Nihil
Nihil's JournalFrom my perspective, we are largely screwed ...
We are being swamped by (deliberate) ignorance & destructive stupidity,
both enabled & actively supported by the (extremely) powerful moneyed factions.
The only way to counter such a mindset would require a fascist approach
(i.e., doesn't matter what people believe to be their "right to destroy", it
has to be revoked for the sake of the future) yet that same fascist approach
is impossible without the backing of the same powerful moneyed factions
that are currently hell bent on f*cking the planet for short term profit.
The "human race" - assuming you mean "current human civilisation" - as a whole is screwed.
It is going to change in many very unpleasant & frighteningly rapid ways over the coming years.
The only thing "we" - i.e., the aware minority who are not part of the 0.01% - can do
about this is on a very local level indeed: spread education, truth & love to try to
alleviate the pain for the coming generations and give them a slightly better chance
of survival than the horde being sent over the cliff happy with their "reality TV",
iPhones, guns & religions.
For that "slightly better chance" for them, I work, I study, I share ... yet I cannot
pretend that I do not also despair at times over the sheer futility of my own actions.
It will be a wonderfully clean source of energy if/when it arrives but that is missing the point.
(or "points" as there are more than one of them)
1) Fusion has always been a decade or two in the future so, at the moment, it is *not*
a "source of energy that would make coal and natural gas obsolete to make electricity".
2) Until it moves from the indeterminate future into the now, its only function is to provide
yet another excuse to maintain Business As Usual rather than *reducing* energy consumption.
3) The mindset ruling the human civilisation is absurdly immature and totally incapable of
handling "boundless free energy" without accelerating the rate of devastation to the ecosphere.
> Its by product is helium.
> No more coal sludge. No open pit coal mines. Mr. Peabocy's coal train disappears.
In an ideal world, fusion like this is *exactly* what we'd want to power our utopian society
where all people are equal and the environment respected.
In the real world, (of today and the next decade or so at least), boundless energy (clean or
not) has only one purpose: to make the filthy rich even richer at the expense of everyone
and everything else.
> You are wrong on this one.
I wish I were but my eyes watching the events of every passing day tell me otherwise.
It has everything to do with a new source of energy.
> We need better environmental laws. but this has nothing to do with a new source of energy.
The fact that we need "environmental laws" to keep our behaviour under any form of control shows
that we are not yet a mature enough species to have advanced (widespread, cheap) energy sources.
The fact that we need "better environmental laws" just underlines this problem: even the more
mature members of the species are currently (and for the foreseeable future) incapable of restraining
the greedy, exploitative & rapacious members who are in control.
> And these places were created before it existed, so the new energy source isn't relevant to that discussion.
Pedantically no, the places in & like that photograph were created after the "new energy source"
was first being promoted as "the clean energy of the future" - a state that it has remained in ever since.
Possibly that it is an excellent counter-argument to the "renewable energy is ugly" bollocks?
If the French (a very image- & culture-oriented nation) can find a solution that allows
their most famous landmark to move towards self-powering with renewables then the
old pro-fossil-fuel canard of "But they look all ugly-like" is shot down in flames.
I agree that some really serious posts do slip by with few recs (hell, for some, even
the view count is only in double digits) and I suspect that part of the reason for the
lack of recs on more than a few of them is simply concern exhaustion: the subject has
been shouted about here for literally YEARS with absolutely no progress in the real world.
At times it hits people that just what is the point of recommending the 985th post showing
how the US government is fucking up the ocean for money or how is India burning shit-tons
more coal each year or which toxic compound is currently top of China's atmospheric output
or how many more previously unknown species have gone extinct today or how insulated
from the effects of their exploitation are the 0.1%ers in London/New York/Zurich/Rome
or just how fucking dumb are the voters in Florida or how corrupt is the Harper government
or how many different IDs can a fossil fuel troll have before getting banned again or ... or ...
It is usually the E/E "regulars" (probably the same "double digit viewers" from the above)
that do the initial recs to a post, so, every now & then - when they have seen precisely how
little DUers in general (much less the wider world) actually cares about any of the things that
hit them so hard - there is an unavoidable "Fuck it" moment that means that you realise just
how futile your attempts to rec a repeat of the same critically important issues up for wider
viewing truly are: you are attempting to overpower the overwhelming ignorance, stupidity and
suicidal selfishness that surrounds us with a mouse-click, to claim the attention of couch
potatoes & facebook failures possessing the attention-span of a drunken gnat with a "+1"
to the rec count of something so far down the list of the so-called "Greatest Page" that they'd
never have scrolled down to find it, much preferring to rush off to post more "Awww!!! n/t" replies
to a photo of yet another kitten.
I rec'd this post in the hope that a post having an eye-catching thread title, a simple text
explanation & a few meaningful photos might break through that morass of triviality and put
to rest just one of the many lies about renewable energy that are thrown at us - that it is ugly
and visually damaging. YMMV.
No, we *need* to stop searching desperately for ways to continue Business As Usual ...
... and for ways to continue justifying the exact same behaviour that has got us into this fix.
Solar power is better than carbon neutral.
Wind power is better than carbon neutral.
The extraction & consumption (whether burned or converted) of fossil fuel resources
is never carbon neutral.
The use of "biofuel" can be better than carbon neutral but it can also be much worse
(e.g., when it destroys the environment "in order to save it"
.
"Forest residue" is not waste. It is currently used to continue the natural cycle.
Extracting it for combustion - even with "most" CO2 being captured (then lost) - is not
helping the environment as not only does it degrade the source region's carbon cycle,
it is providing fuel that would otherwise not be available ... i.e., supporting "growth" and
"profit" a.k.a. "Business As Usual".
"Field residue" is not waste. It contains nutrients to replenish the soil and continue the
ability for the land to support further crops without demanding artificial fertilisers (which
consume resources - fossil fuels - and generate CO2, destroying the environment field by field).
Extracting it for combustion - even with the figleaf of hypothetical "CCS" - supports nothing
other than "Business As Usual".
> We need to do something that produces not just lower emissions, even carbon-neutral
> technology is not sufficient. We need negative emissions.
We need to stop emissions from fossil fuels, not just push them behind a curtain of bullshit.
We need to accept that our current choices are not sustainable - even in the short term - and change them.
We need to stop destroying the environment in order to continue our lust for the myth of "profit".
It's not just political opinions that affect decisions ...
Reduced intelligence has a tendency to lead the political opinions in one primary direction
as a result of unquestioning acceptance of whoever shouts loudest (or most frequently).
Yes, political opinions can vary enormously within families but they are far less
likely to do to in low intelligence ones than in high and everything these days (across different
countries) is geared towards keeping good education as a province of the rich and reducing
any disruption to the stratification of society.
The genetic factors feed in to both ends of that process: "1%" and "herd".
That is a key point.
I'd expand it to the following enabling behaviours:
1) The ability to hedge any risk and make a profit from failure rather than success.
2) The ability to outsource to less regulated countries.
3) The ability to engineer the overthrow of sovereign states for business reasons.
4) The ability to convince the gullible majority that criminal action is acceptable business practice.
5) The ability to convince the gullible majority that criminal action is acceptable foreign policy.
6) The ability to control entire governments whilst maintaining the veneer of "democracy".
The above combination has become so deeply entrenched that the "way of things" isn't going to
change until the organism that maintains it dies.
The difficulty is how to kill the parasite without killing the host.
One country might make headway at cleansing itself but, like the mythical Hydra, the remaining
global organism will turn on the "attacker" in order to "re-grow" itself in power again.
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHome country: England
Member since: 2003 before July 6th
Number of posts: 13,508
