Wind Turbines

[PIK]

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Edited November 21, 2012 by PIK

[Guest Peeves]

Take out the goverment money and it dies, artificial economy.

Exactly. We subsidize whether we want to or not. I can't help but think that there's some corruption in this Wind Power operation.

[WIP]

Which is why they are looking to start mining astrodes where the rare earth medals come from I am the first place. We have to think long ng term in 5 generations these carbon based fuels will be gone anyway. We need to do the transition at some point I am time. Why not now?

Sure, transition -- but here's the point -- today, about 95% of the extraction and refining for rare earth's is done in China, although the best estimates on rare earths are that two thirds of rare earth metals in the ground are NOT inside China's borders. That fact begs the question WHY has China been left with a virtual monopoly over such a lucrative (especially in the future) market, and the U.S., Europe and everyone else has been content to just buy them from China afterwards? The answer could be that so much digging and refining has to be done to get a significant quantity of rare earths, that the dirty job is left to nations like China -- which seem to have little or no regard for environment or the health of their people. Of course it's not like politicians and CEO's are concerned about our welfare over here! It's just that they have more dismantling to do of environmental regulations, health rules, and labour laws before they can turn us into the kind of disposable slave labour class that China has.

[WIP]

I can't help noticing that even now, neither the green treehugging liberals or the climate change denying rightwingers are dealing with the fact that there are environmental and natural resource barriers to both windmills and nuclear power, if the arguments are just framed around providing today's constantly growing need for baseload power! Something has to be done about the way our society, our economies function first, and talking mumbo jumbo about 'green solutions' will do little or nothing to reduce the still-growing carbon emissions that are being added to the atmosphere and the world's oceans.

[Mighty AC]

I agree. Sustainability has to be built in to everything we do. The way we grow food, build cities, transport people and run our economic system has to change. Electric cars and green grid do not fix the way we are going through our finite resources.

[WIP]

I agree. Sustainability has to be built in to everything we do. The way we grow food, build cities, transport people and run our economic system has to change. Electric cars and green grid do not fix the way we are going through our finite resources.

Yes, and I suspect that one of the mysteries of why nothing got done regarding carbon emissions, compared with previous actions to deal with cloroflurocarbons, comes down to the fact that actually doing something meant making significant changes to the way we live. I can't imagine a bigger one than telling people we're going to have to reorient our society away from car culture to even have a chance at sustainability. In southern Ontario, where I live, most of our steel production and factories built, are making car parts and assembling autos. Changing that voluntarily would require a great deal of cooperation and trust that our present system isn't even designed to consider positive virtues, let alone make steps towards. So far, the changes have been happening in typical gangster capitalist manner - our auto industry is being allowed to collapse (just like Detroit), and former auto workers and unemployed steel workers have to go work for minimum wage jobs at Walmart and Tim Hortons, and go into bankruptcy. And that's if they're lucky! In some cities, even those jobs are hard to come by.

There was a story in Scientific American last month about the sudden and unexpected revival of America's freight rail service, and even a possible revival of passenger rail along some high traveled corridors like the East Coast. As time goes on, higher oil prices mean higher transportation costs for the trucking industry -- added with bankrupt state governments that keep raising tolls on the interstates and other toll roads to try to keep them in condition. Even without planning, there will be a gradual unwinding of a lot, possibly most of what we consider to be the permanent advances of modern life. So, I'll stay active on my computer, and get what I can out of it until the grid goes down. I'm not sure what I am going to do with all of the ebooks I have bought in the last couple of years, if I can't find a place to plug it in! If I had bought paper copies, at least I would have something to read by candlelight after the lights go out