Our environmental problem consists of two real problems and many false ones. The real problems: (a) overpopulation and (b) reckless industrial growth. The fake problems: inefficient lightbulbs, unrecycled condoms, non-hybrid cars, non-"green" cleaners, etc.
Oh my god, deserves +6 insightful. This guy should be the head of the EPA.
There is a reason why a PC I build for a customer lasts so long it gets passed down to several family members while that $300 Dell special gets shitcanned 3 weeks after the warranty is gone, and that is because of quality parts. I make sure i have the best parts, from solid caps to high quality fans, whereas the Dell uses the cheapest shit they can get their hands on.
How do you tell which parts are built to last? Most reviews I see on Newegg, Anandtech, etc. focus on initial quality, performance, and price:performance, not durability.
I built a gaming PC in early 2007 with mid-range parts, like a motherboard with solid caps, and nothing has failed so far (using it now). But beyond that, I'd have no idea how to build a durable computer. What's your secret?
Even for scripted series, your local library might not have a particular title.
That sometimes happens, but inter-library loan is free and just adds a few days' delay. Really the worst case I've encountered was where my library had the item in circulation but had a long waiting list. This happened when I wanted to check out Avatar a few days after the DVD release. With ten copies in circulation, there was a waiting list of about 100 patrons, each entitled to check it out for a week. I know my city has a public library that has an especially large and well-kept circulation for a city of 50,000 or fewer people, so maybe I'm lucky.
But daily political commentary and sporting events generally don't come out on DVD because they'd be outdated by the time they did.
I get all my daily political commentary from Slashdot. It's funny because it's true. If I cared about sports, I would be raising hell with my cableco to get ESPN on an a la carte basis (even though my parents' old cableco frequently ran ads explaining why a la carte cable is impossible because of the hideous "package" system media companies use, where they mangle their worst channels in with their best).
It's cheaper to get Amazon Prime, Hulu, AND Netflix than it is to pay for cable.
An excellent point. I would like to add that it is even cheaper to just wait for the show to come out on DVD. And then check it out from the local library.
On the one hand, it requires discipline and patience. On the other hand... it's just TV. I'm not rich, so I'm probably showing some kind of ironic poor-man's snobbery here, but even my favorite TV shows (Futurama, House, Mad Men, The Wire, Top Gear UK, Cowboy Bebop) still enrich my life less than a good novel/comic book/six-pack of beer. And even a terrible novel stimulates the imagination more than TV, with its effortless entertainment value, something that is only really valuable to me if I'm dead tired or staying home from work sick or something.
Paying for any TV show is just not a good deal for me. Or maybe I just don't know good television - feel free to suggest a good show I haven't heard of. But hearing about millions of subscribers leaving cable and satellite TV makes me smile. Cable/sat companies have offered little to nothing of value beyond their infrastructure for years. Enough of this 19th-century rent-seeking. I'm lukewarm about TV, and I understand that puts me in the minority, but I'm sure we can all think of things more deserving of our money.
Not if. When. Fossil fuels are great but not unlimited. What's reasonable is to smooth over the transition period by planning to be a little uncomfortable instead of being a lot uncomfortable. But uncomfortable humanity shall be.
I agree. I should have qualified my previous statement more - fossil fuels will indeed run out (practically speaking), but I believe that the concomitant price increases will be a fairly steady process, meaning that market forces alone will build the necessary nuclear/solar/geothermal plants in time to prevent an electricity price crisis. As far as I can tell, when the price of gas jumps overnight it's due to speculation, not supply/demand. With frakking and tar sand extraction, we're getting really clever at extracting fossil fuels. Natural gas in particular is at an astonishingly low price today (in North America) because of finds in the US and Canada made available by frakking. It's so cheap today that the kWh cost from a natural gas power plant compares favorably to a coal plant! A lot of gas companies are running a serious risk of going bankrupt, too.
So when I consider your idea of planning, I see a lot of guaranteed downsides to it with only one potential upside. We can't perfectly anticipate our future energy needs. The grants and subsidies necessary to get utility/construction companies building these things will bring crony capitalism. And once the things are built, we're faced with the reality that many alternative sources are uneconomical today - what do we do with a power plant that nobody wants? Leave it sitting unused for a few years? It's usually very expensive to leave industrial equipment idle. It's the reason that factories have three work shifts and operate 24/7. And by the time we do finally need the power, we'll be switching on power plants based on old - likely less efficient - designs. We would be taking on all of these problems (and probably more I can't think of) just to smooth out a spike in future electricity prices that I don't feel is necessarily inevitable. Or even likely, given the way things are going.
If you disagree with my analysis, please tell me why. I'm not an expert on this topic. Oh, one more thing - how much would a gallon of gasoline cost if it were synthesized from, say, agricultural waste, like corn husks, and combined with the electricity of a nuclear plant? Generating gasoline from nuclear is pretty stupid, but it might provide a stopgap solution if we are faced with high oil prices and infrastructure that we haven't EOL'd.
When fossil fuel prices skyrocket, then solar panels become a profitable and reasonable alternative
If fossil fuels become expensive, we'll need to fall back on alternative power sources that are currently out of vogue either because:
a. The source relies on specific, rare geology (hydroelectic; old-fashioned geothermal).
b. The source is much more expensive than fossil fuels in most cases (solar at high/medium-high latitudes).
c. The source is captial-intensive and is a regulatory and political nightmare, as it has been using a non-standard design for each new reactor for decades. Oops, I think I just gave this one away.
You can see why none of these are as good as fossil fuels. If we become forced onto these power sources, we'll all just get a lot poorer, as we'll be paying a lot more to fuel our homes and appliances. That will certainly be a profitable situation for solar companies, but I wouldn't call it "reasonable".
Generally speaking, if I'm talking about a movie with a friend, and I hear him say that he hasn't seen it, I say, "let's watch it, right now."
Will you be my friend?
Eventually we'll hit the 1:1 on EROI (energy return on investment) and we'll really be out of oil, despite the fact that there's still more in the ground than the cumulative total ever extracted at that point.
Yes, the EROI is important if you are using fossil fuels to acquire fossil fuels. But what if you are using drilling machinery powered by an alternative power source, like nuclear fission? Known reserves of uranium are staggering. We would not run out of it for a long time even if we were using it to get stupidly hard-to-reach oil. There are a number of good reasons we will soon get off fossil fuels, but measures like these could help make the transition nearly painless. Considering that many people depend on fossil-fuel-burning machines to travel, eat, and not freeze to death, I think that's a good thing.
Also, a small fraction of our current oil consumption goes towards non-fuels like plastics and chemicals that are important to industrial society. Once oil becomes too expensive to use for fuel, I imagine the price will continue to increase, but at a very slow pace, given that demand will have fallen by something like 90-90%.
Let's leave education in the US running as usual, and let's keep doing what we are doing and give kids all the freedom they want. It seems to be working wonders for us, right, right?
We are not even close to giving public school students all the freedom they want. If we were, public schools would resemble the Sudbury Valley School more than the minimum-security jails they are now. If you are worried that K-12 children in public schools have TOO MUCH freedom, then you should probably be sure you're sitting down before I tell you about the Sudbury Valley School.
A few quick stats:
- ~200 students, 9 faculty.
- No academic requirements. No grade-years. No grade-scoring. Students are not even required to learn to read or add/subtract.
- No classes or curriculum.
- Students choose what they want to learn and in what order. All students freely interact with all other students and faculty.
- No armed guards (police). No non-teaching faculty.
- No penalty for showing up late or leaving before closing time. No need for "a good reason" to not show up at all.
Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right? The results may surprise you:
- Between 65-80% of Sudbury alumni go on to graduate from college.
- In 30 years of operation, Sudbury has never once seen a child who did not learn to read of his/her own free will.
Sources:
Wikipedia
Excerpt From An Excellent Book
Currently we are able to drill for steak and eat it.
Quoted for truth.
The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.
