A Fading Fad
Here are some interesting Canadian initiatives:
Energy Probe
and
The Natural Resources Stewardship Project
You can supplement these Canadian perspectives with ideas from:
Cool It!
and
The Bottomless Well
Judging from the above, Canadians should be making hard-headed, wealth increasing energy decisions very different from those being proposed by our political leaders.
Energy Probe started all this for me. They have a long history of writing shallow and unhelpful articles bemoaning all the problems associated with nuclear power. I had written them off as just another voice in the anti-nuke choir, singing from the same sheet as all the rest. Then this appeared:
The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud: And those who are too fearful to do so
The author is Lawrence Solomon, Executive Director of Energy Probe. One can argue all night long about the merits of this book, its accuracy, its fairness - but what struck me most was its source. I never expected to see anything like this from a group of environment hard-liners who push the conserve and reduce theme to the limit. I blinked more than once - the lights seem to be coming on over there at Energy Probe.
Following the thread brought me to a couple of interesting discussions:
Global Warming Advocate Rethinks Position
Don’t Deny Yourself
Canadians need to be realistic about the choices we make if we want to avoid really destructive and expensive mistakes. In Canada we can do nothing to affect the global level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are just too small. If we eliminated all our carbon combustion completely it would not even register on the global measurement, yet such a practice could destroy our economy and social structure. The time has come to think of reasonable things. We need clean, reliable, inexpensive, safe, and plentiful negentropy (ie highly ordered energy), and we know how to produce it using our own Canadian nuclear power industry. For me it seems sort of obvious that we have to start building reactors and electricity distribution lines now, but I guess others still need to watch the clock tick for a while before facing up to this reality.
Increasing our use of nuclear power implies more electricity use. This leads to lots of changes - electric powered transportation, electric powered heating and cooling, electric powered and controlled robotics. All these changes provide opportunities for improvement in the way we live, and that is where The Natural Resources Stewardship Project fits in for me. We can do many things better, such as higher speed ground transportation on elevated rails or in tunnels so there is no animal killing or habitat loss. We can grow food in vats in our cities to avoid cutting down all the trees for farms and to eliminate our cruel animals as food practices. And we dont need garbage dumps any more,
Zero-Waste Ottawa
so the new cities can be floating platforms on the ocean if we want to build them that way. Life can still get much better if we are willing to work for it.
Energy Probe
and
The Natural Resources Stewardship Project
You can supplement these Canadian perspectives with ideas from:
Cool It!
and
The Bottomless Well
Judging from the above, Canadians should be making hard-headed, wealth increasing energy decisions very different from those being proposed by our political leaders.
Energy Probe started all this for me. They have a long history of writing shallow and unhelpful articles bemoaning all the problems associated with nuclear power. I had written them off as just another voice in the anti-nuke choir, singing from the same sheet as all the rest. Then this appeared:
The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud: And those who are too fearful to do so
The author is Lawrence Solomon, Executive Director of Energy Probe. One can argue all night long about the merits of this book, its accuracy, its fairness - but what struck me most was its source. I never expected to see anything like this from a group of environment hard-liners who push the conserve and reduce theme to the limit. I blinked more than once - the lights seem to be coming on over there at Energy Probe.
Following the thread brought me to a couple of interesting discussions:
Global Warming Advocate Rethinks Position
Don’t Deny Yourself
Canadians need to be realistic about the choices we make if we want to avoid really destructive and expensive mistakes. In Canada we can do nothing to affect the global level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are just too small. If we eliminated all our carbon combustion completely it would not even register on the global measurement, yet such a practice could destroy our economy and social structure. The time has come to think of reasonable things. We need clean, reliable, inexpensive, safe, and plentiful negentropy (ie highly ordered energy), and we know how to produce it using our own Canadian nuclear power industry. For me it seems sort of obvious that we have to start building reactors and electricity distribution lines now, but I guess others still need to watch the clock tick for a while before facing up to this reality.
Increasing our use of nuclear power implies more electricity use. This leads to lots of changes - electric powered transportation, electric powered heating and cooling, electric powered and controlled robotics. All these changes provide opportunities for improvement in the way we live, and that is where The Natural Resources Stewardship Project fits in for me. We can do many things better, such as higher speed ground transportation on elevated rails or in tunnels so there is no animal killing or habitat loss. We can grow food in vats in our cities to avoid cutting down all the trees for farms and to eliminate our cruel animals as food practices. And we dont need garbage dumps any more,
Zero-Waste Ottawa
so the new cities can be floating platforms on the ocean if we want to build them that way. Life can still get much better if we are willing to work for it.
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