To-Do List

This is by no means a complete list. It mentions a few things which can be done right away, a few things which can be ramped way, way up.

 

1 electric vehicles 

1a electric unicycles 1b electric skateboards 1c electric scooters 1d electric bicycles 1e electric motorcycles 1f electric cars 1g electric trucks 1h electric trains 1i electric ships 1j electric aircraft 

2 green electricity

2a solar power 2b wind power

3 efficiency

3a smart grids 3b efficient HVAC of buildings

4 materials

4a cleaner steel 4b cleaner concrete 4c cleaner asphalt 4d recycling 4e less harmful mining 4f less plastic

 

5 plants

5a afforestation 5b reforestation 5c restoration of wetlands 5d renewable logging 5e climate-friendly agriculture

 

6 animals

6a responsible pet ownership 6b increased levels of vegetarian and vegan diets

Solar In My Neighborhood

I live in an extremely progressive, environmentally-concscious neighborhood, full of Teslas and Bolts and many other EV's, and yet, they still have us screwed pretty bad when it comes to energy. It does not look like this around here:

 

My next-door neighbor has a solar roof, but I can walk east for more than a half-mile before I see one more house with solar panels. I can walk almost as far to the west before I see more solar panels: the branch of Chase bank next to a strip mall there has solar panels covering its entire roof, north, south, east and west. 

I keep meaning to go in there and ask someone about the solar panels. Because we live in one of those areas where there are all sorts of restrictions about what sort of solar set-up you can have, and I had assumed that literally covering your roof with solar panels was illegal in this city.

Maybe this is just an example of businesses tending not to put up with some of the crap that utilities succeed in shoving down homeowners' throats. Or maybe the fact that most of the roofs around here are not yet covered with solar panels, south, north, east and west, is an illustration of people not knowing their rights. I myself don't actually know whether what Chase is doing there is different than what any of us could be doing. And I know more about solar power than most people do.

There's a local group which wants to take our fair city away from the utility and run our power ourselves. I keep meaning to go to one of their meetings. If all of the neighborhoods in this town had roofs like those in the picture above, we could export a lot of electricity, undercut the prices of that utility, get others to join us, and put that utility and their coal-fired plants out of business. 

I'm good at daydreaming. Top-notch.

I keep meaning to look into these Biden-administration solar incentives, to see whether I could actually go solar myself right now, despite my low income. 

I keep meaning to actually do something.

Well, I write one of these posts on green energy now and then. Maybe I've actually encouraged someone somewhere else to actually do something.

Growth of EV Sales

Worldwide, about 6.75 EV's were sold in 2021, which was more than twice the 2020 total of 3.3 million, which itself was a 60% increase over 2019's total of 2 million. In the first quarter of 2022, 2 million units were sold, almost twice the 1.1 million sold in Q1 2021. 

 

No one knows how quickly EV sales will increase in the future, and no one I've seen is predicting that sales will continue to double every year -- but just for fun, just for the moment, let's pretend they will. Double 2022's global total of 6.75 million would be 13.5 million in 2023, 27 million in 2024, 54 million in 2025, 108 million in 2026 and hold it, hold it, because as far as I know, there have never been as many as 108 million motor vehicles sold in any calendar year. If I've got it right, the worldwide record so far was under 80 million, in 2017, and few if any people are predicting as many as 108 by 2026.

I'm sure that a lot of you, including many hardcore EV advocates, are yelling at your screens about now, saying that I'm an idiot and that 100% growth of EV sales every year is impossible. 

Yes, I'm an idiot, you've got no argument from me there. Where we disagree is in the use of this term "impossible." I've long believed that it's an overused term, and that many more things are possible than most of us tend to think most of the time.

The growth of the EV sector over the past couple of years has happened in spite of COVID, in spite of supply chain issues -- and in spite of very, very few EV's having been sold outside of China, Europe and North America. Lots of vehicles were sold in Central and South America, Africa, India. Very, very few EV's. 

About 90% of recent EV sales have been in China and Europe. Why? It's very simple: because laws in China and Europe said that higher percentages of vehicles had to be EV's. Because people decided that EV sales were going to grow.

What's the biggest obstacle to the growth of solar and wind power to run all these EV's, real present-day one plus the imaginary future ones? It's the legal situation again, with the fossil fuel industry and so-called "utilities" hindering the growth of solar and wind, and thus the death of fossil fuels. 

From one perspective it all seems very complicated, and it's true that there are a lot of moving parts here, and that EV sales are just a part of it: exposing the ties between fossil fuels and government, building up solar and wind, smartening up the grid, improving public transportation, encouraging people to walk more and eat less meat, afforestation, re-forestation, rebuilding wetlands, etc etc. Yes, you could say that it's complicated.

From another perspective, though, it's as simple as anything could ever be: do we want to save our own lives? How much do we want it? Do we want it bad enough, or not?

I'm not going to save the world all by myself, one isolated autistic weirdo with a silly blog. How many people are working on these things, how many will join them? People with the brains to make better batteries and smarter grids? People with power, people in positions to pass laws that get more EV's and less ICE vehicles built, laws that speed the growth of solar and wind and kill off fossil fuels, laws which improve education so that everyone is better equipped to improve all of these things? People with the patience and eloquence and intelligence to explain, better than I can, why all of these things are necessary and how important they are?

The Answer is, There is No One Answer

Sometimes when you come across something stupid, the best thing you can do is forget it and move on.

However, sometimes it just keeps gnawing at your brain like a stupid rodent. I suppose that's one of the things blogs are for.

Someone (I'll do him the kindness of not saying who) who seems to think he's extraordinarily intelligent, and has a considerable following who seem to agree, recently made an elaborate online presentation of all of the reasons why evs are not the answer and are not going to solve the climate crisis all by themselves: they are better than ice vehicles, he says, but they still have tires and drive on roads and other very bad things.

 

The thing is, I literally can't think of anyone, offhand, who has claimed that evs, all by themselves, are the answer. It seems to me that almost everyone bright enough to realize that evs actually are cleaner than ice vehicles, also knows that they are not perfect from an ecological standpoint, and also is in favor of addressing the climate crisis in a number of ways: not just with evs, but also with public transportation, solar power, wind power, geothermal, tidal, sustainable agriculture, a sustainable timber industry, afforestation, reforestation, veganism, smarter architecture, cleaner concrete, cleaner steel, cleaner rubber, better science, better education, better politicians, etc, etc, etc.

I say almost everyone, because this guy, after listing all of the reasons why evs aren't the answer,  said that trains, public transportation by rail, ARE the answer.

Maybe he was making a joke and I missed it. I've missed a few jokes in my lifetime. 

And public transportation by rail will be very helpful in decreasing humanity's carbon footprint. Along with with evs and many, many other things. As you very likely already knew. 

Making it questionable whether this blog post accomplished a thing. Except perhaps to warn you against those who believe that there is one single thing which, all by itself, will repair the Earth's climate. 

If there actually are any such people. There probably are at least a few here and there. Possibly even including the train-obsessed jerk who impelled me to write this.

EV's and Politics

Some of the most prominent EV vloggers on YouTube say repeatedly that they want to avoid political statements, that their videos about EV's are unpolitical. One, who calls himself Electric Vehicle Man, which is also the name of his excellent YouTube channel, which has lots of EV road tests and lots of debunking of negative misconceptions about EV's, also says that he is sometimes accused of being an eco warrior, an accusation which he says is inaccurate.

 

Eco warrior? I was unfamiliar with the term before hearing Electric Vehicle Man repeatedly insist that he is not one. I googled what is an eco warrior, and the first definition I saw was "a person actively involved in preventing damage to the environment." Which Electric Vehicle Man certainly is. In fact, when he says I'm not an eco warrior, he usually goes on to say, Yes, I promote electric vehicles, and I choose electricity from my utility which comes from wind and solar, and I do other things to help the environment. So apparently different people define the term differently. Maybe Electric Vehicle Man thinks that you need to actually chain yourself to a tree, or live in a tree for a month or longer, or be very strictly vegan, or even all three, or even more, in order to be accurately called an eco warrior. Maybe he has already precisely defined what he understands the term to mean and why it doesn't apply to him in his opinion. One of the good things about his You Tube channel is the large amount of precise and detailed information he provides.

Electric Vehicle Man and I definitely define the term "politics" differently. As I said, many people who make a living -- or in some cases just a supplementary second income -- promoting electric vehicles on You Tube insist that their advocacy of EV's has nothing to do with politics. How can they say that? They're constantly mentioning how the prices of EV's include government rebates worth thousands of dollars or Euros or British pounds per vehicle, rebates which are much larger in certain places than others. And they know that politicians determine the size of those rebates, and that different political parties want the rebates to get get bigger or smaller. They constantly report on factories being built which will manufacture EV's, and the involvement of governments in making the construction of these factories easier or more difficult.

Electric Vehicle Man frequently mentions that using public transportation is even better for the environment than driving an EV, and that where he lives, in his part of Yorkshire in the UK, there is very little public transportation, and also very little public charging infrastructure for EV's. Oh, and he also mentioned, when he drove an EV up through Scotland for his video channel, that Scotland not only has a lot of public EV charging infrastructure, but also THAT EV CHARGING IS FREE FOR EVERYONE IN SCOTLAND. (Which is almost 100% true: sometimes there's a small parking fee for those Scottish chargers, sometimes not. Other than that -- FREE!!!)

I tend to think that everything is political. But leaving aside this opinion of mine for the moment, it seems particularly obvious to me that the poor state of public transportation in Yorkshire, about which Electric Vehicle Man complains, is a political issue. They even put the word "public" in public transportation to make it even easier to see how it's political. Does Electric Vehicle Man really not understand that if he and his neighbors there in his part of Yorkshire became more involved in political parties and were more active in promoting and criticizing the agendas of political parties, one benefit of that is that they might get much better public transportation? Among many, many other very good things?

Does Electric Vehicle Man really not grasp that? Really? REALLY???

Some say that if you don't at least vote, you have no right to complain about anything the state does. I wouldn't go quite that far, but I do think it's self-contradictory to complain about government while not doing a thing to participate in it. And strange and quite sad.

By the way, I also think it's rather cheesy of Electric Vehicle Man to call himself Electric Vehicle Man while he not only currently owns an ICE vehicle in addition to an EV, but also intends to buy other ICE vehicles in the future. (Perhaps in large part because of the public transportation situation in his area about which he's always complaining, without seeming to DO much about it?) I think he's doing a lot of good by promoting EV's, but I think there are others who deserve that superhero title a lot more than he does, because they're a lot more committed to the cause. For example, the guy who hosts the YouTube vlog News Coulomb. It seems very clear to me that no-one is perfect, but calling yourself Electric Vehicle Man does definitely imply a level of purity. Calling yourself that and not only owning ICE vehicles, but intending to own more ICE vehicles in the future, is misleading at the very best.

Perhaps complaining about such things makes me an eco warrior in Electric Vehicle Man's eyes. And maybe that means that I and everyone like me is completely unbearable to him. Or perhaps it just means that a few things I do annoy him somewhat, without him thinking I'm a horrible person in general. Which would make the two of us about even.

Reasons For Optimism About the Climate

There's no pressing need to convince people that the Earth is round, not flat. There actually are a few people who still believe it's flat, and Lord knows, they're hard to reason with, since they're very stupid -- but their numbers have become so few that they barely matter any more.

Similarly, the general public has become better educated about the climate, and the effect of human activity upon the climate. Soon, there may be no more real need to debate climate change deniers anymore, since we will be able to easily out-vote them. It's becoming more and more unusual for someone to flat-out deny that global warming is happening. People who used to deny it are now saying that, yes, the Earth is getting warmer, but that humans aren't causing it. And people who used to say that are now saying that th dang environmentalists don't know how to fix it and are just making things worse. And people who used to say that have shut up and started buying electricity generated from solar and wind, and even driving electric cars, because it's cheaper. Because of good old fashioned greed. Boy, wouldn't it be ironic if Gordon Gekko was right about greed all along?

I'm not going that far -- but: environmentally-friendly human behavior is becoming more widespread, for a variety of reasons, including greed. What just a few decades ago was called the environmental movement, and was regarded by many as fringe lunacy, is now mainstream, and growing fast, and getting laughed at less and less often.

This video is delightful:



Yes, it focuses on a list of 10 commonly-given reasons for not buying an electric car, soundly debunking all 10, but in the process it gives a lot of information about much more broad topics of green power and green technology. And it's also very witty and fun to watch.

I'm feeling optimistic about the climate today, because there are so many different ways in which human behavior is changing, each one helping the climate: more and more people are buying electric vehicles instead of vehicles with internal-combustion engines. More and more people are ceasing to drive at all: instead, they take the train or the bus or they walk or bike. And if they really, really need a car, there's cabs and Uber and Lyft, and soon there will be robot cars. Yes, robot cars. Yes, soon. Google it if you don't believe me. And most, or, probably, all of those robot cars will be electric, and will get their juice from solar and wind and other green sources.

And the price of electricity from solar and wind and those other green sources is already lower than the price of electricity from coal or gas in many places, and it just keeps getting less expensive as the green technology becomes more large scale and more efficient. And coal and gas and oil and gasoline are not getting cheaper.

And rooftop gardens keep popping up in cities, and forests keep getting planted along the edges of deserts, turning the deserts green.

And more and more people stop using plastic water bottles, and start using re-usable cloth shopping bags.

And paying attention to the behavior of individual corporations and politicians, and shopping and voting accordingly. And so forth and so on. So many different reasons to be optimistic. They add up.

Great Green Walls

First there was the Great Green Wall of China, begun in the late 1970's.



Then several decades later, Africa began its own Green Wall.



And the idea has been repeated in other places as well: plant many trees along the edge of a desert, in order to stop the desert from spreading. In China and in Africa, there are dramatic stories of regions which had been almost uninhabitable, being restored to fertile, sometimes even lush condition. Stories of farmers moving back to regions which they had abandoned.

In addition to curbing the growth of the desert -- the Gobi Desert in the case of China, the Sahara in Africa -- the atmosphere is cleaned, by taking carbon from the air and storing it in trees. Reducing the amount of carbon which is put into the atmosphere, by burning things like oil, coal and gas, is just one half of the solution to global warming. The other half is increasing plant life.

Planting trees in areas where there had been none previously is referred to as afforestation, as opposed to reforestation, replacing forests which had been removed. The Green Walls are just the two largest examples of afforestation currently underway in the world; smaller projects have been started all over the world.

As far as just exactly how large the Green Walls in China and Africa are -- I've found it very hard to find any precise statistics. For example, I can't tell you for certain whether the number of trees planted so far in China's Great Green Wall is in the millions, or the billions. And I would love to be able to tell you in great detail just what sort of changes of temperature, precipitation and so forth have occurred in the areas covered by the Green Walls, but I haven't been able to find that data either.

Also, there is some controversy over just how helpful afforestation is for the climate overall, and about just exactly what are the best methods for restoring arid regions. So, as always: education is crucial. In this case, education about all the positive and negative effects of afforestation, and about all the other methods to combat the spread of deserts. All I can tell you for sure is that I surely hope that afforestation is at least close to as effective as its most enthusiastic advocates claim.

Are We Technologically Prepared For 100% Renewables Right Now?

For any given challenge facing a society, there seem typically to be at least two, diametrically opposed sorts of responses: 1) This challenge can't be overcome; or 2) How exactly will we overcome this challenge? Response type 1 has said: We can't cross this river, we can't cure this disease, we can't fly through the air, etc, etc, and response type 2 has enabled progress to occur.

Of course, there can be dishonest reasons for claiming that something is impossible. Perhaps some slave owners didn't really believe that it was impossible for society to exist without slavery, but claimed that it was impossible, because they were making lots of money as slave holders, and didn't want to face the economic competition which would come along with the abolition of slavery. Perhaps some steamship operators knew as well as anyone that airplanes were technologically feasible, but didn't want the economic competition of airlines.

Today, response type 1 says that we can't generate all of the electricity we need by means of renewable energy, that we will have to use natural gas and nuclear power as well, because we can't make all of the batteries we would need in order to store as much electricity as we would have to in order to make 100% renewable energy work. Do I really even need to mention that some people might intentionally exaggerate the technical challenges associated with 100% renewables because they're financially invested in petrochemicals and nuclear and don't want the competition from renewables, or was that already perfectly obvious to all of you?

Response type 2 is busy building better batteries, as well as ways to store energy made by renewable means in other forms than electricity, which can be converted into electricity when needed. Batteries and other energy-storage technologies are rapidly improving, and the potential for further improvement appears to be vast.

In the case of this challenge, there is also a response type 3, which says: we don't need any breakthroughs in energy-storage technology, the technology we have right now can enable us to rely 100% on renewable sources of power. Breakthroughs in energy-storage technology will be nice, of course, and give us still greater flexibility and a still more reliable grid, but renewables plus today's energy-storage technology can already add up to a more reliable grid than the one we have today, still powered mostly by oil, gas, coal and nukes. The lovably geeky Amory Lovins lays out a type 3 scenario in under 5 minutes in this TED talk video:



There are all sorts of people today purporting to be experts in energy technology, contradicting what other supposed experts are saying. I would encourage you to consider conflicting assertions, and think for yourself.

I'm much more inclined to believe the believers in 100% renewables than the nay-sayers, because the nay-sayers have already been proven dead wrong over and over, as renewable energy grows and grows and continues to actually function really well. I agree with those who say that the major obstacle to renewable energy is corrupt politics propping up old, highly-polluting means of generating energy which, in a truly unfettered free market, would no longer be able to compete.

Dream Log: Romance and Green Energy

Last night I dreamed I was at a meeting of people concerned about global warming, discussing ways to advocate and implement green energy. People at the meeting were discussing the way that advocates for fossil fuels exaggerate the problems involved in switching to green energy; for example, claiming that solar generation of electricity requires 1000 times more land area than fossil fuels -- an extreme example of fossil-fuel propaganda, to be sure. I was there because I wanted to get some reliable figures about such things. In the dream I was -- and now, waking, I am -- under the impression that solar can generate electricity while using less land than fossil fuels. But I was not -- and still am not -- completely sure who has the most reliable figures, and who is making the most sense.

At the meeting, a lot of John Lennon recordings were been played, from the late 60's and the early 70's, recordings he made with the Beatles and solo, from "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Cept For Me and My Monkey)" and "Glass Onion" to "#9 Dream." In the dream the music was key to the education about global warming and propaganda.

I met a woman at the meeting and we soon became friendly. After the meeting broke up, late in the evening, she and I went for a walk. We began to hug and kiss. Walking along, she said that she was tired. I picked her and carried her for a while, which made her laugh.

She was sad and I didn't know what I could do about it. I tried to be very nice.

We walked through an office building. We were in an atrium several stories above the ground floor. The ground floor was covered in tiles in the shapes and colors of pictures by Matisse. It wasn't clear to me whether Matisse himself had actually made the tiles. I exclaimed about how beautiful the tiles were, she did not reply, and immediately, I was afraid that she disliked Matisse, perhaps more for political than aesthetic reasons.

She smoked a lot. She stepped back outside of the building to have another cigarette. I haven't smoked in 20 years, and I didn't feel good about starting again, but I wanted to be with her, and I find that it's hard to be a couple when one person smokes and the other doesn't, and also I had been smelling so much of her smoke since before the meeting had broken up that I felt I was getting hooked again. So I asked for a drag on her cigarette. I was all-in, even if it meant I had to smoke to be with her.

But then, after I took a puff, she had disappeared when I was looking in another direction. I looked all over and couldn't find her. I didn't have her phone number or address.

Then I woke up.

mee r munkee. mee luv yu. pleez yuze grean ennurjee

mee r munkee. mee luv yu.

mee want 2 liv! greta tunburg also want 2 liv! thairfor, pleez yuze grean ennurjee.

iff mee had 30 bilyun dahlurz, mee kud giv solar rufs 2 milyuns uv howzes an uhthr bildingz.

an then mee kud chalunj uhthur bilyunarez: top that, bil gaitz an warruhn bufut an jef bayzoz and elon musk an yu uhthur bilyunarez! top that, with solar, or win, or tiduhl, or jeeohthermuhl, or uhthur grean stuf! yu want tu bee greanuhst bilyunare uv all time? pruv it! giv away mor kul grean stuf than i jest did! mee luv yu, bilyunarez.

thatts wot mee wud say iff mee had 30 bilyun dahlurz and gaiv uhway milyuns of solar rufs.

speshl mesuhj 2 th coke bruhthurz: stop. jest stop. leev that cole in th grown, an maik grean enurjee insted. mee luv yu, coke bruhthurz. but sumtime it hard 2 luv yu beecuz uhv th cole. not az hard az it iz 2 luv donal chump. but hard sumtimz. so jest stop. thnk yu verr mutch. mee luv yu. mee want 2 liv.

Arnold And Francis

What do a former Republican Governor of California and the Pope have in common?

They're both intensely interested in something Trump says doesn't exist: global warming. They're both promoting alternative energy as energetically as they can.

Of course you can't sell sunshine and wind with big profits the way you can do with petrochemicals. Who cares if it's killing us all, with oil, with Trump, and Putin, there's money to be made!

But -- is there, really? Are the Dakota and Keystone pipelines going to be able to pay for themselves if demand for petrochemicals is drying up, because everybody is switching to solar and wind and tidal and geothermal and biodiesel and vegetable oil and switchgrass and corn ethanol and hydroelectric and nuclear? Not every item on that list is popular with environmentalists, but every one of them isn't petroleum. And with the possible exception of hydroelectric, nuclear and corn ethanol (the only ones on the list which aren't popular with environmentalists), each one is growing fast.

How does this leave us with expanding demand for oil such as that there is any economic reason for Trump's energy policies even if we leave "secondary" considerations such as the health and survival of the human species completely out of the equation?

The oil companies lied to us for so long about the effects of their products. I think they may be lying to us now about the long-term demand for their products. Losers. Sad.

Is Alternative Energy The Cause Of The Drop In Oil Prices?

Many people have made doom-and-gloom predictions about worldwide chaos caused by the end of Big Oil, because the world simply runs out of oil -- you've heard it: gasoline casting $40 a gallon etc -- but what if we're headed very soon for the end of Big Oil, not because the supply is drying up, but because the demand is disappearing?

Is demand for oil going to drop nearly to the point of disappearing? (It could still be used for lubrication and plastic if we no longer use it for fuel. Then again, consumption of plastic might drastically drop...)

It might seem as if it would be easy to find the answer to that -- and that the answer would be yes, since wind, solar and other non-suicidal ways of generating energy are growing fast, and hybrid and all-electric vehicles are replacing all-petrochemical ones not just on the roads, but in the cases of ships and trains as well -- but we are told by alleged experts that the reasons for the drop in oil prices are murky and complex.

Also, the most-asked question concerning the relationship between alternative and petrochemical energy -- most-often asked in the mainstream media, anyway -- seems to be, not something like: How soon will we be able to stop killing ourselves with oil use? but the somewhat shorter-term question: will lower oil prices drive alternative energy out of the market? Nevermind whether humanity will be gone in 30 years -- can I make a killing 6 months from now by shorting alternative?

I know that suggesting that the petrochemical industry is controlling and distorting the public discourse about energy trends makes me sound paranoid to some. But research predictions about such trends for yourself, see if I'm onto something when I suggest that there's an awful lot of bullshit out there. Predictions not fitting facts.

Imagination

There are transparent solar cells now. I don't know how expensive they are now or how far they are from the market, but this could mean, among many other things, smartphones that charge themselves, one skyscraper being able to power a medium-sized city...

Fossil fuels are dinosaurs in more ways than one. Engineers keep coming up with more and more reasons to limit petroleum use to lubrication and plastic. If that. The time when more than all the energy we need will be simple and cheap to get is rushing toward us.

The problem, of course, is that oil companies know all of this, and are Standing. In. The. Way. Of. Progress. With the help of their bought-and-paid-for Republican Party. Oh, won't it be great if this, these days right now, if this is it for the Republican Party, if they're about to explode under the weight of their own stupidity and wretchedness?

Go ahead and dream about things like that. Because dreaming, daydreaming, wondering, speculating, figuring, calculating -- that's how we got things like solar cells, and now transparent solar cells. That's how we got from living in trees to living in houses and apartments (and back to living in trees in a few cases). Engineering involves nuts and bolts and wires and clips and chips and motherboards, but it also involves a certain amount of sitting around and allowing the mind to go to new places. Without the sitting around and just imagining things, the hardware wouldn't exist.

I'm old enough to remember the time before pocket calculators ran on light. Maybe some of you are too young to know what a pocket calculator is. If you need a calculator, it's right there on your phone. In the 1980's, things were sold which are about as big as smart phones, and all they were were calculators. There still are a few of them for sale in dollar discounts stores and places like Walgreen's, and some with a lot of functions for advanced math are sold at places like Office Max. Starting in the 1980's they would run just on the light in a room with the lights on. In the 1970's there had been calculators called solar-powered calculators, because you might have to have them outside on a sunny day in order too get them charged up, the lights inside generally weren't strong enough. Before that, calculator ran on batteries like the ones that power TV remotes today. But as early as 1970, they didn't run on batteries, you had to plug them into a wall outlet and keep them plugged in, so they weren't very portable, and they were too big to fit inside anybody's pocket, they were more like the size of toasters, and heavier than toasters. And all they could do was add, subtract, multiply and divide, and only up to 8-digit numbers. And they were very expensive.

The prices plummeted through the decades as the calculators got smaller and smaller and could do more and more and required less and less power, and today you can get some pretty fancy ones for under $10. But still, even back in 1970, they were amazing. Back in 1970 most people didn't have any machines to help them with math, other than the occasional slide rule or abacus (I never figured out how to use a slide rule), and an 8-digit calculator smaller than a washing machine, with a glowing red LED display, was an amazing thing. And the engineers who were talking about how calculators were going to get much more powerful, and much smaller, and run on much less electricity, they sounded exciting. But I also wondered, at age 9 in 1970, whether they knew what they were talking about, or if they were just pleasantly optimistic nuts.

46 years later, computers owned by hundreds of millions or billions of people outstrip the wildest predictions of most of those excited engineers back in 1970, excited by computers that fit on desktops and could add, subtract, multiply and divide up to 8 digits and only cost a few thousand dollars.

It's time to dream a way out of killing ourselves with all that dinosaur bullshit. Time to dream about the technology and also about the politics of getting past the oil companies and their hired politicians. We're going to need to do both.

Ecological Thinking Must REPLACE Economics

I've been reading Andre Gorz yesterday and today, not for the first time, and suddenly I had this epiphany: ecological thinking must replace economics. Gorz was brilliant at pointing out the ways in which some planning of economies was necessary, how deregulation led to chaos and failure, how microelectronics were shrinking the demand for labor -- in the 1980's he was ahead of where a lot of people are now on all of these issues, even after the huge lesson of 2007-2008.

I don't know whether Gorz himself would have said, simply and without qualification, that ecology must replace economics. Maybe he'd react by saying, "Duh! That's what I was saying, yes, and you read how much of my stuff before you got it?!" or maybe he wouldn't get it.

Plenty of people see that unrestrained, unregulated capitalism is unsustainable for ecological reasons alone, besides other reasons. Only hardcore libertarians are still too stupid to see that. But people keep tinkering with capitalism.

Enough with the tinkering. Capitalism itself is the problem. What do we need? Growth, competition? No, that's the stuff that's killing us. We need food, shelter, water, air, leisure, freedom, pleasure, love. Those are all ecological things. Money doesn't have to enter into it. Money is just something we've overlain onto what is actually essential.

Caring about each other, is that economical? No. It's ecological.

Am I ahead of the curve here? Or am I behind the curve to think that there might be anything at all new or original about this little mental breakthrough I've just had?

How To Get People To Stop Paying Attention To You And Shun You

The only thing wrong with that meme is that other vegans have been telling him the same thing and he always assumes they must be non-vegans because how could a vegan find fault with him? Him?!

JAMES: No-one who is not a vegan can call himself an environmentalist. (ACTUAL QUOTE!)

Class, what is going to be the effect of James' statement? Is it

A) More people will become vegans;

or

B) Fewer people will call themselves environmentalists?

That's right, it's

C) Fewer people will listen to James.

Which is a shame, because James was providing a lot of fascinating information about the food industry. And for all I know, James' information about the food industry may have been 100% correct. But James was wrong in his assumption about who is and isn't allowed to call him- or herself an environmentalist. And he's reinforcing the stereotype about vegans being judgmental douchebags.

I'm sure that if I dug through James' life I could find something which is less than environmentally-friendly. Instead, since I only have one life and I'm trying to use it efficiently, I'm blowing James off and moving on. It's not enough to be right in politics, and everything is political.

The Climate Catastrophe Is No Secret, Even Though Many People Act As If They've Never Heard Of It

Most people know that global warming is already starting to kill us off, and that it's getting much worse very quickly. Even though they act as if they don't know.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I think that the word "secrets" is overused today on TV and the Internet and in print, in shows and writings on historical topics. A show with the title "secrets of the Sphinx," for example, may possibly contain some information which was unknown to the producers before work on the episode began, but a graduate student specializing in the early history of Egypt quite likely already knew every fact contained in the show, and besides that would be able to identify every inaccuracy presented by the show as a fact. And those grad students and their colleagues and instructors aren't keeping anything secret: on the contrary, it's the job of historians to spread their historical knowledge to the utmost of their ability.

The state of the Earth's climate is no secret, although if you were to judge strictly from the way people continue to use SUV's, air conditioners, swimming pools and so forth, you might think that it was.

In the 1840's the German Historian Leopold von Ranke wrote:

"Nicht Blindheit ist es, nicht Unwissenheit, was die Menschen und Staaten verdirbt. Nicht lange bleibt ihnen verborgen, wohin die eingeschlagene Bahn sie führen wird. Aber es ist in ihnen ein Trieb, von ihrer Natur begünstigt, von der Gewohnheit verstärkt, dem sie nicht widerstehen, der sie weiter vorwärts reißt, solange sie noch einen Rest von Kraft haben. Göttliche ist der, welcher sich selbst bezwingt. Die meisten sehen ihren Ruin vor Augen, aber sie gehen hinein."

("It isn't blindness or ignorance which ruins people and states. Where the path they're on is leading doesn't remain hidden from them for long. But there is a drive within them, favored by their nature and strengthened by habit, that pulls them forward as long as there is any strength left in them. He who really controls himself is like a god among men. Most people see their ruin before their eyes, but they march right into it.")

Joachim C Fest put that quote by Ranke at the beginning of his biography of Hitler, which has sold millions of copies since its publication in 1973. It's an answer to those Germans who were adults between 1933 and 1945, when the Nazis were in power, and claimed that they didn't notice their friends and neighbors who were Jewish or Leftist or modern artists or gypsies or homosexuals or critics of the regime being attacked by storm troopers in broad daylight or arrested by the Gestapo at night, who claimed that they didn't know that the Nazi regime was headed straight toward disaster. They knew. Of course they knew.

People know that Earth's climate is in very bad shape and getting much worse very quickly, and they know that petrochemical fuels and waste of water and clear-cutting forests are making things worse. It's no secret whatsoever. The only question is how bad things will get before most people act upon what they know.

Only Republicans Can See The Problems With Solar Energy, The Rest Of Us Are Blind To Them

In my last post I mentioned Forbes sadly telling its readers that this solar craze is based on bad math and gummit handouts. Since then, researching the topic, the only additional naysayers I've found are the Wall Street Journal, Howard C Hayden, author of The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World, and the Heartland Institute, a wonderful buncha guys who, like Hayden, whom they love, say that humans aren't affecting the climate, and have advocated for Big Tobacco and fracking. Recently they've decided they're not going to disclose their sources of funding anymore, and they disrupted the Pope's Council on Climate Change... they're just a bunch of peaches, I tell ya!

Only Republicans can see what a huge disaster and waste solar energy is. Everyone else, each and every one of us, has been duped. And I don't believe that the Amazon customer reviewers who gave Hayden's book 5-stars even though they're hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years -- are actually hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years. Cry wolf often enough and people can start to tell that you're lying sacks of crap.

The bullshit they make up: that electric cars, sadly, aren't actually environmentally friendly because the lithium-ion batteries cause... some sort of huge ecological disaster. Ask a Republican about it. (No-one else has has heard of this problem, because we're all blind, blind, yaaaarggghh!) That smoking hasn't ever made anybody sick. And second-hand smoke much, much less than that! That electric windmills are killing vast quantities of birds who apparently think the windmills are their mothers. (Or something. Again, you'll have to ask a Republican. They're the only ones alert to this environmental danger.) That fracking is safe, that natural gas is clean and that nuclear power is ultra-safe. (I don't know how Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima don't directly contradict that last point, but that's okay: just ask a Republican!)

That solar energy will either make a pitifully tiny amount of electricity, or so much electricity that it will overload and blow up all the grids -- cause, it's not as if an electrical generator could ever be turned off, or anything like that.

Republicans were glad when Angela Merkel of the conservative CDU became Chancellor of Germany in 2005. But I bet that since 2005 meetings between Merkel and Republicans have occasionally been tense, because Merkel has spearheaded a massive increase of government-subsidized solar energy in Germany, which now has more overall installed photovoltaic capacity than any other country on Earth and generates more than 30% of all of its electricity from renewable sources. Somehow those well-meaning, abysmally-ignorant environmentalists got to Merkel. It's only a matter of time now before Germany explodes. (Or something. Once again, you're going to have to ask a Republican, because the horrible dangers inherent in these developments in Germany are way over everybody else's heads.)

Union Of Concerned Scientists Denounces Lies By Petrochemical Industry

If I'm a raving paranoid conspiracy theorist when it comes to the petrochemical industry interfering with the development of alternative energy, then so are the members of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The UCS have released a collection of incriminating documents, The Climate Deception Dossiers. In the UCS' words:

"The documents clearly show that:

"Fossil fuel companies have intentionally spread climate disinformation for decades.

"Fossil fuel company leaders knew that their products were harmful to people and the planet but still chose to actively deceive the public and deny this harm.

"The campaign of deception continues today."

The UCS say that "at a minimum," these companies should be held "accountable for their actions and responsible for the harm they have caused" :

* Shell

* Conoco Phillips

* Peabody

* British Petroleum

* ExxonMobil

* Chevron

The UCS calls on these companies to stop lying about climate change, and to pay for the damage they have caused. (We did it to the tobaccos companies, we can do it to the oil companies too.) (But not if we keep electing Republicans, because these are the people the Republicans work for.) They provide links to documents backing up their charges that these companies have known about climate change for decades and have deliberately and systematically spread disinformation and interfered with the development of alternative energy.

UCS, you magnificent bastards, I salute you! UCS homepage.

Revised Fuel Cost Estimate For Plug-In Electric Vehicles

In in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post, I incorrectly stated that the fuel costs for a plug-in electric vehicle are about half those of a hybrid vehicle of comparable size and performance, and that that hybrid uses about half as much fuel as a comparable conventional vehicle.

Well, loyal Wring Monkey readers, I'm sorry. I should've done a little more research before shooting my mouth off with such sensationalistic figures, because the truth is that for many drivers of electric vehicles, their fuel cost is not 50% of a hybrid and 25% of a conventional vehicle -- but 0% of anything. Nada. Zip. The null set. Just exactly squat.

And I'm not talking about the example I gave in the earlier post about someone living in a zero-energy house which generated enough energy for the car as well. I'm talking about people who drive electric vehicles and are having all of the electricity for those vehicles given to them. For example, anybody who owns a Tesla and is in driving distance of one of these dots:

Those are Tesla recharging stations. Any Tesla can be recharged at one of those stations any time for free. There are more of those stations per square miles in the US than in other parts of the world, but Tesla is working on that. They're also helping people convert their houses into ones which will generate all the electricity from solar, plus enough left over for the car. (What is this Elon Musk guy trying to prove, anyway? And can we all agree that he's proving it?)

In addition, many employers are now providing free recharges to their employees who drive plug-ins. This Department of Energy website has some info about that. Not everybody can afford a Tesla, but if you shop around for a good sale or lease bargain on, say, a Nissan Leaf, and factor in a fuel cost of Squat annually, it no longer seems like you need to be Donald Trump or Elon Musk to get in on this.

Solar Settlement

The more I find out about sustainable energy, the more I wonder why it hasn't already become the dominant model, and the harder it is for me to believe that the petrochemical industry isn't actively blocking the flow of information. Which makes me officially a crazy conspiracy theorist, according to some people. Who no doubt work for the petrochemical industry, probably through lobbyists and shell companies and whatnot.

On the one hand we've got God damn fracking going on all over the world. On the other hand there are things like Solar Settlement, a housing development of 59 homes built in Freiburg, Germany, between 2000 and 2005, all fully occupied since then, selling an average of $5600 worth of electricity per home per year to the grid since then.



But of course this is in the extremely sunny location of Freiburg. You couldn't expect to re-produce such results elsewhere. Of course I'm joking, Freiburg is in freakin Germany and it gets an average of less than 5 hours of sunlight year-round. Imagine a setup like this in Phoenix.

This development was finished 10 years ago. What exactly is the hold-up? Why aren't newer and improved versions of this everywhere, why doesn't the world already have much more electricity than it knows what to do with after having shut down every single coal-, oil- and gas-burning and nuclear power plant in the world? What exactly are we waiting for? If the very fact that big oil is still big doesn't make you angry -- what's wrong with you?