I've been reading George Monbiot's new book, Heat: how to stop the planet
burning. It's an excellent book, and I urge you all to read it. He
( Read more... )
It's a great phrase, isn't it? I'd love to take credit for it, but it was Joshua Ellis who came up with it (and mainly jwz who popularized it, I think). More here.
That book sounds interesting - I'll keep an eye out for it at the library. Have you read Al Gore's book ("An inconvenient truth")? That seems to be along similar lines
( ... )
You ought to be able to get secondary double glazing, shouldn't you? Entirely hypothetically, I mean... ;-)
Commercial fusion is decades away, just like it has been for the last 50 years.
Electric cars can outperform internal combustion engines already - the problem is that petrol (and diesel) contain much more energy per unit volume than batteries, and a petrol tank is much quicker to "recharge". Mind you, emergency response vehicles contain <0.01% of the country's combustion engines, so they could stay fossil-fuelled if necessary.
Commercial fusion: alas yes. Hofstadter's Law applies in spades here. The trouble (as I learned during my time at JET) is that it's a very difficult problem, and keeps turning out to be more difficult as we learn more about it. I dunno. I have a feeling that we'll get it cracked in my lifetime (as Peak Oil gets more obvious, I expect the funding for fusion research will increase dramatically), and after that we're laughing. The tricky bit will be surviving the time until we get fusion with an industrial society and research base intact.
So many problems come down to the uselessness of current battery technology, don't they? If we had really good batteries, renewable energy would be a much more attractive option, for instance.
4) No, I wouldn't. But listed buildings make up a "tiny" percentage of the total housing stock. And there are lots of things you can do to improve insulation of old buildings - double glazing (most people won't suffer from your problem), cavity wall insulation, etc.
8) I think the idea is that the bus doesn't have to drive in and out of every town along its route. Say I'm taking the bus from Oxford to Cambridge, and suppose it still uses the same crack-fuelled route it currently takes. I don't have to wait for the extra time needed to navigate Bedford, Milton Keynes etc, so my total journey is quicker. The poor fools who want to get off at Milton Keynes need to change to another bus, it's true, but if buses are frequent enough this doesn't slow them down much, and the journey's faster for everyone who doesn't get off at the first stop. Anyway, the scheme's described in more detail in the linked column, and there are some interesting comments on it here. My favourite comment is thismarioincandenza
( ... )
A dozen extra plastic bags don't even come close to outweighing the environmental impact of the bright lights, heating, etc. But you're right, they can and should be eliminated. And by walking/bussing to the shops, you're not being typical (at least, not by the standards of UK-outside-London).
Warehouse v. shops: according to Mr George, currently Internet orders are filled by people taking goods off supermarket shelves, which leads to very few carbon savings. He's talking about eliminating out-of-town superstores outright, and replacing them entirely with warehouses. But that's a good point: how efficient can you be if you're only taking a few things at a time out of a box? Presumably you can use caching - take big boxes of bananas or whatever to the order-preparation zone, use them up while filling orders, send someone with a forklift to get a new box when you run out or if you need something rare.
Fuck the world up, and some vastly diminished number of us will adapt and survive, and live in misery. Far better not to fuck it up in the first place, especially given that we can see the fuckup coming.
And if you think you can get us all to Mars before we destroy the ecosystem, I'd love to hear how :-P
Comments 15
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Commercial fusion is decades away, just like it has been for the last 50 years.
Electric cars can outperform internal combustion engines already - the problem is that petrol (and diesel) contain much more energy per unit volume than batteries, and a petrol tank is much quicker to "recharge". Mind you, emergency response vehicles contain <0.01% of the country's combustion engines, so they could stay fossil-fuelled if necessary.
Reply
So many problems come down to the uselessness of current battery technology, don't they? If we had really good batteries, renewable energy would be a much more attractive option, for instance.
Reply
8) I think the idea is that the bus doesn't have to drive in and out of every town along its route. Say I'm taking the bus from Oxford to Cambridge, and suppose it still uses the same crack-fuelled route it currently takes. I don't have to wait for the extra time needed to navigate Bedford, Milton Keynes etc, so my total journey is quicker. The poor fools who want to get off at Milton Keynes need to change to another bus, it's true, but if buses are frequent enough this doesn't slow them down much, and the journey's faster for everyone who doesn't get off at the first stop. Anyway, the scheme's described in more detail in the linked column, and there are some interesting comments on it here. My favourite comment is thismarioincandenza ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Warehouse v. shops: according to Mr George, currently Internet orders are filled by people taking goods off supermarket shelves, which leads to very few carbon savings. He's talking about eliminating out-of-town superstores outright, and replacing them entirely with warehouses. But that's a good point: how efficient can you be if you're only taking a few things at a time out of a box? Presumably you can use caching - take big boxes of bananas or whatever to the order-preparation zone, use them up while filling orders, send someone with a forklift to get a new box when you run out or if you need something rare.
Reply
:D
E
x
Reply
And if you think you can get us all to Mars before we destroy the ecosystem, I'd love to hear how :-P
Reply
Leave a comment