181–190 of 216 posts
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What does that even mean? Who is dependent on what in that scenario?
The people receiving food stop working to secure food on their own. They grow entitled, and expect food aid. It's an observed phenomenon in Africa.
I wonder how this compares to the worst smogs experienced in London and elsewhere before the West got its act together with regard to particulate pollution. Apparently the Great Smog of 1952 killed on the order of 10000 people in just a few days. I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952
It really irks me whenever there's a talk about nuclear energy. Nuclear power may have its own set of challenges, but coming from the baseline of coal it's hard to do worse.
Clearly, the public is more motivated by a move to solar, which actually appears safe whatever its real overall costs would be.
The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the best cost-benefit of any power source, economics and human psychology seem to imply that nuclear power as it will appear is going to be visibly dangerous something human psychology finds less desirable than the poisonous and costly status quo (see evolutionary game theory etc).
Engineers ... love to solve logistical problems and push their solutions on humans, whether these solve the human's problems or not.
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That's the thing, though. They have many Chernobyls worth of effect over the long term, and will continue to do so. Meanwhile, Chernobyl helped nuclear facilities become far safer.
Surprising that nobody here acknowledges the black swan nature of nuclear power. The comparative average is precisely not the point. FWIW I once had dinner with an architect of one of the early nuclear plants. They had been lied to about the prospects of a solution to waste disposal and no longer considered it a sensible approach.
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The people receiving food stop working to secure food on their own. They grow entitled, and expect food aid. It's an observed phenomenon in Africa.
Wasn't that the whole idea - for them to stop producing and polluting the planet? That giving them food would be cheaper. Of course it would threaten our dependence on cheap clothes and expensive gadgets.
Also from an ethical point of view, it's not very fair to deny them the chance to become a developed nation.
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>closed down barbecue pits Mind explaining what those are?
I'm guessing public barbecues
http://inhabitat.com/chinese-government-bans-outdoor-bbqs-in...
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I usually get my fair bit of black mucus in Central London. Not sure what that means but some places don't smell that good. For example, Queen's Gate road in Kensington has a very strong smell of gas.
That's your nose doing its job. The whole point of the nasal passages and mucus is to filter the air, the good thing about this filter is that it's easy to replace.
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I'm not sure many young people nowadays realize how horrible the situation was just half a century ago. This is a great point. We've made so much progress in this area that "pollution" can seem like an abstraction. This is something we should be impressing upon our children, in a more serious way than stories about walking to school uphill in the snow both ways, etc. I was two years old when this picture was taken in…
That isn't brown air; it's a brown print. That's a sepia print of a black and white photo of white steam coming out of chimneys artificially crowded together by a long telephoto lens, taken at sunset, and excluding the sky as much as possible. Imagine another photo taken from the same spot, with a wide-angle lens that shows mostly sky and a bridge going off for miles, even the distant cars clearly visible through cle…
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/...
(The Atlantic again!)
This qualifies as "the real thing". It's well-known local lore that local stonework was turned black by the soot. ("Black" is not an exaggeration.)
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It really irks me whenever there's a talk about nuclear energy. Nuclear power may have its own set of challenges, but coming from the baseline of coal it's hard to do worse.
Better or worse, it is difficult to get public support for moving from with terrible results that trickle out nearly invisibly over time to a system that still has disasters but whose disasters appear as a few big booms. Clearly, the public is more motivated by a move to solar, which actually appears safe whatever its real overall costs would be. The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the bes…
Honestly, I'm getting optimistic enough these days to think solar may be ramping up fast enough that we couldn't kill coal any faster with nuclear; by the time we built up our nuclear capacity significantly the solar would already be ready to replace it.
(Ignoring the fact that natural gas has already been stabbing coal furiously in the chest for several years now.)