From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Tue May 20 2008 - 05:58:53 EDT
Gerald Levy wrote: > Especially note the Appendix, "Labor's Militant Voice Environmental > Program", > which includes a brief platform that "would solve many of today's > environmental problems" in a socialist economy. But, would it? > > http://links.org.au/node/423 '/Energy/. A program to develop and further investigate renewable and alternative energy sources. Research into technologies which promote hydrogen, solar, wind and hyrdo-electric power sources. A rational plan of energy use and production would call for an overall decrease in the use of stored energy of any kind to meet the general needs of society. The generation of energy for public consumption by industrial plants under private ownership, which today contribute greatly to carbon emissions, as well as airborne, water and soil toxicity, would be eliminated and replaced with power generation facilities under community control. In order to further reduce public energy consumption and waste, a program of socialised domestic food production, and sanitation could be implemented through organisations of community control.' There is a real confusion of primary and secondary sources of energy there. Hydrogen can only be produced ( with energy losses ) from some primary energy source -- fossil fuel, nuclear or hydro etc. If they are going to rely on solar and wind, then there is going to be an overall increas in the use of stored energy not a decrease, since these energy sources are intermittent and thus rely on an intermediate form for storage. At pressent that storage is a big problem. The only proven storage technology is hydro electric pumped storage, which requires particular geographic conditions which are limited. Batteries, compressed air and flywheels are other possibilities, but nobody has yet developed these in the required multi-gigawatt range. In a typically opportunist way they evade the issue of nuclear power. > > In solidarity, Jerry > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > ope mailing list > ope@lists.csuchico.edu > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope > _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
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