The Oil Drum: Canada

Actually hydro generation in US and in many other places has recently been falling.

Many factors affecting it - climate change, increased water demands for irrigation and by the population, everything adds up and the trend is negative. I can hardly see these factors reversing, quite the opposite actually.

Expecting hydro to raise its share world-wide is obviously assuming a massive program in the third world. How realistic this is I leave up to you to decide.

Unfortunately I have to conclude your optimism is quite crossing the borders of scientific realism. Same goes for wind - expecting it to surpass both hydro and nuclear based on a track record of 5 years, emerging from virtually non-existent source is... maybe way too much.

All dams should be taken down now.

Salmon Advocates Say Kill Dams, Not Sea Lions* - The NewStandard
The Commission could not kill more than one percent of the sea lion population. ... with mortality rates on some rivers reaching 92 percent, according to ...
newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/4688

What's being proposed here is human feed lots
and no other creature is necessary.

Thee Yangtze, Colorado and the Nile are not making it
to the sea.

We don't have five years. Bakhtiari's WOCAP Model
is the operative one.

I note that financing these wonderous projects
is verboten here.

Reason:

We have no idea how much debt is in the World now.

Since 07/17/07 the process has begun to find out.

With the DJIA at less than 12 750 hedge funds will be carried
out feet first.

From CalculatedRisk:

That’s actually why I find those emails quoted in the indictment to be so explosive. I have spent a lot of years learning to decipher coded language about regulatory-not-exactly-improprieties-but-perhaps-areas-of-concern and other corporate-speak ways of putting it that I’m utterly blown away by the unvarnished language being used here. You just don’t accuse a major account like WaMu of out-and-out violation of safety and soundness regulation unless the conduct is egregious in the extreme, or you think it is clear that you are being lined up for bagholder duty, or both. It sure sounds to me like WaMu wanted to tell eAppraiseIT what to do, while having eAppraiseIT do the scut work plus the small matter of making all the relevant warranties in the utterly certain event it backfired. Mortgage market participants can be so amazingly short-sighted sometimes it’s hard to believe, but somebody at eAppraiseIT seems to have figured out who the sucker at the table was. No doubt they wouldn’t be on the receiving end of a civil suit from Mr. Cuomo if someone higher-up had listened to whatever internal employee called bull on this one.

Why didn’t they listen? Why doesn’t any corporation ever listen? Because the WaMu account is huge, and nobody wants to stop a gravy train. The indictment also includes snippets of emails suggesting that WaMu dangled other business relationships outside the appraisal management function in front of First American if it rolled over. Which is more or less exactly what lenders to do appraisers all the time: offer repeat business if they play ball, or being kicked off the team if they don’t.

...These days appraisers have the same pressures to play ball and absolutely none of the protections of being employees. I wonder if we haven’t gotten to that point where someone with nothing left to lose has nothing left to lose. The lenders are asking appraisers to take personal liability for inflated appraisals, while offering them no salary (protection from falling volume cycles), no benefits, no institutional legal or compliance support. Even the per-deal fee we pay has become typically paid only out of closing proceeds. (We used to pay for the appraisals up front out of an application fee, so the appraiser got paid even if the loan didn’t close. These days the appraiser often never gets paid if the loan doesn’t close because the broker has nothing to pay it with.) And guess who is the target of the Cuomo indictment? Not the lender doing the bullying. At some point these appraisers have to realize that they don’t lose much by going state’s evidence and providing the other half of those email chains. And that would mean a Very Bad No Good Rotten Day for everybody."

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2007/11/whats-wrong-with-approved-app...

Nobody wants to stop the gravy train, but too many people
are noting that the bridge ahead has been taken out
and not only are the brakes not being applied but the engineers are trying to figure out how to accelerate
the train further.

Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens

I still think it is a push, but thanks for your links. The problems we have had recently in filling reservoirs to generating capacity weighs heavy, and I think this will get progressively worse with climate change. Properly sizing a watershed for hydroelectric potential and reservoir size requires decades of flow regimes, and I think future variability will make this a tough call.

Your Canadian link states that hydro is a consequence of climate and topography, and goes on "Practically all hydroelectric-power sites in Canada that are reasonably close to load centres have been developed". The remaining potential is the far north, developed at great economic and environmental cost. I don't believe many such schemes, like the idea of reversing the flow of Quebec watersheds some years past, will make it in the future.

I don't wish to dwell on the environmental costs of large hydro, but they are considerable. The costs of China's Three Gorges is still being tabulated, and in the northwest, I wonder how long we will continue trucking or barging smolts to the ocean. (There are some new developments and ideas for free swimming passage)

Another issue inadequately addressed is reservoir silting. I am a guarded proponent of hydro, including microhydro where I see many small drops in the bucket, but skeptical in it's ability to supply significant postpeak energy.

If it comes to that, and it probably will, war. However, cutting the U.S. share of energy consumption from 30% to 15% wouldn't necessarily impoverish us. Doing it in time would require close to socialism in the U.S. although.

I'm also thinking that the Category I folks may not be who you think they are. Most of the developed world has exhausted its cheap energy resources. At some point the Category II and III people are going to figure out they should keep their resources for themselves and not sell them to the developed world for worthless pieces of paper.

The developed world will not voluntarily impoverish itself in anyone else's favour. The good folks in Category II will not agree to just go away and die. What's the outcome?

Speak for yourself. I would gladly enter on the path of energy decent to try to mitigate the coming disaster in the developing world. Are you saying that you are unwilling to give up wealth? Or are you claiming that you yourself are generous and everyone else is an egotistical bastard? I think that concentrating on technologies that can work for everyone is will benefit ourselves as well. For example rather than concentrating on developing highly expensive lithium batteries for hybrid automobiles and planning on using car batteries for balancing the grid, we should concentrate on developing a low cost storage battery based on an abundant material like iron or aluminum (unfortunately lead production is likely to decline in the not too distant future) in order to allow distributed small scale generation from wind or PV. I think that in a couple of decades time we will need such batteries a lot more than we will need hybrid automobiles. We should also be giving top priority to developing local systems of food production which preserve topsoil and recycle nutrients even if such systems are more labor intensive than current agricultural practices and therefore hurt our economy by moving labor resources from other manufacturing enterprises. Our willingness to spend down our resources of top soil in return for short term luxury is one in the surest signs of the structural insanity of our current economic system. The attempt hang on to as much of what we have for as long as possible will make the transition from an economy which assumes that the world is both an infinite mine and an infinite garbage dump, to one in which we live in dynamic equilibrium with the biosphere even more painful and disastrous than it would be otherwise.

No, it has never been any different, which is why individuals and societies can't rely for a decent future on a model of perfecting human nature. You have to come up with solutions that work within human nature.

For example, someone in this thread asked whether there will be capital available for financing energy efficiency and alternative energy projects. There will be capital available, but the question will be whether it can be pried out of the hands of those who have it. The answer will depend at least partly on decisions being made right now. For example, should the Fed cut interest rates even if it leads to higher inflation, or should the Fed maintain or even raise rates to protect the dollar at the risk of deflation?

The answer is to choose inflation, because it forces the holders of capital to keep their money in the game. Inflation is like an ante or blinds, it forces action. (You can't just sit there on your chips or you soon go broke.) But if deflation gets started, all the holders of capital have to do is sit and watch risk-free as stuff gets cheaper and the cash in their mattresses gets more valuable.