congo basins, such fallen trees average around 1% of biomass/yr (but that’s a very variable value). That’s where the 1 to 2 GtC/yr comes from for the harvest of logs only. The variation suggests that harvesting of a bit more, on an uneven aged basis, and near the fallen-tree sites – to increase gap light-levels, and really goose local understory growth – may be almost as eco-neutral.

When a log is harvested, about 1/3 of the above-ground mass is left behind as well as all the below-ground mass. Also, the distribution of fallen trees is sort of random. So from a nutrient- and eco-point-of-view, when you add ash fertilization, the impact of removal of such logs is pretty small.

It is interesting that the IPCC, IEA, EPA, G8, UK, Australia, US, EU, and others all say that CCS is absolutely necessary for rapid decarbonization, and scientists often endorse the ends of such policies, but then oppose the means to achieve them

So it must be the case either that (a) these policies prescriptions are all fundamentally flawed, or (b) they are not flawed and CCS must be made practical.

I don’t know if CCS will prove practical or not, but I am willing to support finding out rather than taking off the table prematurely. You can’t beat something with nothing, and empty advocacy is just that, and probably counter-productive.

But regarding wind energy here’s a story from the implausible-but-true department about George Bush being a champion of wind energy:

http://www.practicalenvironmentalist.com/energy-efficiency/perhaps-al-gore-should-ask-george-w-bush-for-help-in-making-his-house-more-energy-efficient.htm

“Pat Wood, a friend of the president, was chairman of Texas’s Public Utility Commission when the push for wind energy started.

“At the end of a meeting on transmission policy in mid-1996,” he recalled, “I was on my way out the door of the governor’s office, when Governor Bush said to me, ‘Pat, we like wind.’ He was at his desk. I said, ‘We what?’ He said: ‘You heard me. Go get smart on wind.’ ”

Mr. Wood, his fellow commissioners and the Texas utilities did just that. They conducted polls and were stunned by the results: Texas electricity customers were ready to pay a little extra to get more clean renewable energy. So Mr. Bush instructed Mr. Wood to work on wind with the utilities and the environmentalists. Together, they created the Texas Renewable Portfolio Mandate, which Mr. Bush got passed by the Texas Legislature in 1999, as part of a power competition bill. The mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009.

What happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built wind turbines to meet the mandate — so many that the 2,000-megawatt goal was reached in 2005. So now the Texas Legislature has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015. Everyone knows they’ll beat that, too, because all this investment has driven down the costs and made wind power in Texas competitive with clean coal, nuclear and natural gas, even without the temporary tax break. Mr. Wood says he thinks Texas could be producing 15 percent of all its energy from renewables by 2015.”

So experience says that up to 15% of the total supply, wind energy is competitive and people like it. Not competitive with dirty coal I notice but I already mentioned the best plan to make dirty coal clean at little cost.

Sometimes a trace of sarcasm gets muted in blog comments.

“But, I suppose that if we are truly that concerned about CO2, then we can accept a certain amount of disturbance to the ecosystem.”

LOL. It’s beginning to look like we will not accept all those windmills and solar cells all over everything. What then?

It sounds very interesting. How do we know what quantity of this downed wood is available? How quickly would it be regenerated, once we have harvested what is available at the starting point. I would have to quibble that it is not completely eco-neutral, since fallen logs provide habitat as well as nutrients. But, I suppose that if we are truly that concerned about CO2, then we can accept a certain amount of disturbance to the ecosystem.

Dried wood chips would be the coal replacement. Waste heat is used to dry the chips, at essentially no added cost (grinding coal and chipping wood have similar costs).

Tamara:

The careful removal of fallen trees, and their replacement with ash is both eco-neutral and sustainable.

The most careful removal would be with lighter-than-air ships, like Boeing’s SkyHook, moving logs to rivers – with no new access roads (that might encourage the rape of the otherwise untouched forest).