09-08-2022, 02:28 PM
(09-08-2022, 09:21 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:(09-04-2022, 10:04 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(08-30-2022, 10:06 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The reason Germany is using more coal, is because of Putin. This is a temporary condition, at least if Germany and the EU and the USA continue to support Ukraine and turn back the monster invader. It has to be done. Russia has cut off the gas supply on which Germany was too dependent. That was the mistake. But Germany is now ramping up renewables development too. It has a huge new wind farm being built in the Baltic. Maybe Germany will delay closing nuclear plants, but it doesn't seem to have uranium supplies right now to do that. France I believe is going back to more nuclear right now. Cutting off Russian gas needed to be done anyway as part of the sanctions regime. This gas shutoff was not a deliberate result of cutting it off in order to move away from fossil fuels. It happened because Germany is stepping up and doing its part to turn back the barbarian invader. It HAS to be done! And by the way, the Russians need to be forced to produce less gas anyway.
There will be events caused by the historical model of the Great Man (or the pretender to such a title, at worst Hitler) who believes that he can force events to go his way. Putin thinks himself a Great Man, believing that he can piece again together the old Soviet Union or the Russian Empire with brute force. His sort tells the rest of the world to obey him and serve his ends or endure great tragedy.
Putin reminds me in some way of Mussolini and of great agitprop banners calling for the Italians to restore the glory of the Roman Empire. Mussolini led something much less than a Great Power, and the reality that allowed the Romans to establish an empire that extended from Lisbon to Kuwait and from Syene (now Aswan) to modern Holland does not exist today. The Romans could hijack Hellenic civilization due to its divisions and disrupt the formation of any great Celtic power, and they were ahead of the time in developing sea power to take over the Mediterranean basin. There was little nostalgia for a restoration of Roman rule in the Levant or Britain, and Mussolini has been mocked as the "Sawdust Caesar". Well, there is little nostalgia for the restoration of any imitation of the Soviet Union or the Romanov dynasty.
That the Russians had trading posts in northern California does not mean that they have any reasonable chance of taking over California.
Quote:This goes along with your point. Transition is not an overnight project, and it takes time to build the alternatives. Catastrophes like the invasion of a democratic country by a rapacious tyrannical neighbor happen, and have to be handled. Droughts, themselves caused by climate change and fossil fuel use, can cut off hydro energy we already had too, like is happening in CA. So CA may delay closing a nuclear plant and restart some gas generators for a while. But if we were as dedicated to this energy transition as we are to complaining about high gas prices and blaming Biden for it, and even blaming inflation on him because of the bipartisan money spent to help people through the pandemic shutdowns, then we could get it done much faster than we are doing it.
The arrow of time leads to the ultimate ruin of all that we cherish. A couple hundred million years from now the Earth will be too hot for mammalian and avian life, and of course the astronomical prospect of the sun expanding into a Red Giant and destroying all life on Earth if not the Earth itself is an inevitable, if unsettling prospect. Not many of us live to age 100, as our bodies are not programmed for that. Indeed cells that lose the program to die on schedule typically become cancers. Even business entities have their life cycles.
Global warming pushes our ultimate ruin as a species. I expect that some other species (pigs? Orwell was apparently no farmer, but he figured out what pigs would do if we were not around -- or at least asked farmers who told them that they fear their pigs more than any other animals on the farm and recognize what savage animals dogs would be except for us -- just recall his fable Animal Farm) will have time to overwhelm the world's environments and wreck what ecology remains or recovers after us.
We need Zero Population Growth, and we need also to replace the materialistic model of conspicuous consumption with experience-based lives (even if only simulations of the delights of travel). With global warming it is but a matter of time before many of us recognize how necessary winter is for our agriculture. (Did you see the graphic that I had on how the climates of Michigan and Illinois would be displaced? Winters get milder, but summers become brutal).
Quote:And The West promised to actually help developing countries deal with the climate crisis, which poor countries suffer the most from and did the least to cause, but have not fulfilled this commitment. We in the West need to be more than just be an example and to preach. We need to fulfill our promises and get a Marshall Plan-like effort going to provide the world with renewable clean energy, and we need to give them aid when floods and heat waves and droughts wipe them out, since The West caused this problem for them in the first place.
https://youtu.be/HvD0TgE34HA?t=1800
Donald Trump betrayed that promise, but remember that he is not without his supporters on that. Countries emerging from extreme poverty need to ensure that the 'car culture' never emerges, probably with heavy taxes, because the car culture is unsustainable. We in the economically-suicidal parts of the advanced industrial world need to wean ourselves away from the car culture, quarter-acre lots, and the idea that luxury is a virtue.
As far as the car culture goes, why didn't we begin to wean ourselves away from it right after that humongous gasoline shortage which occurred during the winter of 1973-74? Most folks, including my own mother, thought that the shortage was really a hoax, which was more or less proven by the fact that once they got the prices up to a certain level, almost overnight you could once again get all the gas you wanted, any time of day or night. One of the sticking points no doubt is this: I have been a suburbanite for the majority of my lifetime and I do not feel this way, but many if not most suburbanites feel that using public transportation is beneath their dignity. Not to mention that the spread out nature of suburban areas makes public transit not feasible.
People can often hardly imagine themselves without a car. In my case the local dial-a-ride served well for a couple weeks in which I had no car while mine had costly and elaborate repairs due to a vehicle accident (debris caused a tire blowout). Cars are expensive to repair and maintain after a certain point. This year alone I had to buy two new tires ($200), a battery ($175), and front rotors ($550). The dial-a-ride was fine for getting me to the repair shop when my car was ready to pick up and for a trip to the local box store. That is less expensive than car payments, but I have a thirteen-year-old car, and if I want to go some place interesting I need a car. I do not live in a place like Chicago in which the public transit can get one from an outlying suburb downtown at modest cost and is easy to use. (Parking is incredibly expensive).
On the other hand, if I need a tooth extracted, it is best that I use the dial-a-ride service to the dentist's office.
Quote:We also will need to deprogram our love affair with single family homes and nothing but, which many zoning laws and homeowners associations have saddled us with, this contribution mightily to the massive housing shortage and unaffordability we are also now saddled with. These are issues that have been deferred for far too long now. The authors of the book proclaimed that a 4T is a time during which social problems are no long deferred and thus dealt with. But so far there has been little if any effort to solve these issues. Some psychics are predicting that it will take a few more years until Millennials are old enough to move into positions of political power.
This Crisis Era is unlikely to result in an apocalyptic war that compels people to rebuild what is destroyed. In a real war, those giant expanses of McMansions on quarter-acre lots would be nearly perfect war zones. The way of life that such political decisions made possible forty to seventy years ago would itself be destroyed. The absence of wartime destruction distinguishes the US from Britain, let alone Germany or Japan, let alone Poland. If the economic basis cannot support perverse policies, then those policies will not be indulged.
Quote:Right now in only 12 percent of the country can one do reasonably well without having a car. I have often wonder how long it might be when those living in "The Other 88" will have suitable alternatives. Having to have a car is a big financial burden. Not only gasoline, but insurance, which is now required by law almost everywhere, maintenance, licensing, tolls and parking fees in many places, and, since most folks need to buy their cars on time, installment loan interest.
Really, golf carts would have served the most basic needs of transportation. But those themselves are miniature cars, and by the time the golf cart was invented, the infrastructure dedicated to the automobile made anything the size of a golf cart and as slow into something suitable as a lawn tractor or with a specialized use as a golf cart. For grocery trips to pick up a little stuff, the storage necessary for carrying along a set of golf clubs would be fine.
Not having a car is often a function of location. The middle class in New York City is priced out of any car culture; poor people in New Mexico and the Ozarks have cars. Many employers insist upon their employees owning a car so that they can work night shifts and so that they have a reason to hold on for dear life to jobs in which managers get away with veritable bullying of subordinates. The ruling elites of America have much the same attitude as slave-owning planters -- that they be seen as benefactors to those that they exploit and degrade and get recognized as great humanitarians. Abusers (and this applies to abusive husbands) see nothing wrong in what they do.
Quote:When first the ride share platform and later food delivery platforms began to take off, it was widely assumed that this would save a lot of cars from needing to be on the road. But it wasn't really even a Band-Aid, as so many people got in on it from a driver standpoint that it proved to be nearly a zero sum game.
Have another 1929-1933 style economic crisis or the destruction that some unfortunate countries endured in cataclysmic wars, and we as a people will be compelled to restart differently. Countries that underwent Commie rule learned new ways of life that might have been good for quick recoveries without the need for the old aristocracy and plutocracy that had recently ruled, but such came at the expense of much that proved essential to human happiness. Communism is a perfect ideology for the dullard, but ill-suited for the nimble-minded. The United States was developing a consumer economy complete with bloated suburbs and a car culture while other countries were rebuilding and retooling their manufacturing plants. Would we do things the same way now? Probably not. We built our society around the automobile, and we pay for that in a destruction of civic life, rapidly-rising costs of replacing and maintaining infrastructure that has passed its intended service life, mindless consumerism (of course the Idiot Screen has its role in that), and great losses in highway carnage.
If you want to know what a viable life looks like without cars or televisions, then consider the Old Order Amish. I'd never fit in even if such people were much like my ancestors. I love classical music and I read a lot, and I consider an advanced education necessary for a truly good life. Amish life is constricted, but at the least it seems not to be a jungle. There are no egregious extremes of wealth and poverty, much in contrast to our "English" lives. Maybe we no longer need our economic jungle -- indeed we would be far better off without it. Then again, some people profiteer from an economic jungle that depends upon the destruction of human dignity in the name of high profits and lavish compensation for executives.
High profits and lavish compensation were out of the question in Japan or either part of Germany after the Second World War. I wonder why!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.