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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Those who follow comedian Bill Maher have noticed that a great deal of his current shtick pokes fun at progressives, and has come to support right-wing causes.

The other day he did a bit that I paraphrase as such: When it comes to achieving environmental sustainability, I don’t know what does work, but I can tell you what doesn’t work: asking people to make sacrifices. 

He went on to back up his assertion with some photos of big, stupid, cars and trucks that an admittedly significant portion of Americans still adore, e.g. this version of the F-150, at 12 MPG.

This cynicism may be immensely profitable in Hollywood; after all, ideas like wokeness and decency seem to have, at least for now, fallen out of fashion in the United States. But the photo at the above left is an example of what the Dutch have done with their country, in which people actually give a s***.

The folks in the Netherlands have abandoned selfish, idiotic behavior, and treat our planet with the respect it deserves.  For them, 21st Century transportation is about bicycles and trains.  They’d no more drive the truck shown here than they’d urinate in their own Jacuzzis.

What’s up with Maher?  Just another media whore?  At best, he’s way off base when it comes to understanding who we are as human beings when it comes to dealing with the threat of environmental collapse.

He makes money.  Others, like the Dutch, make change.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

After a second catastrophic failure, Agile Wind Power is removing its giant VAWT from the Grevenbroich test site.

From this:

The dismantlement follows the second failure of the test turbine (see photo).

The Swiss company has been developing the mammoth giromill for the past decade. The prototype has been undergoing tests at Grevenbroich for the past three years.

The turbine previously lost one of its three rotor arms in November 2020. The Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT), one of the largest ever built, was reinstalled in August 2022. Testing began again when the turbine was reconnected to the grid in October 2022.

Here’s some unsolicited advice to the world of renewable energy engineering: Focus on areas where real improvement is at least conceivable.  The horizontal-axis wind turbines we see all around us convert over 90% of the theoretically available kinetic energy in the wind into electricity.  That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for improvement.

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The political analysts we see on TV are telling us that DeSantis is “going after” Trump, though, if that’s happening at all, it’s in the most lily-livered manner possible.

A true political attack on the part of DeSantis would look something like this:

American voters elected Trump in 2016, but that was before we realized that he is a criminal.  He’s a sex abuser, he’s indicted on 34 counts of fraud, he was impeached twice, he’s under investigation for election tampering, seditious conspiracy and theft of classified government documents.  The evidence available to us all is 100% damning. He’s also a pathological liar; he’s no more electable than George Santos.  

Republicans are fine and honest people with conservative values.  They fight for what makes America the greatest country on Earth.  They are not criminals, and are certainly unwilling to elect one to the highest office in the land.  

Now, there is a clear reason that DeSantis is not doing that, namely, that Trump has so much support, at least right this minute, that such a statement would be political suicide.

I counter as follows:  Ron, eventually, someone has to do it. You know and I know it. Why not do it now and be a hero?  I personally won’t be voting for you, but I would greatly admire your courage.  I’m sure the same can be said about most Americans.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s a common thought among baby boomers whose fathers fought the Second World War: How would Dad have felt about this rise of the neo-Nazis in the United States?  How would he regard a U.S. president who, in response to a Nazi rally in Charlottesville said, “There were fine people on both sides?”

I never had the opportunity to speak with my father about this directly before he died in 2010, though I recall how disgusted he was when it was revealed to all the world that his country was operating torture chambers in Abu Ghraib. I have a feeling that he’d be just as sickened by young racist morons who really have no understanding of the true American values of fairness, decency, and rule of law.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

All this may be true.  But does it matter?  Does the U.S. Justice Department have the integrity and courage to indict an extremely popular person, for the precise crime that you or I would be spending decades in prison if we had committed it?

One has to hope so, especially since a run-of-the-mill FBI agent is spending 12 months behind bars for taking a  (single) classified document home.  When she was caught, she confessed and returned the document immediately.  She didn’t hide it, claim she had the right to have it, deny the charge, nor did she claim that she was the victim of a witch-hunt.  She quietly plead guilty and subsequently reported for a year in prison, knowing that she would be regarded for the rest of her life as an ex-con who had betrayed the trust that had been bestowed on her by her country.

In former days, criminals like Trump would have been hanged, or, more recently, fried in the electric chair or executed by lethal injection.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

As we are all aware, there are critics of renewable energy whose arguments are that it’s expensive.

The fellow photographed here is holding a 10MB hard drive from the 1960s. If IT hadn’t been taken forward and scaled, the date storage in your cell phone would now cost upwards of a trillion dollars.

But, as we know, technology does march forward, and the best of it becomes part of our everyday lives. When it reaches scale, it costs an infinitesimally small fraction of what it did in its infancy.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The idea that Trump supporters are members of a cult is not a new one, but let’s examine exactly what this means.

The word “cult” denotes a group whose members have lost their capacity to think for themselves, and who have become slaves to a black-and-white reality in which the leader’s ideas are always right, regardless of evidence to the contrary, and those who reject him are fools, or, more commonly, representatives of evil.

The author of four books on the subject who is interviewed in the video below is an expert in this space.  I use the word “expert” carefully, but who could be more qualified?  He was a Jewish kid who, in 1974, bought into the cult of Sun Myung Moon whose message, among others, is the Holocaust was required to rid the Earth’s population of Jewish vermin.  He eventually realized that he’d been conned.

Best of luck to the totally socked-in Trump supporters.  May they be granted the luxury of self-inspection.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

When my wife read my post from the other day on Ron DeSantis’s pledge to destroy leftism, she commented that the presidential candidate was referring to passing laws that would make certain acts illegal, not to changing human thinking and behavior.

She has a point, but this is still not going to happen, because we live in a representative democracy, where we the people elect our lawmakers.

If hateful morons happen to be a majority in Florida, that’s one thing; they deserve what they get.  But try to pass federal laws that ban abortion, destroy the environment, and teach creationism as science in our schools, see how far you get.

“Leftism” (aka wokeness, kindness, decency) is a set of values shared by the majority of Americans.  The promise to  destroy these ideals carries with it a great level of appeal to mean-spirited idiots, but fortunately, that’s a distinct minority.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

From 2GreenEnergy supporter Rafael Quezada who notes: The sadness is, at times, overwhelming for me.

I hear you, my friend.

I’m reminded of an old pal who sold his house in Ojai (central California) many years ago, when he saw the writing on the wall re: climate, especially droughts and wildfires.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The answer is largely that the health insurance industry has an extremely powerful lobby that makes the idea of nationalized healthcare an impossibility.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Americans are singular in their indifference to the well-being of their countrymen.  This has always been a feature of life here in the U.S., but Trumpism has taken it to a new level of selfishness and cruelty.

If you ask Europeans if they think it’s acceptable to let people die of treatable diseases, they’d laugh in your face.

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