Comments on: The only question on renewables is when

By: Milan

Milan — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:57:50 +0000

Kerrie,

Just be happy you didn’t see their larvae.

By: Milan

Milan — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:56:24 +0000

Call it ‘perpetual leapfrogging.’

Admittedly, it is a logical possibility.

That said, genuinely new forms of non-renewable energy don’t seem to emerge often. Coal, oil, and gas have been understood as basic fuels since ancient times.

Arguably, the only new form of non-renewable energy for thousands of years has been nuclear fission.

By: Kerrie

Kerrie — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:15:14 +0000

I think I saw the same bug outside my bathroom yesterday.

By: Anon

Anon — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:47:47 +0000

There is one other logical possibility:

1) There are a great many non-renewable sources of energy which we haven’t discovered yet.

2) We discover and use them sequentially.

3) Something happens that would have wiped out renewables too: comet or meteor impact, death of the sun, heat death, etc.

Call it ‘perpetual leapfrogging.’

By: Milan

Milan — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:22:41 +0000

‘Unsustainable’ really is that. The question is which sustainable equilibrium we will reach: a few thousand miserable humans living off sustainable plant and animal matter growing near their scattered bands, or billions of humans approximating our current global arrangement, using the sun and wind and heat of the Earth for energy.

By: t

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:05:28 +0000

“Striking the right balance requires good engineering, good policy-making, and the vision to build a better world.”

Sometimes I wonder how this kind of thinking differentiates itself from the utopian communistic vision that the revolution is “inevitable”. The Frankfurt school has already pretty convincingly argued that even if the revolution was in a sense destined, the sense of its inevitability will hold it off indefinitely.