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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

One of the great mysteries in U.S. politics is how the Democrats lost their connection to the working class.  Until very recently, there was a huge stasis in this country in which labor aligned with the Democratic party, and management aligned with the Republicans.

My theory, and I know I’m not alone here, is that:

• Almost all the new wealth that came into the United States over the last 40+ went to the upper 1%, which gutted the middle class, and left more than half the country with virtually no savings, living paycheck to paycheck, and deeply frustrated.

• Educational standards declined sharply over this period of time.

• Republicans, Trump in particular, exploited this combination of ignorance and frustration, blaming the Hollywood elite, the Deep State, Dr. Fauci and other “corrupt” scientists, immigrants, people of color, and liberal “wokeism” for the financial pain that is inflicted on white America’s workers.

Having said all this, it is quite possible that the great labor strikes of the day will be effective at alerting us to the plight of labor.

It’s also true that the GOP has gone too far for even the most poorly educated Americans.  Its leader by a huge margin is Donald Trump, who, by virtue of his status as a traitor to his country, doesn’t stand a prayer in the 2024 election.

In many ways, we’re a pathetic country, the butt of jokes from peoples around the globe.  But even many Trump supporters have a limit, one that was crossed when the former president came within a gnat’s a** of overthrowing the U.S. government.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

From this ad:  Attention Accredited Investors: Have you ever considered investing in Oil & Gas?

Yes, I did.  In fact, in the early 1980s, I was a consultant to a company that owned Chevron stations all over Northern California.

That was 40 years ago, and since that time, the entire world has learned that investing in fossil fuels means profiting from the destruction of the life-supporting capacity of our planet.

And like most decent human beings, I would never again participate in that atrocity.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

A couple of points on the meme here:

Nike is worth $146 billion and change.  They’re among the top brands on the planet, and they don’t care what a former Yankees pitcher thinks.

The vast majority of Americans pride themselves on their concern for the well-being of others.  We don’t care what a hateful moron thinks, either.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

Apparently, there is still a conference for small wind, defined as anything under 25 KW, to be held this year in Jutland, a remote part of Denmark (see map).

Perhaps the site was chosen because it’s one of few places on Earth where small wind makes sense: huge wind resources, and a low, dispersed population of environmentally concerned citizens. There are only six million people in the entire country, and almost all of them in or around Copenhagen.

Check out the photo below.  Wish I could be there.

 

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

This isn’t the first post here (out of more than 15K) that points out how helpful beavers are in our natural world.

It is the first, however, that reproduces this marvelous graphic from Collective Conservation.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

Here’s a video that answers the question: Given a Tesla’s range and the time it takes to charge it, how appropriate is it for road trips?

As readers know, I’m an EV enthusiast, but I grant that they’re not perfect, at least now, for every driving application.  My wife and I normally do about 9 hours per day in the car, with only short stops along the way, so even with fast charging, this wouldn’t be a happy experience for us.

But maybe we’re focusing on the wrong things here.  There are 25 million households in America with a car that commutes less than 100 miles a day.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Hydrokinetics

Here’s a video showing how a water wheel can generate electricity from a fast-running river.

Is this BS?  It depends on how you define “BS.”  It will generate electricity to be sure.

Will it do so cost-effectively?  Not in a million years, and that’s clear from the video itself.  It claims 7.5 KW at 50 RPM, but the wheel in the video (in this incredibly high velocity river) is doing about 12 RPM. Since power and speed are proportional, that means less than 2 KW, a fraction of that of a solar PV array on the typical American house.

Other issues include high maintenance costs and fish strikes.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

There is a philosophical conversation that is prominent in present-day America re: liberalism and its strong correlation to higher education.  In particular, do universities manufacture liberals, or are better educated people naturally liberal in their belief systems?

My mom and I are talking about Laurence Tribe, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law (pictured).  He’s a distinguished legal scholar, brilliant individual, frequently interviewed in mainstream media. I would put him in the same class as Noam Chomsky, insofar as they both live at the very top of the intellectual, and both extremely progressive.

Yet as far as the right-wing TV “news” shows are concerned, neither of these two people exist. And, to be sure, Fox News and the like take the position that college life is tantamount to brainwashing, insofar as professors are prone to punish their students with conservative viewpoints. How that could possibly operate in math, science, language, music — anything outside of political science and perhaps history — I have no clue.

I guess it’s one of those many things in life that are impossible to prove one way or the other.  We all suffer from our cognitive biases, seeking data points that confirm what we already believe.

Moreover, we need to keep in mind that, in a capitalist society, there will always be a supply that rises to meet a demand.

This is really what Fox News is all about.  Almost half of American voters are Republicans, and today, that means taking some fairly extreme positions on things like Trump’s honesty, Biden’s senility,  abortion, gun rights, and so forth.  Fox makes a fortune with programming that appeals to these people, many of them turn Fox on when they get up in the morning and fall asleep to it at night.  That’s a lot of eyeballs being sold products like My Pillow, walk-in bathtubs, hearing aids, and food supplements.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

There are a great number of theories as to why human civilization has as yet been unable to make contact with other forms of intelligent life.

Sci-fi legend and public intellectual Arthur C. Clark offers a totally plausible suggestion here.  Just as ants (we believe) are unaware that they live among human beings, it’s perfectly possible that we don’t have the advanced level of perception and intelligence to know that some superior species is all around us.

Of course, Clark meant this as a “dig,” implying that, in general, the people of Earth don’t apply their intelligence at all well. Touche.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

As illustrated in the meme here, one never knows what news revelations are going to make a real impact on the American people, and which will be forgotten at once, if not entirely overlooked.

When this story broke during the litigation that Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox News, it became immediately clear that Fox: a) had deliberately and repeatedly lied to its viewers that the 2020 presidential election was invalid due to massive voter fraud that everyone, including Fox, knew for a fact had never happened, and b) that they did so because of their exceedingly low opinion of their viewers’ intelligence.

When this happened, I recall asking myself: Are these people OK with being called “dumb cousin-f***ers” by the producers of their “news” channel?  If the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal had said that about me, I think I might have been insulted.

Of course, there wasn’t the tiniest bit of reporting on this court document from Fox itself, and therefore never really happened, for so many of these brave patriots.

 

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