Warren Buffet says man's last great technical challenge is energy

Yes, inexpensive, sustainable energy would make a vast difference to most of humanity. Does Warren have any advice on how to change the massive subsidies given to the oil and transportation industries? The average consumer would be more motivated to make changes if they knew what their choices really cost.

 

Yes, but...

A few years ago pundits thought information was the last great frontier. Currently a lot is being spent on biotechnology research. If we manage to really understand genetics and life processes, many issues (from cancer to aging) will probably begin to be solved. energy isn't as much of an issue as dependence on fossil fuels. Modern nuclear plant designs are safe and relatively clean. The problem is transportation and storage of energy.

 

We already have all the nuclear power we need. The reactor is located at a safe distance, and the power gets here in about eight minutes.

 

He's not talking about us here, he's talking about the developing world. They hardly have the money or resources to build nuclear power plants and connect them to an often non-existent power grid. Solar allows peoples in these countries to skip the grid and go with a much cheaper distributed system. Just having access to clean water and a little bit of power will improve their lives dramatically.

As far as frontiers... who's stupid enough to think that we'll ever run out of them? It'll be a sad day if we ever do, but we won't. If science has taught us anything its that we only know about a fraction of the things we don't know anything about.

 

My car still needs gasoline to run 125mi/day/avg. Give my a similar product that doesn't, and I'll stop my big oil subsidies.

 

Biotech will not solve pollution problems and the associated effects on environmental degredation and the loss of ecosystem services, services we cannot provide even if we wanted to.

Nuclear power is still based on finite resources that require extraction and the whole process leaves waste products ranging from thermal, toxic materials, overburden, combusted fossil fuels, altered landscapes, and sometimes cultural disruption, etc.. Nurclear is often considered better than coal-fired plants but to assume that is the only technology we need or worse yet the best possible energy source we could ever devise is rather silly.

 

It is not energy, but conservation & energy efficiency. It is not what you have or don't have, but what you do with what you do have. Conservation & efficiency are more cost effective than anything else. We have been under the spell of "go get more" for too long. It is better to hold onto what you have first.

 

As in ecological design and figuring out ways to get what you need without continuous energy inputs? What a novel idea. Maybe we'll really get to work on that when people are forced to pay the true cost of energy.

You know that is not directed at you buddy. It is simply sarcasm directed at our collective ignornace.

 

Of course there will be other energy sources developed. For all we know quantum mechanics research will tap into a neighboring universe for free power. Or it will be something not even considered today.

I agree that in developing countries solar generated electricity could change lives. I also believe that clean water is already in shorter supply than fossil fuels in many areas, and will become more of an issue than fuel faster than we run out of finite oil resources. Interestingly, cheap power will help to solve the water crisis through desalination of sea water, so maybe everything hinges around energy after all.

Mankind tends to solve issues based on available capital - when the ROI for solving an issue exceeds the cost of the issue, we tend to find solutions. This has not been kind to the planet, but it appears to be relatively consistent. Such an approach means we won't fix our energy problems until it becomes economically feasible to do so in spite of government mandates. Higher fuel costs will drive research which will drive breakthroughs. Hopefully this happens before we have totally destroyed our environment.

 

Agreed. Unfortunately we tend to create more problems than we solve with most of our inventions (the opposite of Wendell Berry's "Solving for Patern"). lol wait.. that's not funny

 

Do you believe in existence of Free energy and the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_suppression"]conspiracy of suppressing technologies[/ame] that can harness it ?

 

That's a lot of miles! I hope that is sales/similar rather than a commute. If it is a commute then there are better answers.

 

Getting energy from the Sun is pretty obvious. The plants have been doing it long before we were around. Getting energy out of the ground (oil) was pretty dumb, when you think about it. We just weren't smart enough to get it from the Sun--like the plants were. But the plants have had a much longer time to figure it out. Too bad they can't talk. Fortunately, we are learning.

Nuclear energy, by the way, is really part of solar energy, since a lot of the Sun's enormous energy comes from nuclear reactions. In a sense, a nuclear reactor is a kind of mini-sun.

 

I commute 50 miles/day one way (or 100 miles/day total). I'd love to have an alternative, but buying the Prius WAS my alternative. Here in the Denver/Front Range metroplex, public transportation hasn't reached from Denver to Colorado Springs where I work, or north to Ft. Collins. Once it does (if it ever does) the whole front range is then in range of reasonable transportation from a cost and pollution perspective. Carpooling is one solution, but difficult with my job hours. There are no public busses that connect reasonably well to my home and job.

Our mid-south metros, being so much newer than those in Europe (and even those on the US East Coast) didn't develop rail or other public transportation. Now we're paying the price. In today's job market, I take what I can get and put up with the consequences. As an aside, I wouldn't have a Prius had it not been for this, so I'm glad for the circumstance that led me to Prius ownership and the benefits I'm getting outside my commute.

 

Your are running your car nuclear power right now. Both extra-terestrial fusion and fision here on Earth. Billions of years ago a super-nova spit out carbon, iron, and uranium, amoungs many other elements all forged in a nuclear fusion reactions in that star. The uranium coallesed with other elements to form Earth, and the Sun. Millions of years ago the solar furance pumped out photons, which struck Earth, grew plants and dinosaurs. These were subducted over milenia down deep in the Earth where nulcear fision from the uranium heat processed them into crude oil, natural gas and coal. The crude oil was pumped out of the ground, and craced and reacted using the natural gas and electricity from the coal to produce gasoline....

 

You don't actually believe in that crap do you? Next thing you'll be telling us that light waves are discrete bundles (quanta) of electromagnetic energy and that the atom can be broken down into smaller parts.

 

Well, each of us has our own comfort levels for living and reasons for where we are, but I figure expending the time driving 100 miles/day to/from work is worth about $16,000/year, minimum...and that's just time. (Probably a lot more since that is leisure time = after tax basis.) Add in gasoline, maintenance and depreciation, and there is another ~$5,000 year. So for my life perspective there would be a lot of incentive to cut that down to 20 minutes each way, maximum--I get happy when it is ~10 mins. That and schools have been the major determinants of where we live. My wife briefly had a commute of over an hour each way in Houston along a $#%@!*& toll road when we had the Accord. Didn't take long for me to crunch the numbers and for us to find a more economical location.

But some are okay with the time lost, etc. I had a good friend who drove 99 miles each way in his former job for years before he got work in the same facility as his wife (and me), so I've got a lot of respect for the fortitude it took to do that day in and day out.

For me it is primarily a quality of life issue, but it is also possible to convert that into a financial burden (as if one was comparing job A to job B and looking at two salary offers to determine which one made the most economic sense.)

 

Actually, oil is a brilliant source of energy. You can't fault people for harnessing it. Petrol has a crazy amount of energy/unit volume. The trouble is that oil has allowed us to run amok, sustain WAY too many people on the globe, and get REALLY, REALLY lazy. We wouldn't be able to harness the sun now if we hadn't figured out how to manipulate oil first. The hard part for us is accepting that we really need to change and actually get smarter about how we tackle problems. I think we've made tremendous strides in the last 50 years in thinking about systems and how we might perturb them. The problem is that short term interests (biological conditioning) have remained successful at marginalizing the information that we know have to make better decisions. Our next challenge as a species is teaching our selves to take the long view into account more often, or certainly giving it more weight in our decision making processes.

 

The one nice thing about a long commute is you can listen to a LOT of pipe tunes.