31–40 of 49 posts
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This is why electoralism was, is, and always will be a failure. True global fixes will always require unpopular and unpleasant decisions like this.
Ok...fun to see how the "common good" types often blatantly argue/devolve into authoritarianism...
What's the author proposing? That we voluntarily abstain from using electricity during certain times, or the government shut down electricity usage to households during certain times? The former is the equivalent of the government telling people to "turn down your thermostat" or "don't drive SUVs". That's basically useless because most people don't care. The latter wouldn't work because most people place high value o…
It feels like yet another case of trying to blame consumers for industrial problems. If there are places that have high demand load on a continuous basis, it would be large industrial applications running three+ shifts.
The first step is to have people realize how much power they are consuming. Maybe sell power in blocks that have to be refilled. I had a shed built on some cheap off grid land as my office. Bought 100ah 12v battery and 300w of solar. It’s surprising how little power use I can manage when I see the power draw and battery level. I’m not in the greatest place for solar. It’s also given me an appreciation for how much po…
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> It can't possibly be economically competitive if it is driving a steam turbine What do you mean by "economic competition"? Generally speaking with current technology there is no power cheaper than nuclear power. In that sense it is the most competitive power there is. But not for private investment funds looking to own power generation and secure huge returns in relatively short term. They'd rather see more expensi…
Not economically competitive with a gas-turbine power plant powered by methane. (almost the same thing as the power plant on a jet airplane) The real hazard of the current "renewable energy" economy that is when the sun doesn't shine the backup power is generated from methane (aka 'natural gas') which has very high power density and very low capital cost compared to the steam turbine either in a coal or nuclear plant…
Doesn't natural gas power plants also use turbines to generate electricity? How can it be cheaper than the steam turbine portion of a coal/nuclear power plant?
Hang on there, are we so sure about that? Our present-day obsession with reliable technology in healthcare is a very recent development, but it's something that has largely been sold to us by industrialists and the oil industry, and we consume it, increasingly, at the cost of the living standards, even the lives, of the poor and those in developing countries. Society has conditioned us to believe that reliable power for safety-critical life-sustaining applications is something that we can't live without, but a measured examination of the evidence of climate change means that we must urgently reimagine a future without the growth or even the maintenance of healthy human lifespans for those in the developed world.
A modest proposal of my own would be for western governments to introduce climate-safeguarding social credit systems that normalise and enforce the migration to a new intermittency economy, while forestalling the dangers of any dissidence or skepticism that would hold out against the new economic model that this would create. It would help to prepare us for a new society and a new economy that wasn't reliant on the old and unsustainable paradigms of food, resource and energy security.
> Hospitals certainly need 100 percent reliable equipment— Hang on there, are we so sure about that? Our present-day obsession with reliable technology in healthcare is a very recent development, but it's something that has largely been sold to us by industrialists and the oil industry, and we consume it, increasingly, at the cost of the living standards, even the lives, of the poor and those in developing countries.…
I don’t understand why people keep proposing these ideas that we must sacrifice and do without electricity. There are 7 billion people on the planet. Even if you organized to have enough Americans self sacrifice (needlessly) why would you ever expect the rest of the world, in particular the developing world who are trying to raise their living standards, to do the same? This is not a solution. It’s dead on arrival bu…
Even putting aside that, that standard of living fundamentally depends on the labour output of developing nations. Without it the economics look very different. Could France have fully de-carbonised it’s grid without international trade to less developed nations producing many things it consumes? Doubtful. High tech sustainable energy is the privilege of stable, developed nations which leverage a significant portion of their living standards from the labour of other, less developed nations.
So you keep hearing this notion because the current notion doesn’t scale to the current earth population let alone where it will be in another fifty years. Both are little more than flights of fancy and their main use is as thought experiments to hopefully come up with something that will actually work. The current trajectory can’t be sustained, and the self-sacrifice utopia will never be reached. In between are scenarios where we’re screwed, but hopefully also ones where we’re not. The search continues.
I completely agree that the concept of a global population of self sacrificing humans is not foreseeable or realistic. But I think that must be tempered with the equal improbability of an energy abundant utopia as you foresee. If it was going to happen we at least need a clear actionable means of making it so, and either outcome seems to have the same foil: human behaviour and self interest.
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This is why electoralism was, is, and always will be a failure. True global fixes will always require unpopular and unpleasant decisions like this.
What system do you propose that will implement wise unpopular and unpleasant decisions and not foolish ones ... at least more than electoral systems do?
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What system do you propose that will implement wise unpopular and unpleasant decisions and not foolish ones ... at least more than electoral systems do?
Dictatorship of the proletariat, of course. You see left wing ideas rising in the discourse, media, and world - the fire burns within, Capitalism will fall soon
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Ok...fun to see how the "common good" types often blatantly argue/devolve into authoritarianism...
200,000+ of human history any we are still overwhelmed with people who will only be happy when everyone else is under their boot.