From today’s New York Times – and two replies from a team of scientists that has added me to their distribution list:
• Only if each of us chooses to be a coward.
• More likely if we are stupid. So far Stupid is winning hands down.
When you get a chance, please check out the revisions to the 2GreenEnergy website, where we’ve sharpened our focus on cleantech business strategy.
This is echoed in a few different places around the site, but it’s spelled out on the home page: (more…)
I just wrote to a friend whose stepson is a fabulously talented writer, but sadly, remains virtually unknown in the literary world today. My friend remarks that this is a “hard road,” to which I respond:
Yes, I’m quite certain it’s a hard road. I’m reminded of my life as an undergraduate during which I told my advisor that I aspired to be an author of philosophic novels. To my surprise, he actively discouraged me, on the basis of how difficult a field this is to enter. He explained that he had been a roommate of John Updike at Harvard, and thus had a privileged position from which to observe how this whole thing goes. He told me, “Once you achieve that status, you can barf on a page and it will be received with great ovation, but only a handful of people each generation actually gets there.”
The issue, of course, is meritocracy, i.e., that there isn’t one there, or anywhere else. (more…)
I just signed The Center for Biological Diversity’s petition calling for POTUS Obama to “Reject the Keystone XL Once and for All.”
Will rejecting the project materially change our country’s devotion to oil? No.
Will doing so suggest to Americans and the rest of the world that perhaps we’re not owned by our oil companies and that we may be headed in the direction of a sane and responsible energy policy? Absolutely.
As I’ve mentioned, I get several emails each day from a pro-nuclear energy group, and, the more I learn about what they’re doing, the more I deeply sympathize with their situation, which, to summarize, is dealing with public misunderstanding. How many people know that nuclear power is by far the safest large-scale resource, that thousands of times more people die every year from coal than have ever been killed by nuclear accidents? Who’s tracking with “advanced nuclear,” which will eliminate all the problems that existed with the plants design of the 1950s?
Of course, we people in renewables face very similar challenges. (more…)
Over the last six months I wrote a number of articles for the Hedge Connection, a newsletter that goes out to many thousands of investors, especially family offices. Considering that one of its most important domains is clean energy, I was happy to oblige when they invited me to contribute.
Understandably, they like to jazz up their weekly email with a quote from an economist who wrote something about a topic of current importance.
In today’s newsletter: “Every global recession since 1970 has been preceded by at least a doubling of the oil price, and every time the oil price has fallen by half and stayed down for six months or so, a major acceleration of global growth has followed.” – Economist and journalist, Anatole Kaletsky (more…)
I just came home from my regular Friday evening visit to our local wine bar, where I was speaking with a friend who’s about my age (which means we were both teenagers in the early 1970s). He told me that he recalled that drinking and driving wasn’t a huge deal at the time, and that, unless you had done something horrible, there was very little chance that you would be arrested and that your life would take a radical turn for the worse simply because you were behind the wheel with a blood alcohol content of 0.0800001%. (more…)
The pro-nuke group that has me on its email distribution list has some extremely intelligent and highly educated people, most of whom take this subject extremely seriously. Occasionally I tell them to take a few deep breaths; all that rancor isn’t helping.
Maybe some of them took my advice. Now, they’re talking about a mock campaign to show how silly all the anti-nuke sentiment is, and how most scientifically illiterate people gobble all this up. (more…)
It’s common for readers outside the U.S. to wonder how it’s possible that this country is making so little progress on climate change mitigation, even though 2014 was the hottest year on record, and May, June, August, September, October and December were the hottest such months since records began to be kept in 1880.
It’s simply this: powerful interests, not the will of the people, control our law-making processes. Here’s a wonderful example that just happens to be in today’s news: (more…)
Here’s a very solid insight from Greg Krumm:
…We have progressed as humans in the basic chores of humans such as sewage control, trash pick-up, crop rotation and recycling…Our collective human intelligence should enforce the theory that we are stewards of the Earth as opposed to pillagers … By using human intelligence for protecting our home, climate control as a problem becomes more solvable.
Thanks, Greg. That’s a wonderful and well-expressed sentiment; I only wish it (more…)
