Energy Part 9 - Energy Properties and Renewables
Renewables A.K.A. Rebuildables
Summary: ‘Renewable energy’. It's something we all know about, right? It's the current phraseology for "non-fossil" energy, and the popular notion is that it's as good as, or better, than fossil energy. We agree it's hugely better than fossil fuel in the most important way: fossil fuel, if its use is continued on the current path for many more decades, will cause the Earth to lose most large complex life and most specialized food webs to acidified seas, hotter temperatures, ecosystem degradation and rapid environmental change. It's the word "renewable" that is misleading. It’s a story. It implies that energy may be “renewed” and used again. This isn’t the case. A maple tree is renewable. A chicken is renewable. They can reproduce themselves based on solar and hydrological flows (and finding another chicken). A Prius isn’t renewable. What is referred to in common parlance as "renewable energy", then, is the notion, there are devices humans can make that will channel and concentrate useable flows of energy, more or less indefinitely, from the ongoing diffuse flow of fusion energy from the sun (including secondary solar energy such as wind, etc.). And not just a little bit but (a) in amounts comparable to what we are now getting by burning fossil carbon and
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