Comments by "" (@rstevewarmorycom) on "TED"
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We exist. That is obvious. The evidence is that we can SEE it. That someone had to make us is not something that is seen or witnessed, so there is NO evidence for that AT ALL.. We exist by being aware because being aware is the only way existence is possible. What would it even mean to pretend something could exist without an awareness witnessing it? In what sense would its existence BE REAL? It wouldn't. And non-existence can't exist because it is non-existence, what we call impossible. Therefore only existence is possible, and only by means of and within an awareness. Atoms, yes, big-bang, okay maybe, chemistry, sure, physics and energy, by all means, Darwin, of course. But it all happens BY MEANS of awareness and exists AS A PART of the existence of that awareness, because nothing else is possible. Non-existence, because it IS non-existence, is impossible. We exist because we can't do anything else or we wouldn't be WE. If that's too anthropic for you, too bad. It happens to be true because nothing else can be.
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***** Yes, but embodied energy means we waste most of what we use that for, so lets mandate standardized re-usable containers, and mandate the re-sale of all items, and not permit their disposal and require the person who doesn't want them to offer them to others in a common space, like a recycle yard. This HAS to be govt mandated, we're headed for 3 more degrees C this century, and twice that the next. Whether people know it yet or not, this IS indeed an emergency situation. This is NOT a matter of personal choice as to lifestyle, This is what we MUST do. Aeronautical experts have already said that the high prices of air travel being more than most now are willing to spend is not the fault of the airlines, but the problem of the cost of fuel and equipment. They also say that this will be the last generation for a while for the average person to be able to fly on jets. Better go with Elon Musk's ideas for transport. I don't care whether people "would like" a vacation in the south of France or Tuscany. They will find that it is soon out of range for most of them. Prices will see to that as we are forced to put more tariffs on carbon fuels. We don't have to go vegetarian, we can eat fish and poultry, those are not much less efficient at converting grain than we are. But your meat consumption WILL fall, prices will see to that. Cars will also have to go, they consume way too much, as MacKay showed you. Instead of 10,000 kWs a two or three wheeled ultralight <100kg battery vehicle with a thin aerodynamic weather shell can do 30-40 mph on less than 600 or 800 Watts, have a range of 50 miles, and it can be charged from home with a few solar panels in a few hours. If mass produced as a hobby kit, each family can own several. Gives a new meaning to "I can't drive 65!!", don't it? That sort of thing can be done right away and in only a few years we have the monkey off our backs. Then, if we get PRISM or another scheme working, or fusion, then we can do more, but humans really need to grow up about this stuff, and this is a way to achieve that. They have to learn how to build vehicles and generate power, they will feel and be more independent, and they free themselves of some huge monkeys on their backs that have been strangling this economy, If the govt put us on a war-time footing for the production of solar panels and wind turbines, we might not have to suffer hardly at all, but we would still have to learn to live a slightly different and more conscious way.
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***** There is that, but two things: We need to decide with something potentially dangerous, and that's a democracy sort of thing, even renewables have that, it just doesn't have to be as careful because those aren't dangerous, AND, it isn't THOSE costs I was worried about, more like nuclear transport, security, mining, waste management and cleanup of decommissioned reactors, as well as the day to day costs of the expertise required to run them safely, and then there are govt subsidies and liability insurance costs born by government.. Add those all together and you wind up with a much higher cost than the cost on your energy bill, and much higher than renewables. The Chinese changed several of their reactor plans and are now increasing renwables much faster than coal and nuclear put together. Part of this is due to being unable to breathe in Beijing and several other industrial cities. The rest of it is falling costs for wind and solar. Russia is peculiar, there are lots of entrenched oil interests in the former Politburo families that are now the Russian Mafia, and that, just like the actions of our rich to protect their investments, is probably behind their failure, but Russia is nearly a 3rd world economy lately anyway. It continues to amaze analysts how the Russians keep their space agency going, and it is believed that without American help they couldn't. The Saudis are now building Mazdar, the solar city, and they are experimenting with several giant solar thermal plants that are floating islands. They haven't gone solar big time yet, I think they are worried about frightening the west into believing they are running dry, and probably won't till they actually start to run dry on oil, which analysts say is any time now, some Saudis have privately said that their oil reserves are mostly salt water, saline intrusion.
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***** It's not a matter of being some kind of renewables authoritarian, but about saving the planet and humankind. If I'm authoritarian about that, so what? Carbon has to be stopped, and I'll accept anything that works, but things that are more expensive will be slower to expand because we can't afford them as well. As for fossil getting less subsidy than renewables, maybe that is true, but that is only because now that they have the subsidy they produce more of it because they bought their equipment base with the subsidies and they've stolen the market. If renewables had received as much total subsidy historically to bring them to a parity of subsidy over time, then I'm sure there would be even more solar, and less subsidy per kWhr for renewables as well. Since the subsidy pays for the equipment investment, if renewables had the same degree of investment, such as the huge grid and highway system enjoyed by coal and oil, then I'm sure it would have spread all over. This stuff is hard to gauge, but it seems true. And people seldom think of it that way. The whole society is structured around fossil and we're so used to it we think it's normal, so ask yourself what would a society built around renewables look like? High speed trains, or capsules, electric velomobile and other ultralight electric bicycle and tricycle lanes as superhighways? Much less grid and more localized power generation from wind and solar? More widely spaced homes and people growing most of their own food by backyard permaculture and vertical gardening in agrarian cul-de-sacs serviced bicycle lanes and by delivery drones and helicopter EMS? Transport of goods by tubes to each neighborhood? No more strip mines for coal or mountaintop removal, recycling all materials? Neighborhood aluminum re-casting using solar furnaces? Local reuse of benign reformable plastics like HDPE? Huge solar and windpowered clothes dryers serving the whole block? All shopping done by computer? Neighborhood solar and wind projects? Things could be quite different.
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***** Amory Lovins is FAR more optimistic than I am about it, he thinks the free market can do all this, and I doubt that very much. I think finally he will run into the last major bank of entrenched investors and they won't budge because it means they won't be rich anymore. And it won't matter if the sheeple vote guys out of office, because the climate will finally frighten everyone into doing the right thing, just maybe too late to even HAVE a next century. Long about the latter part of this century when the great American breadbasket becomes a dust bowl for the third year straight people will start clamoring for their elected guys to "DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!", and then the experts will tell them what they should have done, and they may try to do it all waaay too late. You see, the problem is, that even if we stopped emitting carbon right now, totally, the warming would continue for a century or more, and that might be enough to destroy most of the food crops of the world. You can't just move all food production north, and the equatorial nations will be one big refugee camp, starving and loading guns. Amory deals with the corporate youngsters and those whose bread comes from keeping up with the times, but he has yet to make inroads among the filthy rich, the ones who already "got theirs" and want to keep collecting on old investments and enjoying expensive cars and mansions and vacations till they croak. So for now it actually SEEMS like his way can be successful, so let's just wait and see, shall we? I won't be around, so all I can do is warn you and leave.
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***** No, it doesn't quite work that way, the state changes forbid it. Also, cooling by the refrigeration required is very energy intensive. And that requires lots of waste heat that cannot be concentrated enough to continue the process without even more energy. It gets crazy trying to cogenerate that way. The best form is vacuum distillation, and even it requires lots of power per Liter. After that comes RO, and that takes slightly more. I don't know why you keep pretending Lovins wants this "energy poverty" like you imagine I do. He's a big champion of keeping the same moronic standard of living and brute forcing it with lots of wind and solar, and he likes some nuclear too. He's convinced capitalism can do it all, and I'm not. He's a very bright guy, but not of the same tack as me. I don't even think my approach is "energy poverty", just a more ordered society where we do the same things, but very efficiently using renewables. And the scarcity you fear is NOT artificial, it's going to be VERY real fairly shortly.
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I can tell you don't really know a thing about solar. Any home can be made to heat and cool itself. All it takes is more south-facing glass, and 4" exterior superinsulation. Combine that with ventilation into a pipe system under the yard or an insulation skirt on the ground around its perimeter. For homes with few windows on the south, use solar walls or Trombe walls, masonry with glass over it to absorb heat. If you once upgrade the houses you will never need power plants or to replace them every thirty years. I don't know where you get the notion that wind is "inefficient". Efficiency is irrelevant, there are no fuel costs. Only the cost of installation is important, and if you amortize that over its life it pays off its cost in two years AND it's CO2 cost to make it in LESS time than that, and they last thirty+ years, more with careful rebuilding. Solar photovoltaic is "inefficient" in converting light to electrical energy, but since it is free that is also irrelevant. News for you, we won't have fusion, probably not till end of century, well too late to do anything about climate change and vanishing oil. The calculations for making a home solar are trivial physics, I'm a physicist. All you have to do is count BTUs supplied and lost through various interfaces per square area. And tall residential buildings are even easier to make solar, because they have a lot of open south wall and insulating them costs much less per contained volume. It is not only possible, it's trivial, and not only that, we will HAVE NO CHOICE!
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captain swagworth I've read all their stuff, and it all sounds boyishly over-optimistic, just like all that kind of stuff always reads. The reason they ARE poorly funded is because it is HORRIBLY expensive, and also we don't know for sure we can even do it. The time frame is still totally wrong to solve our climate or energy problems. Even if ITER works and the DEMO, it will take 50-75 YEARS to build the number of these that we would need, and the cost could be far better spent on solar and wind, and MUCH more effectively. You're a physicist, that's nice, I'm a OLD physicist, with a lot more experience. All homes and their heating systems amortize out at about 25-30 years, meaning they require a capitol outlay or replacement every generation. If we begin retrofitting homes for passive solar instead, and installing the wind and PV now, progressively, we will be done before the time frame to even BEGIN any major fusion plants. Fusion might be nice, but it's uncertain,. too late, and probably not even needed to get us the kind of world we want in the short run. In the long run, it's a grand scheme, but for now, only a scheme. I would definitely better fund it, but only if we were spending what we should on wind and solar, in case what I said turns out to be true.
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Coptah Actually there is. If you stop listening to rah-rah nuclear proponent liars who don't cover the arguments or actual data, but who only cherry-pick factoids and glib tid-bits and if you stop watching websites that promote their side without any reference to people who have contradicted them, then you can find the information among the pretenders and figure it out.
You had to learn who to trust regarding Evolution, you don't just believe the yell-loudest creationist lie sites, do you?
Well, you have to do this with climate and nuclear and renewables and a whole host of issues, because there are a lot of liars out there with vested interests in deceiving you.
You first of all ignore proponents. You know they deal in half truths and pump up support with deception. You find the information from people making things work. You go to universities and respected scientific sources. You look for peer-reviewed research papers.
You ask the obvious question: Why don't we do this now, why doesn't anyone want to fund this? There are REASONS why they don't fund things, usually it is because after the big money people paid a lot of money to experts to tell them the truth, they have found that the liars were lying, and it won't really go as easily as they say it will, and it will cost them their shirt and pants!!
We can do this with "free energy" bullshitters too, ask them why they don't have a well-recognized product on the market that people are pleased with? Diagnosing bullshit artists is as simple as realizing obvious realities many times.
After you see someone try to tell you how molten salt reactors, or some such bull that they don't have working yet, will make all our dreams come true and save the planet, go look for counter-evidence. Liars always lie 20 times louder than reputable sources, so you will find vast numbers of rah-rah clones of their websites and lectures, put up by "true believers" who have been duped, so go look for the very few who are questioning that, and ask them why. They are usually MUCH quieter people.
See if they are reputable, do they have university chairs, are they published in peer-reviewed journals? What do they say, what arguments do they address and have the rah-rah folks ever mentioned those things? If not then you have dishonest deceivers on your hands among the rah-rah-ers and you shouldn't believe them.
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