Violating the law

We're at the Common Ground Fair all weekend, in the Energy and Shelter area, showing off wind assessment and energy audit equipment and the like, and answering questions about energy and college.

Come see us and ask a question. Who knows. You may even get a good answer.

One guy yesterday didn't like his answer. He wanted to know why he couldn't put a wind turbine on the roof of his camper and use it to produce electricity for the camper while driving down the road.

I explained, very, very carefully, that the extra drag contributed by the turbine would add to his fuel consumption, and the energy created by the slipstream turbine would be at least less than the energy of the additional gas consumed, and probably much less. He would probably do better to hook up his vehicle's alternator to whatever interior battery he was thinking of charging, if it isn't already hooked up so. If he wanted much more electrical power he should fit a more powerful alternator to the vehicle. He might profitably use a wind turbine while the vehicle was parked, but not while it was running down the road.

This is of course a fairly simple application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Entropy Law. Any of our Sustech students could have given him the same practical answer, and any of our juniors in other majors too, after taking their required third-year class in climate and energy.

But this fellow was not helpfully educated. He was, rather, most offended. He looked very hurt and then angry, rejecting the information, could not accept it, and then argued against it, raising his tone all the while.

Beautiful to watch.

A picture of denial.

If we could get a read-out of his brain during those few minutes, we could probably solve the energy crisis and the climate crisis all at once, because we could track and follow the brain's denial mechanism, identify the neurological seat of whatever incorrect mental model he's using, just completely troubleshoot the wonky plumbing that some people have up there.

So he threw out a last one liner to the effect that he "knew the US military was doing it" so it must work. His tone was nasty by this point, so I told him that the US military wasn't doing it, because the US military was smarter than that, and he angrily stumped off into the netherworld from whence he came.

Why publish this encounter on the Internet?

It's just an example of the kind of reaction we get to a lot of energy and climate science problems, from denialists to anti-wind activists. People listening way too hard to the voices in their own heads.

My wife used to have a great bumper sticker on her truck.

It read, "Don't Believe What You Think."

Good advice for our students.

Critical thinking is probably the most important skill to learn in college.

Here's a good question:

Does the Common Ground Fair save more energy than it uses?

People drive to this fair, sixty to eighty thousand of them, from all over New England. I would guess the average fair-related gas consumption to be at least five gallons and possibly ten. Two to three visitors per car.

That would be between 100,000 and 400,000 gallons per fair, discounting all the other energy that goes into the products sold, and running MOFGA (which excellent outfit uses a lot of renewable power and even generates some itself).

To save that much energy, each visitor would have to go home each year and engage in a behavioral change that reduced overall energy use by the equivalent of a couple-three gallons of gas, or about twenty or thirty KWH. Two or three times that for a family.

Behavioral changes that would count might involve buying more efficient local food (not all local food is more efficient, but most is), or other energy saving products, as well as the more obvious household energy changes demonstrated in the Energy and Shelter area.

Is that possible?

I doubt the average fair goer succeeds in learning enough that is new or additional about efficient agriculture or living techniques to do this. This is especially unlikely because most fair-goers come each year, and most have already adopted energy-saving measures. One couple I talked to yesterday were looking to get a wind turbine, but it very soon was apparent that they didn't consume enough electricity to make sense out of a wind turbine. They didn't use heat oil either, but instead burned firewood for fuel. The only serious energy improvement they might make was to trade in their car, which they drove very little, for a more efficient one, and even that was unlikely to pay for itself. They were probably exceptional, but illustrative of the inherent problem of "preaching to the choir."

But the occasional or new fair-goer might reduce energy consumption by a very large amount, particularly when you consider that some might choose to implement a lifestyle choice that lasts much longer than the per-year time-frame of the fair.

So if I go to the fair and learn about a new weatherization or insulation technique, or visit Unity College's blower door exhibit and learn how to get a proper energy audit, and thereby reduce my oil consumption by a hundred or two hundred gallons a year as a result, over many many years, I might "pay" for many visitors' energy required to get them to the fair.

All this is speculative, but not nearly as implausible as wind-powered camper guy.

In any case, the fair is fun, one of the best fun things I do every year in my job.

A little fun never hurt anyone. Or any planet.