useful blogs all over the net. today has been a day of happy study. as result i maybe have uncovered information you can put to good use. it is:
there is more than one boat sinking.
that may seem strange, but when i listen to people in charge of america, i get the sense that the epochal challenges of resource depletion and climate mess have been demoted to leaks while the financial gashes are patched.
when the only sure way to restore people’s faith is to accomplish real things, against a real clock, for a real reason.
top people: the credit crisis, ultimately, is a vote of no confidence in you.
ps. i wanted to say “faith in a system,” but which? we’ve stripped so much recourse, there’s no wheelhouse; and the real skepticism is hopelessness.
pps. in a good interview, lester brown called the bush-cheneys “a public-relations operation with a hidden agenda.” demoralizing america — convincing us that planning and public involvement were redundant because the market cornucopia needed neither — was a longer, older project.
everything that came to be, meant to be, so the losers get lost or convert, and more comes like it came. you get a sense the things you need to do and do them and then do doing them and do doing them like you used to do them and like the founding doers would have did doing. and then you’re some fucking place. doing for nothing. and when somebody comes, tells you, “i hate you,” maybe it’s god, the only being in a pile of do. and you’re finally done.
i know there’s nowhere to grow. no way to get away. i wish, really wish, i could fix that for you, bring you across from the hall of mirrors of our world — authenticity’s dead now but where — to a universe that doesn’t explode when you touch it.
i know why you want to go to the same stores. i know why you want to hear the same music and see the same people. why the pantheons and saints. your tribe, right? isn’t it? and your ancestors, your inheritance, your roots. it didn’t used to be about making it work. it was about us.
I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the eighteenth century economically.
This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, D.C. It’s time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it’s way overdue.
a selection from mr kunstler goes on washington. i’ll have more to say about this tomorrow, after sleeping on it, i’m sure. well, not on this, not especially.
i was going to write about japanese electric vehicles — motorcycles, cars — because subaru estimated they could make 5-door vehicle with >100-mile range for about $14K in seven years which is too slow for me. from there i learned the VW turbodiesel hybrid 5-door is dead, by cost, which is disappointing because gasoline engines are bad at adapting to new fuels; thus the plug-in gas hybrid becomes a benefit that is also a liability. oh but wait! peugeot has one that will be on sale this year, looks french, and costs either absolutely nothing, more, or if-you-have-to-ask. fortunately if-you-don’t-have-to-ask, you can wait a year and get the racing version. but forget that.
have you heard, yet, that there are design advantages to an all-electric powertrain? yes, it’s wheelchair-inspired. yes, peugeot really built it. (click for more pictures.)
in other news, industrial society could collapse any minute so forget trying to clean up the grid; just run for your life. let me be the first to thank public advocates of this for doing corporations’ “government is the problem” PR work so they don’t have to. there’s resilience and there’s quitting — a line you can draw for yourself — if you live in a densely-populated area — you’re quitting. why? because you have more power and more options than anyone. stop thinking of your place as a monolithic legacy. fix it.
in other other news, from last year,
yet more news. uranium speculators want to dig up the grand canyon, or poison it, whichever. try getting them to pay remediation — they’ll have more lawyers than you. and of course there are terrorists.
“You won’t have to depend on foreign uranium,” he said. Though higher-grade deposits are found in Canada, and more mines are opening in the next five years, “you never know what the Canadians will do. It just makes sense to protect our industry from a national security standpoint.”
wow. this… wow. as i’ve been staring at the wind pictures, fixing them to fix them in my head, it’s been more and more clear that south asia’s ground-based wind supply, approximately, per capita, sucks.
people are now on to building an “asian energy security grid” out of flammable materials in an increasingly fire-hazardous world, right, so that’s a bad plan. but what’s the better one? let’s ask a south asian expert strawman.
offshore wind is impossible. you hear me? impossible.
solar thermal can’t just be plugged in to meet the needs of speculative capitalists who run the world because they are smarter, better, and more visionary than you and for no other reason remotely related to the existing money system.
inscrutable wind resources are far away in china’s celestial waters and there is no way to run wires that far because you have to share wires, unlike pipelines. yes, we said “energy grid,” but we didn’t mean “energy” or “grid” like you mean them.
kites are also impossible. and i have never heard of them.
small solar is for peasants. do you see any peasants here? no. this is a nation of industrialists and bountiful human capital.
geothermal is another terrible option, proved by lack of investment.
what do you mean? aircraft carriers are a renewable resource. we will use them to invade canada, which has our uranium.
what does “asian energy security” mean to you. i hear “safety.” i hear “cooperation.” i hear “autonomy.” fossil fuels and nuclear speak of none of those. must be why they’re popular.
note the helpful plate boundaries! that’s the USGS for you.
the fact that diesel/electric plug-in cars are a little out of reach has no bearing on the flexibility that similarly-motivated buses afford us.
now that i search a little harder i see estimates of price being near the prius and release being 2009, 2010, who knows. i seek only a household or rental car-of-much-use. this one gets >60mpg.
don’t let my grumping over survivalism bug you. i’m nearly the same with the NRA — open-country myth vs cramped reality — the collective welfare here defines the individual’s — so fix it.
ring ring ring