Réacteur nucléaire naturel d'Oklo.J'ai déjà évoqué un autre document sur les énergies renouvellables cette semaine, en voilà un autre un peu moins 'gentil' (in English, désolé). The Limitations of Renewable Energy.
Et si vous ne vous faites pas de soucis au sujet du Rechauffement de la Planète (soyons franc, un monde sans éléctricité est nettement plus térrifiant qu'un monde un degré plus chaud) il reste plusieurs centaines d'années de charbon à disposition, que les Chinois vont bruler de toute façon.
(Le charbon pollue plus que le nucléaire, cause plus de fatalités, detruit plus de paysage, et émet plus de CO2. Mais c'est moins cher...)
Si vous en avez la possibilité, il vous faudrait le lire, et ensuite vous poser des questions sérieuses sur la politique énergétique de votre pays (ce texte pris ailleurs):
Ce n'est pas demain la veille que des trains éléctriques vont marcher à l'éolienne...
Nature’s Nuclear Reactors: The 2-Billion-Year-Old Natural Fission Reactors in Gabon, Western AfricaI already mentioned 'Without the hot air' this week. Here is another document: The Limitations of Renewable Energy.
And if you are not Concerned About Climate Change (and let's face it, a world with no electricity at all is a lot more terrifying than one a degree warmer) there's several hundred years of coal, which the Chinese will be burning anyway.
(Coal is dirtier than nuclear, kills more people, destroys more landscape, causes more CO2. But it's cheap. See also here)
You really should read it, and start worrying about your country's energy policy (this text by the same author):
Europe and Japan need to move away from fossil quicker as they have no significant resource of either left, and the middle east is running out.
We can see a fairly smooth progressions away from things the depend on oil – cars and aircraft mainly – towards an more electric age powered by coal or nuclear.
There is enough fossil left to build it. It won’t collapse instantly, but the first pre-requisite is that expectations are radically changed. Deliberate or serendipitous, the current global ‘financial’ crisis is achieving this.
The second casualty beyond standard of living, and the collapse of a consumer society will be egalitarianism and possibly democracy. In a resource stripped world, you can’t afford to give candy to the kids, even if they have a vote: resources will have to go on those who can and will build the necessary infrastructure. That means a total retrenchment of the socialist state as a paternalistic protector and provider to the masses.
If these measures fail to occur, and weakness in central government leads to a form of neo-communism disguised as paternalistic egalitarianism, then the transition to a post industrial situation will not occur and the natural regression will be back to a neo-feudalism, with local warlords controlling what amounts to a localised suite of more or less self sufficient principalities under effective martial law by a landed and martial elite. This will result in something like 75%-95% population loss. It seems to be the direction the Green Faithful want to take things, and also the Islamic fundamentalists. It was essentially technology and access to it that eventually de-emphasised the land and warriors castes in favour of a skilled artisan and merchant class in Europe: strip energy away from this and it must revert back to feudalism, with massive loss of life, especially in the now irrelevant industrial cities.
In short any society that accepts that it needs a technocratic elite and nuclear power or coal to preserve what can be preserved and transform what must be transformed, will survive. Right now that looks like India and China. Whose populations have far lower expectations and far more respect for science technology and intelligence.
Western socialism will die completely – as it depends on the support of a class that is now supremely irrelevant.
