Interesting tidbit from Bill Gates. Link to video.
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Here's what's really eye opening, your Iphone has more computing power in it than the computers that took man to the moon. Actually, it's your flip phone. You are really stupid to not use cheap energy forms. Gates is a billionaire, he can afford expensive forms of energy. The public, not as easy. You cannot create demand for a more expensive product when cheaper forms are there. An MIT engineer explained that why cut your nose off in spite of your face. When you run out of carbon based energy, science will figure out how to use other forms of energy and make it cost effective. This is what's wrong with our energy policy. Use all of it but don't make the cheap forms more expensive on the fake belief that there's climate change.
If people are paying the true cost then I agree that it's stupid to not use the cheap energy. In addition to climate change there is the issue that our defense budget is probably hundreds of billions more per year than it would be if we didn't have to make sure the oil keeps flowing. That's a hidden subsidy and I bet there are other hidden subsidies too.
In the same place I saw that Gates thing I also saw another thing that said a refrigerator uses more power than the typical person in Ethiopia...or Ghana...or several other countries. Just the refrigerator!
Yes, that is eye opening. Let the market decide what is needed, what you will produce and what you pay for it. When anything gets out of line, go back to the market. We become very inefficient when the governments attempt to satisfy demand or supply.
I've been saying for several years now that I wish they'd stop talking about climate change and discuss the hundred other reasons why alternative energy is a good idea. It may not make sense everywhere, but in some places it will make perfect sense.
There are only 3 rivers in the US that aren't dammed. There is talk every couple/few years of adding the turbines to Tygart Dam to make it a hydroelectric plant. When it was designed/built, it was done so that it could be retrofitted to produce power. (I don't know why it wasn't done initially) It turns out that the winter water level is too low to created the force needed to turn the turbines. It would work just fine all of the other times.
Anyway, I can't believe that there aren't a number of other dams in the US that could be retrofitted as well. It was going to be a couple billion or so to do Tygart Dam .... or roughly about a week's worth of the Iraq/Afghanistan war budget. If that.
But, the argument over climate change obfuscates all of the other reasons why it would be a good idea to look at things like that.
As a man of science or evidence based results, in the 70's the cry was we were going to freeze over, then burn up, now it's just climate change because there's not enough evidence to support warming and that it's bad for us. More people die fromt he cold than warmth. I bleive in a cleaner planet but not on some false premise of climate change. The one analogy I always bring up is that we have maybe 150 years of accurate temps in the US. We may have 100 years in other countries. The US is 3-5 billion years old. 150 years to 3-5 billion is equal to a grain of sand on a beach. There's no way you can tell if that beach is eroding or building. Twenty thousand years ago, Chicago was under a mile of ice, not that would be a bad thing right now, but warming isn't naturally bad. Use your energy wisely but cap and trade, putting miners out of work artificially is stupid.
What is the average annual power consumption of someone in Ethiopia or Ghana or any of those several other countries? If you are talking about 3rd world countries where the majority of people don't consume any electricity, why would this be shocking? This is the sort of statistic that gets statisticians in trouble.
There are plenty of poor people in the states that don't have computers, $100 sneakers, etc. You live a very sheltered life.
I volunteer for an organization that supplies solar power to some of those countries. And LED light boxes that can be attached to solar panels to be charged so they have light at night. 10's of thousands die every year of things related to burning oil lamps for light.
Yes, I'm sure there are but how many do you actually know? When I took Medicaid, they all had the latest luxuries out there. You live a life devoid of how many people have gamed our welfare system.
I'm on the side that warming is an actual problem ... but regardless of that ... the things that are being proposed to counter anthropomorphic global warming are things that would be good to do for any number of other reasons. So, I'd rather see us talking about those reasons and leave warming out of it.
Why would solar power be economical over there ? They have no way to pay for it? Much less repair it if it goes down? Clean water and vaccines and mosquito spray would seem to be more important?
You may or may not have a distorted view on whether or not those people are gaming the system or if they qualify for Medicaid for some other reason. It won't be too long before I'll have to start dialysis and get on a transplant list, and when that happens I'll qualify for Medicaid, but I have any number of nice things. Not because I gamed the system, but because I worked and earned before Medicaid was even an option. So, I would walk into your office and use Medicaid in $150 Rockports after parking my Mercedes.
We could argue that point all day long but not polluting should be a goal, not mandated by govt, unless it's on a large scale. The US has made great strides in lowering pollution but putting people out of work over questionable science isn't what I want. Until China and India get on board, we are whistling in the smog![cheers]
I hope you know that I was talking about a lot of things that do go on and I would never be caught in Rockports. I wear Pete Millar!
Here's the graph (I hope is shows up...I can't see it right now). Poor countries are still poor but less poor than they used to be.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcQfVk5XIAANiEP.jpg:large
Because they have no infrastructure to distribute power at all. It's easier to install a couple solar panels on the roof than it is to set up an entire electrical grid. We will take somebody and train them on how to do repairs if necessary. The systems don't really need any maintenance after initial setup.
They recently took a bunch of lights to a village in the DR. In order to qualify to get the lights, they had to get together and contribute so many man hours of community service in their village. They all got together and made roads and built a school and everything. Then they actually had to be shown how to use the switch on the light because many had never even seen a switch.
I can get several thousand Ethiopians in my refrigerator. They don't take up much room freeze dried.[laughing]Here's the graph (I hope is shows up...I can't see it right now). Poor countries are still poor but less poor than they used to be.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcQfVk5XIAANiEP.jpg:large
I agree. How about we just work on not polluting because it's just a good idea to not pollute? That should be the only argument we need.
We can go to many places in the US and find all sorts of poverty. A lot chose to live that way. We can go into the inner city and find a lot of people on govt assistance that have pretty nice stuff compared to the poor of other countries. That's all I was saying. Our poor, for the most part, have access to decent things.
When I was growing up on the Tug River, you couldn't see the bottom. Now, after the coal has gone, the river is cleaner and you can see the bottom. There's bass in it too. We can do it and I think, that's what we see in most the US. Cleaner Rivers and air. Except the air in LA!
I've read about some parts of Africa where they went from never having had a phone to cell phones. They skipped right over landlines, which take a lot of infrastructure. They're trying to figure out ways of doing the same with sanitation, i.e., getting them good sanitation without having to lay a jillion water pipes like we have here. Bill Gates' famous poop-to-water machine is up and running in Senegal, although I don't know how smoothly it's going.
I see the graph, but, all due respect, I think you failed to see my point. What might shed a little light (no pun intended) on these statistics would be a statistic about the percentage of the population with any access to any electrical grid. If 10% of the population has access, and the average consumption is 1/10 of a refrigerator's annual usage, that tells one story. If that percentage drops to 1%, now we are talking about similar usage by people with access, just limited access by people.Here's the graph (I hope is shows up...I can't see it right now). Poor countries are still poor but less poor than they used to be.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcQfVk5XIAANiEP.jpg:large
Um, isn't that what he's doing with the last decades of his life? Do you know who Bill Gates is? And why do you think he's a liberal? I'm pretty sure that he's in favor of a free market economy considering he became a billionaire from it.
You must be joking..... I guess your liberal friends have not made you aware that the big push now is to UNDAM rivers.
Greed is too strong therefore pollution laws and regulations were enacted. We were once like China is now regarding pollution.
I don't have a side in which I always agree or always disagree. To me, it makes sense. Whatever environmental impact there is from damming a river has already been done. You still have to get power lines in and out, but that's minimal compared to everything else. It is expensive, but then you have power for as long as water flows.