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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Well, I know exactly who needs to hear this (not that it will make any difference).

There are two different, though related types of anti-vaxxers:

1) Those who carry with them the erroneous idea that vaccinations don’t work.  It’s essentially an anti-science, Q-anon-style position, and it was quite popular during the height of the COVID -19 pandemic.  Vaccinations were believed to be dangerous, often lethal.  They were “experimental,” even though many billions of them had been administered, and there was no real evidence that they did more good than harm.

These people normally had an entire ensemble of conspiracy theories that solidified their crackpot ideas: the U.S. government had planned the pandemic, the medical community had grossly inflated the number of deaths from the disease, etc.

2) Selfish people who don’t care whether or not vaccinations (or masks, or social distancing) work on a societal basis.  These are the people who don’t vaccinate their kids against the common childhood diseases, and they are the reason that certain of these ailments that were all but eradicated many decades ago are coming back with a vengeance.

When you look at what’s going so wrong with our world, it’s not hard to spot the culprit.  It’s our population’s growing levels of ignorance and indifference to the well-being of others, and it’s growing worse with each passing year.

Here in the U.S., we happily re-elected a criminal conman to lead us.  Ask yourself if this could have happened even 20 years ago.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I had a talk with a friend recently about all the angst associated with “grooming” our kids.  Lots of folks apparently think that kids choose their sexual orientation and exposing them to the mere concept of homosexuality could cause them to be gay.

But does this jibe with our own experiences?  Not at all.

We all wake up one morning when we’re about 12 years old, and we’re suddenly and strangely attracted to someone of a certain sex.  None of us had any idea this was going to happen when we went to sleep the night before.  We had no choice in the matter, any more than a right-handed person could choose to be left-handed.

That’s why all the handwringing about grooming is so asinine.

We seem to have lost our ability to reason–even to the extent of consulting what has occurred in our own lives.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Smart Grid

We haven’t heard too much on this subject recently, but it’s unclear why that is.

Over 20% of the gasoline consumed in the downtown parts of our big cities is associated with drivers looking for parking spaces.  About 15 years ago, there was a considerable buzz about apps like smart parking meters that would push signals saying, “I’m open!” to these drivers.

What happened?  If anyone knows, please comment.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Here in the United States, tax breaks for the wealthiest individuals and corporations have brought us to a point at which our educational standards in our public schools are in freefall.

As Pythagoras observed 2500 years ago, decisions like these have terrible consequences for the underlying society.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

The world lost Frank Zappa in 1993, and we baby boomers remember very well what American life was like back then.  It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t feature anywhere near the high-intensity, hammer-pounding stupidity that it does today.

It’s impossible to imagine what the iconic American musician would have said about our society now.  Perhaps it’s best that we don’t try to think too hard about that.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics
Soon thereafter I realized that, yes, the government is bloated and will never act with the efficiency of the private sector, but wealthy people and their corporations were (and have always been) simply getting richer, normally by harming the rest of us.  Many were polluting the planet and using our skies and waterways as their own private sewers, and I could see that without the regulation that libertarianism negated, this was only going to get worse.  I’ve been a Green, voting with the Democrats when the tide of the election seems close, ever since.
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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

The reader who submitted the mere here writes:  If you want EVs just do it. If you want to drive gas/diesel vehicles do it as well. Let’s not try to make everyone conform to our way of life. If electric or fossil fuels fail they will. The same goes for Vegans eat plants if you please. Just don’t expect everyone to do as you do. Our meager environmental changes to save the atmosphere is equal to shooting spit wads at a battleship.

A few comments.

You apparently don’t have any training in this subject.  Our scientists are clear in explaining to us that decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors is an absolute requirement if we expect to have an organized human civilization here 50 years down the road.

Diesel generators account for close to 0% of our grid-mix.

Uranium (nuclear) has virtually no carbon content.

Solar, wind, and nuclear are in the process of displacing coal, by far the dirtiest of our fuels. There is nothing “meager” whatsoever about these efforts.

It would a good thing if our population would follow what our scientists are begging us to do re: our behavior (driving, eating, etc.)  Obviously, there are many people who won’t, and there is very little that can be done about this.  More than half of Americans voted for Donald Trump and his distinctly anti-science platform.  This is an uphill battle, to be sure.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Due to the demolition of U.S. education standards, American voters re-elected Donald Trump, whose administration is now poised to wage an all-out war against vaccinations and as many other elements of sciences as they can get their hands on.

There will be two main results: a) the adoration of the MAGA crowd as crackpot RFK Jr. leads the charge into battle, and b) the return of many childhood diseases (see graphic at left) that humankind had previously all but eliminated.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

In my recent post Are We Looking at the End? I quoted a few scientists who claim that human civilization will “unravel” somewhere between 2040 and 2050, due primarily to climate change and the loss of biodiversity, particularly the insects.

In response, longtime 2GreenEnergy supporter Cameron Atwood writes:

What we need is a global moonshot attitude toward transitioning, and that we don’t have.

We also need a buy-in by the most exorbitantly wealthy among us, the top 1%, and we don’t have that either.

Of course, the least powerful among us individually have little sway over the direction of the paradigm, and the most powerful are disinclined to alter their behavior.

Any advisors they listen to are dependent on their good graces and will wait until what they think is the last minute to advise change.

By then it will have been too late. It may already be now.

I don’t advise we give up, as potent action may still mitigate the worst of the consequences, and at least we will have tried.

Excellent points.  This civilization has no paradigm of cooperative action to promote its survival.  Rich people prosper, poor people suffer, and that’s about it.

Making matters worse is the fact that the United States is driving in reverse.  Massive numbers of largely uneducated, anti-science voters just re-elected Donald Trump to a second term. We’re in a pathetic condition.

I’m not giving up either but ignoring the core of the problem is not helpful.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Yesterday, I happened to meet a guy who works for the California Department of Fish and Game whose life’s work is hunting nutria, an invasive species of rodent shown at left.

“What’s the deal with the nutria?” I asked?

The answer, in essence: Nutria could be said to be the anti-matter of the beaver.  Where the latter improves every aspect of the biosphere it inhabits, the former destroys the local wetland environment, primarily through their ravenous consumption of aquatic vegetation, (roots and all) which destabilizes the soil leading to erosion, which, in turn, destroys critical habitat for other wildlife and disrupts the entire wetland ecosystem balance.

According to the fellow I met, what they do to the manmade portion of the environment is arguably even worse, e.g., undermining bridge footings.

I asked what they look like, to which the guy said, “Just imagine a 20-pound hamster.”  When I searched for the picture above, I realized that I would call it an ugly 20-pound hamster.

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