[ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Sun Jan 20 18:56:56 UTC 2013


On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

>> This is my greatest fear (well, this and rabid chihuahuas), that we will
>> learn to make do with less, and less, and
>> less, all the way down to the freezing in the dark scenario.
>>
>
> > That's a perfectly possible scenario. And it's all our fault. We wasted
> the last 40+ years. What we're doing is two orders of magnitude too little,
> at least two decades too late.  Look into the bathroom mirror. There's your
> culprit, right there.
>

There is a certain Calvinist holier than thou attitude in that and I find
it somewhat less than endearing, rather like those a century ago who said
drugs shouldn't be given to women during childbirth to relieve their pain
because God wanted them to suffer.  Environmentalists gained a lot of
political power about 40 years ago and there is no doubt they did a lot of
good by cleaning up the air and water, but they also have a lot to answer
for, like a virtual worldwide ban on DDT that ended up killing a lot of
people. And today the problem is that environmentalists never saw a source
of energy they didn't hate; oil causes oil spills, coal causes greenhouse
warming, fracking contaminates the groundwater with water, hydroelectric
floods the land, geothermal causes earthquakes, solar cells are too dark
and take up so much land that they endanger obscure desert lizards, wind
turbines are too ugly and noisy and kill little birdies. And as for
nuclear, well the mere utterance of that forbidden word sends them (and
even a particular member of this list) into irrational expletive filled
infantile tantrums.  The environmentally correct solution is that we should
freeze to death in the dark and stop complaining about it because we
deserve it.  I think there may be a better solution.


> > most people seem to want to turn their back on it and slump into a slow
>> extinction.
>>
>
> > Right, and so many of them are on *this* mailing list! An evil fairy
> snuck in sometime a decade ago, and turned
> its readers into reactionary dinos. Ugh.
>

Then one can't help but ask, why are you here? Eugen, I've known you since
the 90's and we've disagreed a lot but you only went bat shit crazy about 6
months ago, what the hell happened?

  John K Clark
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