Over the years, I’ve learned that the most productive way to deal with climate change deniers is to point out that global warming is only one of half-a-dozen reasons to knock off our dependence on coal and oil. “Just pick your favorite,” I smile.
How about the obvious and growing damage to human health? It would seem to me that this would be a fact that even the most fanatical of the anti-government types couldn’t argue. Don’t we need some empowered body to protect our health from those who are indifferent?
One of the very clearest – and saddest – indications that we’re on the wrong road with respect to environmental regulation is our skyrocketing rate of respiratory disease, e.g., asthma, in children. (more…)
I refer frequently to the writings of Professor Michael Klare, documentarian at Amherst, as I find him so lucid and so on-target in his analysis of the macro issues on energy that we face here in the 21st Century. Here, in his piece Why High Gas Prices Are Here To Stay, he notes the difference between what the oil propagandists say (“the world is awash in oil”), and the truth: the world still contains plenty of oil, but very little “easy” oil. It’s getting harder to get to, it’s becoming harder to extract and refine, and the risks to the environment are growing with each passing year. And who’s absorbing these costs? Look in the mirror.
As an ongoing part of our series in which we introduce the basics of renewable energy to young people and newcomers to the subject, here’s a short video I made recently on geothermal. Here I talk about the fundamentals, and present the various strengths and weaknesses of geothermal as a component of our energy mix. I hope you enjoy it.
Here’s a piece I wrote originally in 2009 for another website, but I wanted to make it available to 2GreenEnergy readers as well.
220 years after the birth of our beloved U.S. Constitution we see its basic tenets challenged from many different directions. The complaints against the G.W. Bush administration that are most likely to endure through the coming generations are likely be rooted not so much in unpopular actions, but rather in actions that were deemed to have violated the supreme law of the land. Similarly, Republicans’ rancor with Obama’s financial bailout is based on the notion of his team’s having exceeded the powers specifically granted to the executive branch under the Constitution.
Last Friday I had the pleasure of hearing Sandra Day O’Connor speak at a luncheon. When she and I were introduced, I felt myself under pressure to keep my words brief. “A great honor to meet you,” I smiled as a shook her hand. But I sure would have liked to ask her: “Didn’t you find it frustrating to be forced to write an opinion of the narrow case you were hearing, rather than making a decision that would speak to the wider issue at stake and the way you felt it needed to be viewed vis-à-vis the Constitution? Didn’t you finding yourself constantly wanting to write, ‘This is what the nine of us think in this case. But here’s what we believe the Constitution means with respect to gun control, or abortion, or capital punishment–or whatever the larger issue happened to be?’”
She made a warm and resonant speech — one that everyone clearly appreciated — but she scrupulously avoided making comments on her personal views on philosophy and law. And she left immediately upon the completion of her talk, I presume specifically to avoid taking questions like these from people like me.
In any case, the one thing we can agree upon — almost unanimously, I think — is that the U.S. Constitution was written very carefully and thoughtfully, and that it’s a very good thing that we have something as solid and revered as this to serve as the touchstone of our conversations about law.
The Chippendale tallcase clock behind my daughter in the picture above was made circa 1790 — certainly within a few years of the construction and ratification of our Constitution. Before the clock stood in my dining room it was in my parents’ living room — and in my grandparents’ house before that. It’s not really a distinguished piece of furniture (sorry, Mom) — i.e., it’s not terrifically valuable as an antique. It was built in the fledgling U.S. by an unknown clockmaker; its movement had been imported from England, and it has no special design features that would make it particularly collectible.
But its modest monetary value does not begin to diminish my love of the piece. I look forward to winding it each Sunday evening; in fact, doing the math, I believe that I may have given it its 10,000th winding one such Sunday in the last few years. But one thing I know for certain is this: when I turn its crank each week, I feel a great sense of connectedness — to my loving parents, of course. But I also feel a mysterious connection to its previous owners — the earliest of whom lived and died in the very early days of our beloved republic. I’m proud to carry on a tradition that involves people whose names I’ll never know — people whose most basic relationship to me is the respect for a single document that was written by a group of gentlemen in Philadelphia, 220 years ago.
Here’s another short video for young people and newcomers to the subject of renewable energy. In this brief talk on solar energy and photovoltaics (solar panels), I provide my thinking on the strengths and weaknesses of solar power. Hope you enjoy.
There are at least two kinds of “EV deniers” (as I call them), i.e., people who doubt that electric vehicles represent an improvement for the environment over gasoline. The first concept is that for the foreseeable future, an increase in the electric load means burning more coal. I.e., coal plants that would otherwise have been tamped down during off peak hours are instead running full-throttle through the night. Frequent commenter Glenn Doty points out that even California and the other states that have no coal buy power when they need it, and this ultimately means that somewhere, more coal is being burned.
Classically, I’ve addressed this by saying that we do indeed face the need to shut down coal plants; this is part of the reason that I favor a significant role of government in support of the migration to renewables and the ancillary areas: smart-grid, efficiency, conservation, energy storage, etc. I’ve also pointed out that the true externalities of fossil fuels are almost completely ignored in most of the arguments. E.g., as bad as coal is, it could be argued that it’s not as bad as oil because of international security issues. The costs (both financial and human) of war, terrorism, and civil unrest and injustice are enormous, and normally totally dismissed. As oil becomes scarcer, these problems will only get worse.
My friend Cameron sent me a piece on union labor and public education, which spawned this conversation that some readers may find interesting (though it has nothing to do with clean energy).
Cameron: Imagine if all elementary schools were well-staffed with well-qualified and well-paid teachers of critical thinking and facilitators of creativity, and imagine if everyone who wanted to do so went to university, and got degrees in their chosen field (selected with effective guidance testing), and imagine if all had access to the best nutrition and healthcare, and sound financial advice… we’d be one kick-ass society in less than a generation!
Craig: We disagree on a few things (which is totally cool, btw). E.g., I don’t think that anyone is well served by the teacher’s unions. The net result is that it’s practically impossible to root out bad teachers — of which (trust me on this) there are many. When the budget cuts came to the California schools, guess whose jobs were preserved? Those with ability? No, those with seniority, regardless of the quality of their work. The overall quality of teachers went down even further. (more…)
Last evening, waiting at a restaurant bar for the remainder of my party to arrive, I happened to run into professional poet Richard Jerrette. He told me about his recent cycle of poems, “Beso The Donkey,” and we briefly commiserated over our martinis (mine, technically a Gibson, with an onion) about how difficult it is to get important industry figures to review one’s writing.
I told him about my experience with my first book, how I had spent several 12-hour days identifying and contacting the most obvious people: editors of magazines and websites on energy and environmentalism, as well as the world’s top names in the space that I deemed relevant: Al Gore, Oprha Winfrey, Jon Stewart, etc. (more…)
I just started a fine historic novel that my brother gave me for Christmas, The Hangman’s Daughter; the first 100 pages are really good. In addition to the story itself, a murder mystery set in mid-17th Century Bavaria, the author reminds us of the horrors and brutalities of living at that time, e.g., the persecution of witches and the outrageously illogical ways in which this took place. “If she has a birthmark, she’s probably a witch. Stick it with a needle; if she bleeds, then she’s definitely a witch.” How would you like to have been born female with a birthmark in 1650?
To me, the remarkable aspect of this isn’t that people were at one point so stupid to think like this. The truly amazing thing is that this was fairly recent. Almost exactly 2000 years earlier we had Ancient Greece with its fantastic developments in mathematics, science, education, philosophy, theater, focus on virtue, jurisprudence, democracy and the like – not to mention logic. Aristotle (more…)
