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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I wrote a post earlier today in which I pointed out that the level of ignorance on the part of this former state senator from Pennsylvania is truly staggering.  Yet that’s not the most revolting aspect of his character.

IMO, it’s his intellectual arrogance.  He knows that there are thousands of people who have been studying the causes of global warming and the various possible ways of dealing with it since the subject of climate change came on the scene in earnest in the late 1970s.  Instead of simply learning from the scientists, like you and I do every day, he said, in essence: “I don’t give a s***.  I have invented my own ideas, even though the slowest high school student would find them laughably stupid, and I aim to foist them off as valid.”

Blatant dishonesty is far worse than ignorance, in my view.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In any given month, I meet an average of three or four Brits, and I can’t remember a single one who thought Brexit was a good idea for the country.

Now, keep in mind that I’m not meeting the typical Brit; the people I come across are generally highly educated folks, wealthy enough to enjoy travel internationally.

According to what I’m told, those who favor Brexit are their equivalent of the MAGA Trump supporter, i.e., ignorant racists who welcomed Brexit for its capacity to block immigration.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

There is no doubt that the United States needs a much stronger educational system, though, as a practical matter, what we need even more is a voter base that refuses to elect the most ignorant people imaginable.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

As much as I favor environmental sustainability, there is nothing in the meme here that I agree with.

Investors must treat the crisis as an economy-wide threat?  No. Investors have money, and they can use it however and wherever they think will do them the most good, whether that means monetary profit or the satisfaction of doing what’s good for the world, or some combination of the two.

The investment world hasn’t responded decisively?  Again, no. Think of all the money that’s going into decarbonizing our transportation and energy sectors.  That means alternative fuel (especially electric) cars and trucks, renewable energy, and nuclear.

It’s all fairly impressive, especially considering that the fossil fuels industries essentially own the U.S. law-making processes.  This group of gargantuan corporations are ~125 years old, enormously profitable, and receive 7+ trillion dollars (worldwide) of subsidies annually.  They use our atmosphere are their own private sewer, and no one even thinks about asking them to pay to clean up after themselves.

$7 trillion is a lot of money, regardless of your standard, which makes the article linked above from the International Monetary Fund worth your time.

Another issue here is improving our use of land, which basically translates into moving away from beef, so as to enable us to stop destroying the Amazon rainforest.  As anyone could have guessed, however, the financial pressures here are analogous to those in fossil fuels, where the industry is putting a full-court press against plant-based and lab-grown meat, and has declared an all-out PR war.

Taking into consideration the economic pressures being applied by the industry incumbents, clean tech is actually doing fairly well.  But will its progress be sufficient to avert catastrophe?

No one knows.

Maybe the answer depends on how people like you and me react and get involved.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

It pains me to think that I live among Americans who are this stupid.  This country has 880 million acres of farmland, and 34,000 acres of solar PV. That’s a ratio of 26K:1.

In addition, farmland doesn’t need to be “replaced.”  Here’s an AI piece on agrisolar, also known as agrivoltaics,

….. the practice of combining solar power and agriculture in the same landscape. Solar panels can be placed between crops, above them, or on greenhouses. This can provide space for grazing, crops, and native habitats, while also producing energy. Agrisolar can have many benefits, including: water conservation, soil health, crop yield, and pollinator habitat.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz notes: If this comment doesn’t cinch the Peace Prize for him the Nobels are rigged.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In this day of utter confusion and the mincing of words, it’s good that we have a person in the U.S. Congress like Jasmine Crockett.  The harsh reality is that it was a terrible idea to elect a criminal thug to lead the most powerful country on the planet, and she is perfectly willing to put this in plain language.

Maybe we’re starting to understand the gravity of what we’ve done.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Points to be made here include:

1) None of these five men is an imbecile.

2) This is a place and time in which our world leaders are more demented and less interested in the welfare of others than at any point since, at least, the 1930s.

3) No one know what’s going to happen next.  Sure, it could be nuclear conflagration or runaway environmental collapse.  It could also be something else entirely.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Efficiency

If you can recognize the photo here, you’re at least 65 years old, probably 70+.  It’s a small generator that converted some of the kinetic energy from your moving bicycle’s tires into the electrical energy required to power your headlight.

It was one of the least efficient devices every to see commercial deployment.  I remember engaging it and instantly having to pedal far harder to make up for the ridiculously small amount of light energy it produced.  But, when you’re a kid, trying to get home alive, what’s the big deal?

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

What makes the evil presence of Donald Trump so horrific in our lives is his amazing capacity to harness the “herd instinct” that Bertrand Russell identified.

All this is aimed at one thing: augmenting Trump’s wealth and power.

Sickening.

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