Today, the economics/government teacher brought to our attention just how mythical our belief in privacy and security has been in the states.
Through a spotty analysis of Google Maps and Earth, I was able to magnify my house (surprise). Nothings new there. But it never really took a hold of me before-- the fact that satellites photographed my un-photogenic dog in the yard and my garden of dirt.
When I was younger, I played a computer game called Civilization. The goal was to survive by discovering different tribes, researching and developing technology and uncovering the blackened map. That's the end game of any civilization, right? I'm reminded of the text preceding Star Trek episodes and films from 1966 onward:
Space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before
I wonder whether this has been the American legacy since July 4, 1776 and whether our model is the model. I don't think technology and their rapid development actually makes our lives simpler. I don't think this Earth can stand another China or United States.
Sure we have a couple more blenders available to us than we did in the 1950s. Sure we have the worldwide web at our fingertips. But I think our culture shafts its citizens when this is what we become-- when we start believing the internet is easier, and by association better than public library research. I reckon you can refer to me as a Luddite, but I think there's more to our species than a Star-Trek continuum of things.
Do I think I could live in a forest by myself (eating nuts and whatnot)? No. But that isn't entirely my fault.
I missed the 1960s and the pre-combustion engine times before that.
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Yea, the lack of privacy in today's world is getting scary. I hate driving down the road and seeing a whole telephone pole loaded up with traffic surveillance cameras. You'd think that would be illegal... And about Google Earth, apparently you can send them a request to make your property invisible on their satellite images.
I'd prefer the library to the Internet. At least the majority of the information in a library is actually verifiable and true. I can hardly say the same for the Internet. And besides, as weird as it sounds, I like the smell of books...
I like the often short philosophies that sometimes appear graffitied into those books. And the smell of course!
Earth First: we'll destroy the other planets later.
The technology that you don't like is the only thing that allows us to survive. Without it there would be mass starvation.
And with the exception of a small slice of the population like yourself, people love it. Most people think it makes their lives better. They work their butts off to earn what it takes to acquire it. It's too bad that you don't like it but there are actually numerous places in the world where you could move to enjoy a far more primative lifestyle.
The world actually needs several more China's. Of the world's 6+ billion people, 5 billion of them are poorer than the average Mexican. Most of the world's people are living in abject poverty and it seems incredibly selfish of you to want to keep them that way while you live the good life and plug in your computer to the internet whenever you feel like it. I bet your family has a car too.
China, through its economic progress, has managed to lift about 45% of its 1.3 billion population out of dire misery. It still has a long ways to go before it has solved the problems of its people. India has also made some progress lifting its billion people out of poverty. And progress has been made through much of the Asian part of the world. But for most people inb the world life remains a brutish horror.
I wish more environmentalists would practice what they preach. They should disrobe themselves of all of their clothing that is not made from natural fiber and those natural materials that were produced from modern agriculture including leather, cotton and wool. Essentially I'm talking about naked or wearing buckskin and homespun. They should then unplug themselves from the power grid including natural gas, electricity and the internet. And then they should limit themselves to only the food they grow themselves or which is grown organically locally and consumed no fossil fuels. They should divest themselves of all hydrocarbon powered engines. If they use beasts of burden they should only feed them hay that is grown without the benefit of hydrocarbons. Oh ..... and forget about nicities like toilet paper and modern medicine.
And after a year of this, if they survive it, if they still think that lifestyle is worthwhile, then they might have earned the right to preach to the rest of us.
Excellent rebuttal, Nimbler. We have fundamental disagreements about the American model of industrialization and prosperity, but we connect on the idea of self-sufficiency. Did you miss my previous blog? http://www.progressiveu.org/135813-stream-consciousness-i-ride-wild-wing...
Earth First: we'll destroy the other planets later.
I think the point should be that those Americans, Chinese, etc, who are not impoverished must do as much as they can to protect the environment. After all, like you said, we shouldn't expect the world's destitute to. That would be totally immoral and inhumane. Since wealthier Westerners have the power to protect the environment, they also have the responsibility.
I have no problem with conservation. I am very conservation minded when it makes economic sense. I heat my swimming pool with solar rather than natural gas because it is an economic winner.
But we need to be careful that our efforts at protecting the environment do not harm our economy to the extent that they make us poor.
Only the wealthy can afford to care about the environment. If our efforts at environmental protection end up hurting the economy to the extent that people are more concerned about keeping warm and earning their next meal then all of the environmentally minded legislation that gets passed will become unenforceable and will end up doing more harm than good. Just as poor people do all over the world, people will rape the environment for their own survival or just to maintain their standard of living.
Energy costs went up this year. In my small town in Wyoming I bet that there were at least 500 new coal stoves installed this winter. These are burning coal and emitting raw unscrubbed smoke. It is far more harmful to the environment then the equivalent amount of coal being burned in a modern coal fired plant and turned into nice clean electricity. But those coal stoves save people a LOT of money and the environment be damned. I suppose you could try to get a law passed against these stoves but the politicians who passed it would be thrown out of office and the law repealed because they would be attacking people's standard of living. It is too bad that environmentalists have made the cost of electricity so high because by trying to save the environment they are going to end up making it worse.
Environmentalists, in alliance with big agriculture, pretty much shoved uneconomic biofuels down our throats and we are already seeing all sorts of perverse consequences and lot of those consequences are going to be bad for the environment.
The answer to solving the world's economic problems is to make everybody richer.
My mom just bought a pellet stove, which is much more efficient than a regular wood-burning stove, and costs I'd imagine thousands of dollars less than heating her house with propane (which is now being switched to natural gas). A ton of pellets (which costs about $250) can heat her house of roughly 2000 sq feet through the Pueblo winter (which amounts to a LOT of wind, though not too much snow, since the wind blows it all away). It's pretty clean burning, since it uses all of the fuel it's given, and doesn't take up too much space in the house.
So what makes coal better than that?
~C
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No particular reason except that in my corner of Wyoming, and in many other parts of the country, coal is dirt cheap ($40/ton delivered) and a ton of coal has more BTUs then a ton of pellets. But quite a few people around here have pellet stoves too. Pellets are cleaner to handle then coal and some people like them for that reason. But they are several times as expensive. The cheapest thing around here is pine wood. A $10 permit lets you cut all you want on certain designated parts of the National Forest. The only real cost is gas to haul it and the effort of cutting and splitting it. Burning wood is nasty too.
Compared to the scrubbed smoke coming out of a modern coal fired electricty plant, the smoke coming out of a wood pellet stove is nasty, It is perhaps not quite so bad as coal smoke but it is bad. (If you don't believe me, put your head in a lawn and leaf bag and put it over your Mom's chimney and breath for a few minutes). One stove does not due too much harm but when tens of thousands of people fire them up the pollution is huge. In contrast, if we made electricity with nukes, there would be practically zero pollution.
It is far less damaging to the environment to create energy centrally and distribute it as electricity. But as I said in my previous post, misguided efforts to save the environment have made electricity so expensive that people like your Mom are doing the economically rational thing which is to burn nasty fires (pellets, coal, wood) and save their money to maintain their standard of living in other ways like buying gasoline and food.
This is reverse progress. I am 50 years old and I remember when I was a little kid that this town in the winter was under a pall of coal smoke. Fairly early in my life, most of the coal stoves and boilers were replaced with gas and electric heat and winter days were a lot prettier and cleaner. But it is now starting to look like, largely due to the efforts of environmentalists, that once again everybody will be heating their homes with coal.
Wealth and abundant energy are practically two sides of the same coin. When people are telling you they want you to consume less energy or they want to tax energy or anything else that leaves you with less energy they are effectively telling you that they want you to be poorer. When people are poorer, they care less about the environment and do things like burning pellet stoves.
The way to have a clean environment is to make energy abundant and cheap. Cheap energy quickly translates to wealthy people who can afford to care about the environment.
It's not that electricity is expensive, it's that our house wasn't built with the capability of heating using electricity. Our house is connected to a 200 gallon propane tank (which, as I mentioned before, is being converted into a natural gas tank, since they're discontinuing propane in our area). It costs several hundred dollars to fill that tank up, and we used to go through a tank ever 2 weeks or so during the winter. Plus, no matter how hard we tried, the downstairs (where I sleep, since my bedroom is the only one downstairs) was ALWAYS cold. So cold I couldn't walk around without having a blanket with me all the time.
With our pellet stove (which I never said was clean, but it's far more efficient than a regular wood stove, which is really the only other option here), it's nice and toasty downstairs all the time, and the heat rises and heats the upstairs nicely as well. We don't use NEARLY as much gas.
And to offset some of the electricity we do use, my mom wants to get a wind powered generator for the house, since there is rarely a day in our town when there are gusts less than 30 mph. And if anything happens to knock out a power grid, we have the electricity we need at our fingertips.
~C
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If propane was costing you $200, then electricity would have killed you!
Electricity is the most expensive heat just about everywhere except perhaps the Pacific North West where they have lots of hydropower. It runs about 50% above the cost of natural gas/propane almost everywhere in the country.
There is no reason electricity has to be expensive except that environmentalists apparently want it that way. A big part of that cost is environmental compliance. It is almost impossible to build a new coal fired plant and it is impossible to build a new nuke. About the only kind of plants that are getting permitted are natural gas and renewables. Colorado has passed a Constitutional Amendment mandating that I think 20% of all new electricity come from renewable sources and that electricity is by far the most expensive. So of course people are turning to filthy pellets for heating.
Natural gas is an excellent heating option. It is the only hydrocarbon that can be burned cleanly in a home. Chemically it is methane or CH4. When methane burns the results are heat plus hydrogen combined with oxygen H2O (water vapor) and CO2 which is the same harmless gas that we exhale from our lungs and that plants breath in as part of photosynthesis.
But the demand for natural gas is going way up because it is stupidly being used to make electricity which is a crime against our grandchildren. It is crazy to waste the one fuel that can be burned cleanly in our homes to make electricity when there are numerous cheaper ways to make electricity. The increased demand for natural gas means that it is very expensive as a home heating fuel which is why people are resorting increasingly to wood, pellets and coal. This insanity is totally the doing of environmentalists. Every new power plant that has been built in California since their electricity crunch a few years ago (remember Grey-out Davis?) has been natural gas fired.
I am in the natural gas business. Methane I was selling at the wellhead for $1.50 per 1000 cubic feet 5 years ago is now selling for about $10. It is great for me but not so good for everybody else and is very hard on the environment because people are resorting to much dirtyier alternatives like pellets, coal and wood. Methane would be a lot cheaper if the environmentalists were not stupidly demanding that it be burned to make electricity.
Expensive energy is making people feel poor and when people are faced with the choice of caring about the environment or trying to maintain their standard of living the environment loses every single time.
They say you can motivate people through fear and love. Fear tactics are good. But not when they're backed up with poor economics. Want to listen to an interesting speaker, someone who talks about profit a lot, listen to Amory Lovins. Oh and he's an economist. Went to Harvard or Oxford when he was 15.
From what I've heard Switchgrass biofuels still hold potential. Brazilian rain forests that were protected in the 1990s are being converted at a rapid pace for all the wrong reasons, you're right. Have you heard much about algae crop plantations downwind of coal plants that not only suck co2, but are squeezed afterwards for biofuels? Beautiful stuff, really.
Earth First: we'll destroy the other planets later.
There is lots of room for conservation and there are probably lots of ways to produce electicity in cleaner ways. You and I put probably find common ground on some of these things.
My disdain is reserved for the kind of mindless knee jerk environmentalism that is driven by emotions and fear rather than science. Like burning natural gas to make electricity and not building nukes.