Peter Johnson's Profile

journalistic quality

embrace their forms of communication

I am partly driven to this conclusion by

the chorus of opposition that greets any major renewable energy proposal.

People love renewable energy, unless it is bigger than a figleaf.

A new car’s embodied energy is 76 000 kWh – so if

you get one every 15 years, that’s an average energy cost of 14 kWh per day.

A life-cycle analysis by Treloar, Love, and Crawford estimates that building

an Australian road costs 7600 kWh per metre (a continuously reinforced

concrete road), and that, including maintenance costs, the total cost over

40 years was 35 000 kWh per metre.

Shadowfax the horse weighs about 400 kg and consumes 17 kWh per

day.

Many tidal energy extraction systems are just extracting energy that would

have been lost anyway in friction.

over 30 years.

It doesn’t require

high-cost hardware, in contrast to solar photovoltaic power.

Similar arguments can be made in favour of

carnivory for places such as the scrublands of Africa and the grasslands of

Australia