Tag Archives: Energy

The True Dark Ages

Posted on March 27, 2009 | 1 comment

I read this, and scoffed. Loudly.

NEW YORK, March 27 (UPI) — The Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower and Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza are among the landmarks that will go dark Saturday night for Earth Hour.

This sends the message that the solution to possible climate change issues is to use less energy. Mind you, not by efficiency, but by living in the dark. This is a sad step backwards, and sends a depressing message to the younger generation. “Don’t expect to be able to be crazy with your lightbulbs like we were!” I’m all for clean energy, efficiency, being smart about energy use, etc. I’m not excited about going backwards in time a hundred plus years to find the solution to possible problem.

I suggest that, at 8:30 PM on March 28th, everyone turn on every light in their house. Call it the “Technology is Good Hour”. I’m going to.

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Posted in Energy, Technology

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I Expected More

Posted on November 20, 2008 | 3 comments

Today I read on Next Big Future about Obama’s recently announced clean energy goals. The key is his commitment to “catalyze private sector efforts to build a ‘clean energy future'” with 15 billion a year of federalm money. While this is nice, sure, it’s certainly a lot less than I expected. For an annual budget of almost 3 trillion a year, this breaks down to about a half of one percent of the total.  We spend almost 20 times that amount on the interest on the national debt alone. Forgive me if I don’t take this as a sign of Obama’s seriousness to renewable energy. We should be spending that much on fusion research alone (if not more), no matter solar, wind, geothermal, and other long shot renewables.

It’s early, of course, and he’s not even president yet. There may be a whole lot of inventive and smart things coming other than this to spur the “green energy revolution”. This, though, certainly isn’t it.

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Posted in Energy, Politics

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