“mr president, i’m trying to get through to the national guard but their line is either busy or i get an answering message in arabic.”
“shit! i forgot about the war!”
“we’d all like to, sir.”
ps.aaiieeeee! terrorists!!!
pps. “no, it’s not terrorists, it’s—” *glub*
ppps. the movie’s mostly fine but it has one of those extreme people aren’t like that moments, to serve the plot and theme and make the point.
so, the kid hero, he realizes that every telephone is out — the library’s landlines and the mobile phones, both — and he swims into the freezing water to use a downstairs payphone because it’s powered by the phone line, not the local grid. it works, ok? that’s what’s important. anyway he makes this last phone call and he finds out from his authority-in-the-field parent that this storm’s going to get much worse. detailed instructions are relayed.
once the kid has a change of clothes and is back with the main group of evacuees, does the kid or anyone in the kid’s small group who heard the story of the larger storm, tell anyone else in the room?
no.
no one overhears them talking about it, either. it’s a secret!
so then the situation goes really bad and nearly every evacuee runs out into the horrible weather and dies, because the discussion they would have had about the storm was delayed until the people were literally walking out the door. even then, no! one! listens! message sent! message received!
the problems with people not listening now has nothing to do with people being unreceptive to good information or to democracy. what’s killing us is our obligations and our plans.
this came by email. tom friedman approving killing countries for show. (if you didn’t know, he approved of killing countries for show before 9/11. this is how he comes to his honest support of throwing darts at the map to choose targets.)
anyhow, linked to that was this interview with google people about green energy and things like that. i gather it was at the WEF in davos, switzerland, this past january.
it starts getting good after the first guy shuts up. such as noticing that if you end up displacing other green energy users, you’re not helping. and such as recognizing that if you have the money to buy at a premium, you should aim your money toward projects that will scale well.
yes! hello! you have to make that distinction between good business and good policy. this isn’t a niche anymore. we’re not talking about a viable business or a viable industry. we’re talking about a viable civilization.
buncha things i suspected came out true. the big one was which current technologies are cost effective.
they tagged on photovoltaics, about which i have doubts. do i get points for picking those three as the real near-term possibilities? i do! extra points to me for loving industrial waste-heat capture.
don’t worry. i’m never gonna win.
ps. waaaaa! i can’t find the original post so to link!
pps. wow. looking at what i wrote january and december. it was good. why did i stop? tired. i guess.
ppps. there’s a pdf transcript. oh! but i still have to type this because it’s passworded! the question was, “what one thing can the next president do to help your project?”
i mean i don’t know the best possible thing. one thing that i’m very concerned about is transmission. and i just like to tell the story, i went to the university of michigan in engineering, and like 20 years before i got there they closed their power transmission school. they had a school that dealt with high tension wires and power transmission and that was closed long, long before i got there. and unsurprisingly, that area hasn’t advanced that much. and i’m pretty concerned, what sergey mentioned about wind is very true. the costs of a windmill, the power is competitive with coal now except for … the transmission and the variability. and if you have better transmission, that really helps you with variability. there’s been studies that show for example europe could get 90% of their electricity from wind at a cost equal to coal, 90% just from wind at the same cost as coal if they had better transmission. now it’s kind of terrible that there’s nobody working on that, right, as far as i can tell, or very, very few people. and even if we did have the technologies that were better for the transmission, the ones we have are probably good enough to solve europe’s energy needs. but the odds that they’ll get deployed across a wide area like that are probably close to zero without somebody, like a US president or somebody powerful saying we’re going to build really good transmission so that we can have better renewable energy and solve some of these problems.
my guess is that the school was closed because the system was finished. once the goal of access is accomplished, here and elsewhere, goals of tech development sort of just die.
that businesses can’t cut emissions profitably (to a point), or that existing efforts are pointless and futile. It’s that at current energy prices, even ragingly successful emissions reductions will only cut your emissions by a third, at best, because it isn’t profitable enough to do more.
because they’re the only cargo vehicles today that can (and did) draw energy directly from their environment — wind, current, wave, and sun. this means trade agreements need special scrutiny on environmental standards; carbon taxes and such may increase intercontinental economic pressure.
(i know, me and many have said we can’t buy our way out of this, but i meant it as we can’t shop our way out.)
ps. i guess i should be super clear: i don’t mean this as anything like “caring for the environment costs jobs.” just that if you look at today’s equipment, you can see that there are significant weaknesses in land- and air-based transport, in terms of developing safe replacements.
it’s not just that we don’t have the water and soil to grow fuel. we also have this problem where our grids will end up delivering both home energy and transport energy. it’s gonna end up costing people extra to live inland.
pps. and you’d think that would make big inland cities prime advocates for nuclear power — let’s have fun and say it’s generated in canada, where cooling the plants is easiest and most reliable — what a lively debate that’d be.
and i can’t. i’m not seeing it. it’s disappointing, too, because i hoped that virtuality would show people that there are many paths to group success — but they’re still chasing after solo gains.
ps. the trouble, as i see it, is, apart from having little science pride outside of machines, we, maybe, don’t think reality can be changed, anymore. except to revert.
ring ring ring