To be clear, I don't regard so called "renewable energy" as an "alternative energy source." Enthusiasm for this trillion dollar "renewable energy" scam has left the fossil fuel industry fat and happy, while destroying vast swathes of once pristine wilderness.
I don't consider nuclear energy to be "alternative energy," because in so many cases this includes - regrettably with emphasis on them and often with expressed contempt for nuclear - solar and wind.
The nuclear industry is established, viable, and, with some limited time constraints involving the doubling time of breeding for free access to fissionable nuclei, infinitely expandable at moderate cost in our times, of remarkable value in times to come, to the coming generations we have so callously screwed.
To me, there is only nuclear energy, and "everything else," everything else, including so called "renewable energy" dependent on access to fossil fuels, not to mention rapacious use of land and materials, and therefore environmentally unacceptable.
The oil, gas and coal industries are very clever advertisers. We had lots of ads here recently, barely disguised as environmental posts, to rebrand fossil fuels as "green hydrogen." They seem, happily, to have stopped.
As for the oil industry's attitude toward so called "renewable energy," I recall, if everyone else has forgotten, that just before the Deepwater Horizon blowout - which killed more people than Fukushima - the owner of that rig, BP, was calling itself, in a vast line of bullshit, "Beyond Petroleum." That of course, was a transparent lie, "renewable" lipstick on the fossil pig.
As for Krakauer, I had no idea who he was until attending the lecture at the suggestion of a friend. I was familiar with another Santa Fe Institute scientist, Stuart Kauffman, owing to having run across his work, The Origins of Order.
In one of the best afternoons of my life, I got to discuss Kauffman with Freeman Dyson, whereupon he agreed that the best definition of living systems was Kaufmann's description of them as "Eddies in Thermodynamics." (I was surprised - and shouldn't have been in retrospect - that when I mentioned Kauffman to Dyson, he knew his work in detail and his personal life as well.)
The Santa Fe Institute strikes me as a very interesting place, comparable, I'm sure to our Institute of Advanced Study here in New Jersey, Findhorne's for scientists. It would be very cool to be a fly on the wall there, just as it is to be such a fly at the Institute of Advanced Study.
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