THE PLOWBOY PAPERS ENERGY, ECOLOGY AND ECONOMICS
(Page 6 of 11)
May/June 1974
By Mother Earth News
As growth of urban areas has become concentrated, much of our energies and research and development work has been going into developing energy-costing technology to protect the environment from wastes, whereas most wastes are themselves rich energy sources for which there are, in most cases, ecosystems capable of using and recycling wastes as a partner of the city without drain on the scarce fossil fuels. Soils take up carbon monoxide, forests absorb nutrients, swamps accept and regulate floodwaters. If growth is so dense that environmental technology is required, then it is too dense to be economically vital for the combined system of man and nature there. The growth needs to be arrested or it will arrest itself with depressed, poorly competing economy of man and of his environs. For example, there is rarely excuse for tertiary treatment because there is no excuse for such dense packing of growth that the natural buffer lands cannot be a good cheap recycling partner. Man as a partner of nature must use nature well and this does not mean crowd it, out and pave it over; nor does it mean developing industries that compete with nature for the waters and wastes that would be an energy contributor to the survival of both.
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13. Solar energy is very dilute and the inherent energy cost of concentrating solar energy into form for human use has already been maximized by forests and food-producing plants. Without energy subsidy there is no yield from the sun possible beyond the familiar yields from forestry and agriculture.
Figure 5. Diagrams of three systems of solar energy use.
Advocates of major new energies available from the sun don't understand that the concentrations quality of solar energy is very low, being only 10— 16 kilocalories per cubic centimeter. Much of this has to be used up in upgrading to food quality. Plants build tiny microscopic semiconductor photon receptors that are the same in principle as the solar cells advocated at vastly greater expense by some solar advocates. The plants have already maximized use of sunlight, by which they support an ecosystem whose diverse work helps maximize this conversion as shown in Figure 5 A. If man and his work are substituted for much of the ecosystem so that he and his farm animals do the recycling and management, higher yield results as in sacred cow agriculture (Figure 5 B). Higher yields require large fossil fuel subsidies in doing some of the work. For example, making the solar receiving structures (Figure 5 C), whereas the plants and ecosystem make their equipment out of the energy budget they process. Since man has already learned how to subsidize agriculture and forestry with fossil fuels when he has them, solar technology becomes a duplication. The reason major solar technology has not and will not be a major contributor or substitute for fossil fuels is that it will not compete without energy subsidy from the fossil fuel economy. Some energy savings are possible in house heating on a minor scale.
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