An Inconvenient Truth

[Selena_Kitt]

I agree we should not live like dufuses, with two Hummers in every garage and 6,000 sq. ft McMansions for families of 2.5. But in the long run the reason we shouldn't has nothing to do with energy or the environment. It has more to do with spiritual values

Yes... it goes much deeper than just an "issue" or a "problem" to logically be solved. (Although did you see me go all "Roxanne" at the beginning of this thread, trying to bypass all the arguments with simple logic?? Yay me <grin>)

that you, SelenaKittyn, could probably describe, or that in his own way Pope JP II could have described (there would probably be a surprising amount of overlap in those descriptions, even though I assume you are neither Catholic nor religious.)

Indeed. Truth is truth, wisdom is wisdom... I don't discount it, no matter what the source...

But if you agree with me that to live a human life can have transcendental meaning, then we need to think about how human existence acquires weight and consequence.

Mr. Murray has a great heart, and a he really "gets" it here... it's a beautiful passage, Roxanne, thanks for sharing it.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Yes... it goes much deeper than just an "issue" or a "problem" to logically be solved. (Although did you see me go all "Roxanne" at the beginning of this thread, trying to bypass all the arguments with simple logic?? Yay me <grin>)





Indeed. Truth is truth, wisdom is wisdom... I don't discount it, no matter what the source...



Mr. Murray has a great heart, and a he really "gets" it here... it's a beautiful passage, Roxanne, thanks for sharing it.

Any time you want to run for Pope, babe, you have my vote.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

Any time you want to run for Pope, babe, you have my vote.

they still require dangly bits for that job... that's the one thing I just ain't got!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

' No, it's more than ironic -- it's dishonest. In "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore lifts the "seven-wedge" approach to global warming from Robert Socolow, director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton. Mr. Socolow's main "wedges" are efficiency, conservation, fuel switching, renewables, carbon sequestration, reforestation -- and "nuclear fission." Mr. Gore conveniently leaves nuclear out.'


Why would Al Gore do that?

Quite honestly, I worked at Argonne National Laboratory on nuclear reactors and especially nuclear waste disposal and was* (*see below) always a big albeit cautious advocate of nuclear power, which used to get me in trouble with my environmentalist friends. I always thought that pollution from burning fossil fuels and their subsequent depletion was a bigger problem than handling nuclear waste. In fact, back in the 70's we already had a technique called vitrification that could turn high-level nuclear waste into low-level ceramic balls that could probably be buried in stable formations and be safe for millions of years. I'm still pretty big on nuclear, but I have more serious reservations now.

What changed my mind was Three Mile Island. Not Chernobyl so much, because Chernobyl was caused mainly by dumb mistakes and mistakes can be eliminated, at least in theory. But TMI was a foolproof system that failed. A complex chain of human and mechanical error so unlikely that it could never have been anticipated or planned for, and yet it happened. TMI gave rise to a whole new theory in failure analysis called Complexity Failure, which basically says that when systems reach a certain level of complexity you can no longer anticipate everything that might go wrong. That was Three Mile Island.

Still, I have a gut feeling that we're never going to get very far with attempts at conservation, not until our electric bills hit $1000 a month or so, and I think nukes are kind of inevitable.

I'd still like to see my government spending half as much on energy R&D as we are on blowing things up in Iraq, but I guess that's just idle dreaming. We had some very smart people at Argonne when I was there, and they were doing some very good work, work that private industry just wasn't interested in doing and isn't interested in doing now, a lot of pure R&D that was expensive and probably unprofitable in the short run. To me, that's just the sort of work our government should be doing: the stuff private industry won't do.

Argonne's just a shell of what it was then though, and government funding has dried up. The general consensus now seems to be that government can't do anything but fuck things up, but I think that view is going to change pretty soon, and change radically.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Quite honestly, I worked at Argonne National Laboratory on nuclear reactors and especially nuclear waste disposal and was* (*see below) always a big albeit cautious advocate of nuclear power, which used to get me in trouble with my environmentalist friends. I always thought that pollution from burning fossil fuels and their subsequent depletion was a bigger problem than handling nuclear waste. In fact, back in the 70's we already had a technique called vitrification that could turn high-level nuclear waste into low-level ceramic balls that could probably be buried in stable formations and be safe for millions of years. I'm still pretty big on nuclear, but I have more serious reservations now.

What changed my mind was Three Mile Island. Not Chernobyl so much, because Chernobyl was caused mainly by dumb mistakes and mistakes can be eliminated, at least in theory. But TMI was a foolproof system that failed. A complex chain of human and mechanical error so unlikely that it could never have been anticipated or planned for, and yet it happened. TMI gave rise to a whole new theory in failure analysis called Complexity Failure, which basically says that when systems reach a certain level of complexity you can no longer anticipate everything that might go wrong. That was Three Mile Island.

Still, I have a gut feeling that we're never going to get very far with attempts at conservation, not until our electric bills hit $1000 a month or so, and I think nukes are kind of inevitable.

I'd still like to see my government spending half as much on energy R&D as we are on blowing things up in Iraq, but I guess that's just idle dreaming. We had some very smart people at Argonne when I was there, and they were doing some very good work, work that private industry just wasn't interested in doing and isn't interested in doing now, a lot of pure R&D that was expensive and probably unprofitable in the short run. To me, that's just the sort of work our government should be doing: the stuff private industry won't do.

Argonne's just a shell of what it was then though, and government funding has dried up. The general consensus now seems to be that government can't do anything but fuck things up, but I think that view is going to change pretty soon, and change radically.

Hey Mab, in a previous life I did a few laps X-C skiing on a trail that circumnavigated Argonne. Got a nice tan there, even on cloudy days . . .

re. nukes and complexity - You describe the old "event cascade" implicated in most airplane crashes, too. But aren't the new generation nukes much less prone to such things? Much less of a "kludge" than the first generation?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Hey Mab, in a previous life I did a few laps X-C skiing on a trail that circumnavigated Argonne. Got a nice tan there, even on cloudy days . . .

re. nukes and complexity - You describe the old "event cascade" implicated in most airplane crashes, too. But aren't the new generation nukes much less prone to such things? Much less of a "kludge" than the first generation?

Waterfall Glen Park, right? With the white deer?

As I said, I was there in the 70's, and I'm sure that nukes are safer now than they ever have been. That's pretty much all we worked on was safety and reliability and waste disposal issues. Of course they'll never be 100% guaranteeable fail-safe - nothing in this world is - and people are never going to be happy having nuclear waste trucked or trained through their towns, (although it's really not as dangerous as it sounds goiven the way they handle high-level waste these days), but I think nuclear energy is worakable and is currently the best option. I believe that France gets more than 50% of their electricty from nuclear now. I might be wrong about that figure, but I think it's substantial.

There are those, including many prominent in the environmental movement, who want man to recede from the comforts and conveniences of modern civilization. Those of you sweltering in Texas and AZ, that would mean no more air conditioners. Those of you shivering six months from now in MI and PA, that would mean no more central heating. It might mean no more cars and no more airplanes. It would mean fewer choices in the stores, maybe including less fresh fruit and vegetables year round.

Could we live that way? I will ignore the fact that sustaining the current population level requires an industrial civilization, and pretend we are talking about a world with a substantiantially smaller population, say in 150 years or so. The answer is yes, we could live that way. But why should we? With nukes and possibly other sources like geo we can have all the energy we need to maintain the current comforts and conveniences - cars, planes, climate controlled houses, abundant and widely varied food and other material goods.

In the end, I think this is what it comes down to.

Forgive me if I mentioned this earlier (I think I did, but I can't find the reference), but I just heard this fact that haunts me. It said that, should the Chinese reach our American standard of material abundance regarding automobiles—4 cars for every 3 people—their demand for gasaline to fuel those cars will outstrip the planet's entire current production capacity of gasoline production by 20%. That's for Chinese cars alone, ignoring the rest of the world's needs. Clearly, that's an impossible situation. Their cars alone would suck the world dry of oil in a matter of years.

Whether we start burning coal or drilling in ANWAR or offshore or make Iraq the 51st state, our energy use is not maintanable, not with the rest of the world industrializing too.

In other words, the current American lifestyle is not exportable. It's simply not an option for the rest of the world, and it's highly doubtful we can sustain it for much longer either. Our society is entirely based on consumption to the point where materialism and the values of the marketplace have become a national religion and the source of our ethics and morality and politics.

I wince whenever anyone refers to me as a"consumer," because to me that suggests some big fat man sitting at a table stuffing everything he can find into his mouth. I'm afraid that's what we've become as Americans. That's pretty much what "American" means to the rest of the world, anyway.

I don't think we have to give up our AC or passenger jets or personal automobiles, or only eat food we grow ourselves, but there's still plenty we can do so we're not such hogs about things. Europenas seem to live very nice lives consuming a fraction of the energy we do. The thing I'll always remember about France was how they had less than I did, but what they had was far better and more worth having.

The Pope is right. Finding a cheaper way to manufacture or distribute toasters and athletic shoes is not the highest purpose in life. I think one of the things that's going to come out of our confrontation with radical Islam is a re-examination of just what it is we stand for and believe in. They've got religion and belief in a higher purpose. We've got our desire to drive big cars fast and turn our AC up so high that we can an enjoy a gas fire in the fireplace in August (Remember? Nixon did that in the White House).

But there's no way the rest of the world can achieve our standard of living, and whether we can even maintain our curent lifestyle in the face of global competition and demand for resources seems to me very unlikely. Changes are afoot, whether we want them to happen or not. I'd much rather see the US working with these other nations than against them.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Waterfall Glen Park, right? With the white deer?

As I said, I was there in the 70's, and I'm sure that nukes are safer now than they ever have been. That's pretty much all we worked on was safety and reliability and waste disposal issues. Of course they'll never be 100% guaranteeable fail-safe - nothing in this world is - and people are never going to be happy having nuclear waste trucked or trained through their towns, (although it's really not as dangerous as it sounds goiven the way they handle high-level waste these days), but I think nuclear energy is worakable and is currently the best option. I believe that France gets more than 50% of their electricty from nuclear now. I might be wrong about that figure, but I think it's substantial.


Right, the white deer. I forgot about them. Yep.


In the end, I think this is what it comes down to.

Forgive me if I mentioned this earlier (I think I did, but I can't find the reference), but I just heard this fact that haunts me. It said that, should the Chinese reach our American standard of material abundance regarding automobiles—4 cars for every 3 people—their demand for gasaline to fuel those cars will outstrip the planet's entire current production capacity of gasoline production by 20%. That's for Chinese cars alone, ignoring the rest of the world's needs. Clearly, that's an impossible situation. Their cars alone would suck the world dry of oil in a matter of years.

Whether we start burning coal or drilling in ANWAR or offshore or make Iraq the 51st state, our energy use is not maintanable, not with the rest of the world industrializing too.

In other words, the current American lifestyle is not exportable. It's simply not an option for the rest of the world, and it's highly doubtful we can sustain it for much longer either. Our society is entirely based on consumption to the point where materialism and the values of the marketplace have become a national religion and the source of our ethics and morality and politics.

I wince whenever anyone refers to me as a"consumer," because to me that suggests some big fat man sitting at a table stuffing everything he can find into his mouth. I'm afraid that's what we've become as Americans. That's pretty much what "American" means to the rest of the world, anyway.

The Pope is right. Finding a cheaper way to manufacture or distribute toasters and athletic shoes is not the highest purpose in life. I think one of the things that's going to come out of our confrontation with radical Islam is a re-examination of just what it is we stand for and believe in. They've got religion and belief in a higher purpose. We've got our desire to drive big cars fast and turn our AC up so high that we can an enjoy a gas fire in the fireplace in August (Remember? Nixon did that in the White House).

But there's no way the rest of the world can achieve our standard of living, and whether we can even maintain our curent lifestyle in the face of global competition and demand for resources seems to me very unlikely. Changes are afoot, whether we want them to happen or not. I'd much rather see the US working with these other nations than against them.

Cheer up, Mab - the whole world can enjoy the comforts and conveniences of industrial civilization. I have described elsewhere a sustainable electric economy based on nukes or perhaps some kind of geothermal that provides all the same comforts and conveniences. Population growth falls and even reverses in countries that acheive a certain level of affluence. Put these together and you have a the potential in 50-100 years for a lovely world indeed where all enjoy these things. As discussed above by Selena and I we should question how we live, but that does not require questioning whether we should have toasters and sneakers - there is no reason for us not to. (One of the former will last me decades but I wear out the latter every 2 years or so.)

 

[shereads]

Only 50% of the crowd gathered outside are yelling 'Fire!'

The door to the hallway is hot to the touch.

Smoke, or more accurately, something that resembles smoke, is billowing underneath.

It's getting warm in here. But it always does in July.

I could leave through the window, risk twisting my ankle, miss my favorite Seinfeld rerun and leave the house vulnerable to burglars. But that's a fairly drastic lifestyle change to base on speculation and hearsay.

I'm waiting until all the evidence is in.

 

[JamesSD]

I'm cautiously supportive of Nuclear power. My biggest concern is storage/disposal of the used fuel rods.

In SimCity I always accepted the slight risk of a meltdown and higher costs of Nuclear Plants over the dirty, polluting, coal plants. While a silly example, it shows my personal feelings on the cost/risk relationship of coal pollution vs. the small risk of a nuclear disaster (which, I'd like to point out, TMI is the worst nuclear case ever in the US, and while certainly problematic, was hardly earth-shatteringly bad)

Of course, Nuclear power also requires tighter regulation, which has costs associated with it. Homer Simpson is funny on TV, but we dont' actually want him running a nuclear plant in real life.

 

[mack_the_knife]

I'm cautiously supportive of Nuclear power. My biggest concern is storage/disposal of the used fuel rods.

In SimCity I always accepted the slight risk of a meltdown and higher costs of Nuclear Plants over the dirty, polluting, coal plants. While a silly example, it shows my personal feelings on the cost/risk relationship of coal pollution vs. the small risk of a nuclear disaster (which, I'd like to point out, TMI is the worst nuclear case ever in the US, and while certainly problematic, was hardly earth-shatteringly bad)

Of course, Nuclear power also requires tighter regulation, which has costs associated with it. Homer Simpson is funny on TV, but we dont' actually want him running a nuclear plant in real life.

The eco-warriors of the seventies pretty much shut down our opening any new plants since then. Meanwhile Europe, which they otherwise worship like puppies following a meat vendor, has been building nuke plants like they were a good idea all along...

Spent fuel rods, in other countries than the USA, recycle their spent rods into fuel for another kind of reactor. We're not allowed to do that by law, again railed for by the ecologically minded folk of the seventies. So, what do we do with spent fuel? We process a lot of it into depleted uranium and concentrate the really nasty bits into waste which must be stored for a few million years. Ever wonder how we have so much depleted uranium around to make ammunition from it while no one else does - it makes great penetrators, but would be horribly expensive if not subsidized by our own foolishly passed laws.

 

[wazhazhe]

It is my impression that the decision to prevent the recycling of nuclear waste was reversed by the Reagan administration in 1981. I believe the reasons recycling never took place were concerns over proliferation and cost. Given the current technology, it's not cost effective to recycle nuclear waste.