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Rethink cars
Motoring could be revolutionised if cars were marketed like mobile phones ? in a manner that would cut carbon dioxide and reduce the cost of driving. Motorists would get subsidised ? or possibly even free ? electric cars in the same way that customers currently get mobile phone handsets. In return, they would take out a contract for miles, rather than minutes, entitling them to get power either by plugging in to recharging points (at home, in car parks or on the street) or exchanging batteries at filling stations. The idea is the brainchild of a thirty-something former dot-com entrepreneur, Shia Agassi, who believes it would halve motoring costs. It sounds too good to be true, but Israel, Denmark, Hawaii and San Francisco are already starting to put the system in place ? and even Gordon Brown has toyed with the idea. But to tackle climate change properly, the electricity has to be provided by renewable sources or nuclear power rather than fossil fuels.
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Independent Minds
Reduce your global impact.
Comments
Electic cars? Where are we going to get the extra electricity to charge them from? Burning more coal? Planes running on biofuel? Get real!
it is very interesting that the real solutions to the envrnmental catastrophe that is unflonding - powerdown and permaculture, along with localisation of food supply and deindustrialisation - are not even mentioned.
And it is also very noticeable that one of the main drivers of all our woes -increasing population- does not even get a mention. Maybe it's a given that world population will soon start to fall quite rapidly as a consequence of the industrialised food system collapsing [as a consequence of Peak Oil, and severe water shortages]. Perhaps the powers that be recognise that most westerners do not even notice the 30,000 people dying every day from malnutrition etc., so when the figure rises to 100,000 they still will not notice.
If the above list is the best that can be offered by mainstream thinkers, then the next generation definitely has no future.
And to suggest that [more airport runways] Gordon Brown or [more troops to Afghanistan and turn up the war volume on Iran] Barack Obama are key world-savers is nothing short of a disgrace.
There is a much better solutio to all these problems;
Start WWIII.
It might interest the authors to know that the more people learn about global warming the less they believe in it.
Get it?
It's a scam and if you educate yourself and think about it, it doesn't make any sense.
Drink more KoolAid baby!
At last the sums have been done to show what might work and at what cost in terms of both financial investment and land use.
Read http://www.withouthotair.com/, all the sums are there.
This book by a clear thinking Cambridge academic corrects the many misconceptions that have been promoted by environmental movements and they are absolutely hair raising.
It turns out that the only immediate answer to getting off the world's dependency on fossil fuels and providing the energy for land travel is a massive investment in nuclear power worldwide, at least to the same extent as in France and even much more. Nuclear is the only solution that has sufficient scale to begin to make a difference. It could be enhanced by tidal power, to a certain extent in some countries. Whatever energy generation solution is taken it has to be realized that the investment will be absolutely massive. Little gestures may make people feel they are contributing but will have no worthwhile effect.
The Green movements in their opposition to Nuclear energy have delayed that solution and as a result have hastened the effect of global warming to the whole world's detriment.
The former director of Greenpeace international Patrick More has said "we made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, as if all things nuclear were evil. I think that is as big a mistake as if you lumped nuclear medicine with nuclear weapons".
Tell that to Al Gore, he's got four kids.
If you don't believe so many people can be wrong worldwide then I suggest you read the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay.
Somebody once said: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"
Don't breed.
Please, when writing articles, be precise.
This bio-char also has the benefit of being very good for soil-health, and as one of our problemsis degraded soils - a problem the UK suffers from - the biochar itself also has secondary value.
Carbon removal is our only hope. The Little Ice Age in the 1700's was caused by massive re-growth of forests in the Americas, following the massive population drop caused by the advent of Europeans and their diseases, which wiped out much of the native American population, leading to a massive drop in agricultural use of landmass.
The trees that grew in the place of fields sucked enormous amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere.
There are already projects in place to initiate carbonification. I would like to see all local councils in the UK set up their own carbonification plant - as this carbon can be offset against emissions. Coppices could be planted along the verges of all major highways, and land verging railway lines -
- and the resulting biomass turned to bio-char.
These bio-char incubators could be funded by coal fired plants and other polluting industries. A coal fired plant can actually be carbon negative, IF it funds enough of these projects (which are very cheap to set up) to offset the total carbon emissions of the fossil fuel plant, and extra. We can cut emissions, but unless we also actively start to remove carbon from the carbon cycle, we are not going to succeed.
The article says we should grow hemp and use it as a building material since it takes so much carbon out of the atmosphere.
Well trees take carbon out of the atmosphere too, so we should be building everything we can out of wood. My wooden patio furniture is a carbon sink, same as the 2X6's in the wall of my house.
The newspapers I throw in the landfill are also full of carbon and they will stay in the dump for generations without releasing that carbon. So quit recycling paper.
But wait, I can hear the gnashing of teeth already, every tree is sacred!
No it isn't.
By the same logic this guy uses to justify his hemp argument we should be chopping down every tree we can get our hands on and using as much wood as possible, as long as we plant more trees.
This should spark a religious rift between the 'every tree is sacred' crowd and the 'carbon is our enemy' crowd.
Me?
I'm going snowmobiling for a couple of days, someone has to feed the trees some C02, and after all, the planet is cooling down.
We've got some weird bunch going around propping up the branches of ancient trees because they're famous and ancient and mustn't be allowed to fall apart from old age.
They'd do a lot better to chop 'em down and replace 'em with something young and vigorous.
The same goes for forests: cut down 5km x 500m, replant 5km x 450m, use the other 50m as temporary access road to cut the next 5km x 500m strip, replant 500m, use the remaining 50m as new temporary access road to cut the next 5km x 500m strip ... and as long as you've chosen a big enough forest, by the time you get back round to where you started you've got 200-year-old woodland again. Working around the badger setts would be a pain in the neck, but it could be done, and 200-yr-old oaks could be left standing on alternating trips round as they spend 400 years growing. Adjust timescale to ecosystem.
Ideally, we'd need wood-burning steam engines to haul the stuff and wood-burning stoves and steam turbines to power saw mills and chippers, and enough wood production to allow us to bury a lot of it in worked-out mines as a real carbon sink, but at the moment selling furniture and construction timber and buying up more forest to use sustainably rather than clearing it out and turning it into desert would be a pretty good start.
So we would ship our raw materials to the dirty factories there and ship the finished products back.
So more real pollution and C02 emissions, not less.
Who thought that one up?
We'll save the planet by increasing the C02 emissions and increasing real pollution.
That's about as smart as using food for fuel.
Oh, wait...
Why do the greens keep getting it so wrong?
Is it because they aren't green, they are watermelons?
Green on the outside, red on the inside?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/200
"I was in the room in The Hague in November 2000 when then-French President Jacques Chirac hailed the Kyoto Protocol, or "global warming" treaty, as "the first component of an authentic global governance." Then-European Union Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom seconded the sentiment when she told London's Independent that Kyoto was "not about whether scientists agree" but instead "about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide." "
The good news is the whole toxic, anthropocentric system is now in its death throes and present eonomic arrangements will not last even another decade.
As another contributor commented, the Earth is not under threat; it will do extremely well once the plague of killer apes that have overrun the planet have largely annihliated themselves. The pity is all the other species that are going to be exterminated as a consequewnce of the colective stupidity and greed of one species.
Shut up the 'Greens'.
Stop flying everywhere to discuss nothing.
Hurricane activity is extremely low.
Funny how these things aren't front page news.
Polar bear population increasing.
Planet on a 30 year cooling trend.
Where are the headlines?
Could it be that scary headlines sell newspapers?
Show me the physics behind beamed power.
While you're at it calculate how many joules of energy there is in a litre of gasoline and calculate the energy required to move a car 100 miles at 50 miles per hour. Then factor in the thermal efficiency of the internal combustion engine and subtract friction losses.
Does it mean that the results of any experiment can be repeated?
Does it mean any computer models are examined?
No.
Until the planet is throwing back some unworldly weather and / or catatrosphies of biblical proportions i doubt we will have global agreement.
http://newsbalance.com/article/2008-0
Bill B. May
Los Altos, CA
There are NO historical examples of a civilisation that peaks and then goes into a slow decline. They peak and then rapidly collapse.
We have had the collapse of global Ponzi schemes causing a depression. As soon as any sort of recovery happens, oil will go straight back up, and any recovery will be stifled. Meanwhile, people will continue to believe that being Green is an optional extra, which requires no personal sacrifice.
Basically, the climate, economy and political instability will combine to hit our current civilisation with multiple shocks from which it will not recover. Billions will die from starvation, there will be multiple resource wars, and large parts of the world will become steadily more marginal for supporting agriculture and (eventually) any form of life bigger than a lizard.
How about an article which seriously discusses this possibility, and what to do about it?
Ignorance, complacency and apathy continue to dominate, so collapse beccome inevitable.