Subject: Re: Brashears on Hanson
From: yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 16:14:36 GMT
Michael Tobis (tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu) wrote:
: Yuri Kuchinsky (yuku@io.org) wrote:
: : Unfortunately, they aren't assumptions at all, but a description of
: : reality.
: An incorrect one, alas.
There's only one.
: : The destruction of Nature will inevitably result in social
: : (self)destruction.
: Perhaps so, but using invalid arguments to support this position,
: as Hanson does, serves to discredit rather than justify such a
: position.
Which invalid arguments?
: As far as your statement goes, perhaps you would do better to
: qualify "destruction" and/or define "Nature". To a physicist,
: for instance, your position is utterly meaningless.
Maybe to you. Have you read the World Scientists' Letter on Environment?
: Asserting your feelings is not a way to have the slightest influence
: on those who disagree with you in the first place, but perhaps it
: will make you feel better.
A little bit.
: For myself, since I do think that environmental problems are indeed
: serious, and that progress on them requires careful reasoning,
: your and Hansen's shabby arguments and vain emoting make me feel
: substantially worse.
I don't think you're too sincere about seeing the problems for
environment... Your tone says something quite different.
Yuri.
--
#% Yuri Kuchinsky in Toronto %#
-- a webpage like any other... http://www.io.org/~yuku --
Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow
astronauts ====== Vice President Dan Quayle
Subject: Re: Brashears on Hanson
From: yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 16:08:51 GMT
charliew (charliew@hal-pc.org) wrote:
[Yuri:]
: >Unfortunately, they aren't assumptions at all, but a description of
: >reality. Unfortunately, this is where the real world is heading.
: >
: >The destruction of Nature will inevitably result in social
: >(self)destruction.
: >I take a totally different view of God and Nature from that which
: >the later Christians usually entertain, for I hold that God is the
: >immanent, and not the extraneous, cause of all things. I say, All
: >is in God; all lives and moves in God === B. Spinoza
: why is it that as things are getting better, you perceive them as getting
: worse? Pollution was much worse in the '60's than it is now. Open your
: eyes, ears, and nose, and verify this for yourself.
Your kind have done everything you could to oppose all the environmental
legislation that made the improvements possible. Now you're telling me
about the improvements. Hypocrite.
Yuri.
--
#% Yuri Kuchinsky in Toronto %#
-- a webpage like any other... http://www.io.org/~yuku --
Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow
astronauts ====== Vice President Dan Quayle
Subject: Re: So just why is capitalism so great?
From: jamesd@echeque.com (James A. Donald)
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 1996 16:34:43 GMT
James A. Donald wrote:
> > Now that the Indians and Indonesians have finally started
> > to abandon socialism, they too are finally starting to catch up
> > with the west, though slower than most of Asia.
CDS4AW@leeds.ac.uk (A. Whitworth) wrote:
> Indonesia was never "socialist".
Whatever you choose to call it, it was not capitalism: it was a
country where private individuals could not own the means of
production, in particular, land. The nominal owner received an
allotment from above, and could, and frequently did, have that
allotment taken away.
Land, and capital goods, were, and to some extent still are, assigned,
for the most part, rather than bought or sold.
> I don't think a country where around 300
> million people don't have enough to eat should be classed as
> "developed", do you?
India is not developed, but there is no outside force preventing
individual indians from becoming middle class. Only the Indian
government, and the Indian government is now stopping people less than
it used to.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ James A. Donald jamesd@echeque.com
Subject: Re: Hanson's latest and Yuri's added errors.
From: wfhummel@netcom.com (William F. Hummel)
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 18:04:31 GMT
John McCarthy (jmc@Steam.stanford.edu) wrote:
: In article wfhummel@netcom.com (William F. Hummel) writes:
: >
: > David Lloyd-Jones (dlj@inforamp.net) wrote:
: >
: > : My view is that all benefits, including tax credits, Social Security
: > : welfare payments, medicare and medicaid, and the county shovelling the
: > : drive for you, should be taxable at a steeply increasing rate. 40%
: > : over $100K p.a., 60% over $500K, 80% over $1M, 90% over $10 million a
: > : year.
: >
: > -----------
: > The U.S. had rates that high once, on even lower income, and it didn't
: > work the way it was expected to. Tax dodges of all kinds became a way
: > of life for the higher income types. The loop holes couldn't be closed
: > fast enough before some new ones were engineered by the tax lawyers, and
: > the corporations continued to reward their brass in imaginative ways.
: >
: > I doubt that any system of such confiscatory taxes at the high end can
: > be made to work, although in principle I would agree with the intent of
: > achieving a more equitable distribution of the economic pie. While the
: > Japanese appear to have a more equitable distribution, I wonder whether
: > they have unobserved ways (perhaps under the table) of rewarding the big
: > wheels and the big producers.
: >
: > William F. Hummel
: 1. The highest U.S. rate was 92 percent during WWII.
: 2. Until Bill Gates came along the richest men in the world were
: Japanese. Somehow they managed to accumulate the wealth - Tokyo real
: estate, I vaguely recall.
: 3. Is your objective to help the poor or to punish the rich? Is your
: objective of the tax system to raise money for Government expenses or
: to achieve "equity"?
-----------
In simple terms, my objective is to achieve a more stable and harmonious
society. An essential ingredient is a large middle class and a far fewer
pockets of poverty and homelessness. For the last quarter century we have
been heading in the wrong direction. You don't have to worry about the
rich. They have far more personal comforts than they need, not to speak
of the political power they wield. The tax system should raise money for
the government AND help achieve equity. Wealth does not distribute itself
equitably of its own accord. In fact, without the moderating influence of
government, wealth would concentrate into fewer and fewer hands. If
there are other ways than taxation to moderate that concentration, fine.
: 4. More moderate tax rates collect more taxes than the very highest rates.
-----------
This smacks of the Laffer curve. It depends on where you start from.
There is no evidence to support this contention at the present tax rates,
and the Reagan tax cuts certainly don't support it when the rates were
even higher than they are now.
William F. Hummel
Subject: Re: Major problem with climate predictions
From: gdy52150@prairie.lakes.com (gdy52150@prairie.lakes.com)
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 1996 18:06:35 GMT
charliew@hal-pc.org (charliew) wrote:
>In article <584541$83o_002@leeds.ac.uk>,
> CDS4AW@leeds.ac.uk (A. Whitworth) wrote:
>>In article <57vafo$8kq@rebecca.albany.edu>,
>>ey7731@CNSVAX.ALBANY.EDU ("j.b. DiGriz") wrote:
>>
>>>While i would definitely agree with your last sentiment
>>WHOLEheartedly,
>>>I would take exception with your moral valuation of
>>technological tools
>>>and techniques. THey are neither good nor bad, what will
>>get judged is
>>>their implmentation. Otherwise, you're calling a pile of
>>books or
>>>some text files on a pc or some notes scribbled on a
>>blackboard somewhere
>>>evil or good. That makes no sense. Moral valuation comes
>>from and ultimately
>>>ends within ourselves.
>>
>>I fully accept that, although in some cases (the atom bomb?
>>other military technology?) there is a case for the
>>technology itself to be viewed as undesirable, as I really
>>don't see any beneficial usage of it. This is why firms can
>>produce items of mass destruction such as landmines that
>>sell for $50 or so, and then wash their hands of the
>>conseuqneces by saying "the technology is neutral, it's what
>>you do with it that counts....."
>>
>>What else are you going to do with a landmine? Protect your
>>field of potatoes from rabbits?
>It was once anticipated that atom bombs could be used to fracture oil
>bearing rock strata. This looked like a good idea, and it was tried.
>Unfortunately, it made the oil radioactive. However, if this had worked,
>we would indeed have a peaceful use for atomic weapons.
>BTW, when a large asteroid heads our way, we will need something to purturb
>its path enough to miss us. Can you think of a better tool than a nuclear
>explosive to do this? There may yet be "good" uses for these weapons.
talk about misplace priorities. charlie worries about astroids hitting
earth a extremely remote chance but ignores the very real problems of
global warming,ozone depeltion, species diveristy and clean ari/water.
Subject: Re: Hanson's latest and Yuri's added errors.
From: tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 17:43:39 GMT
John McCarthy (jmc@Steam.stanford.edu) wrote:
: Michael Tobis includes:
: The primitive conservative method of simply treating the
: public expenditure as equivalent to the cost seems to
: neglect any economic activity that is generated by the
: relevant public expenditure.
: Suppose we hire people to dig holes in the ground and fill them again,
: including engineers to design the holes. The hole diggers indeed buy
: food which supports farmers. However, if instead of digging holes
: they build schools or cars, they would support the same number of
: farmers. If you assume they would be unemployed if they didn't dig
: the holes, you can ascribe the benefit to the farmers to the hole
: digging. If you assume, as is almost always the case, that they would
: do something thought by someone to be useful, then you can regard the
: cost of the hole digging as a net loss to society.
: Government expenditures and private expenditures also should not be
: given credit merely for generating employment.
Suppose we hire people to spam other people's telephones and email
with unsolicited advertising. The general well-being is substantially
worse off than before, while the well-being of the employers is
marginally better. The fact that someone is willing to pay for something
in no way guarantees that it enhances the general well-being. It is
precisely this fact that causes the endless (literally, I hope, else
intelligence will be extinct) debates on environmental issues. Junk
email and junk phone calls are just another form of junk emissions
for which the emitter escapes responsibility.
Private expenditure is thus not obviously superior to government or
mandated expenditure. In the latter cases, there was at least a constituency
that *tried* to address a meaningful issue. Governments in general and
the US in particular (Richard Darman made an interesting argument to
this effect in last week's New York Times Magazine) are reluctant to
admit error and hone strategy - rather they tend to flail about and address
little effort to measuring success. This causes the jw's of the world to
conclude that *any* vigorous social policy is worse than none at all,
but a more sensible conclusion might be that we need to apply more
intelligence and less dogmatic symbolism to our problems. But if the
government is paying someone to dig holes, somebody at least *thought*
they wanted the holes.
Another point that confuses me is this "creation of wealth" idea.
I suppose the model that wealth is "created" by labor is useful,
but another point we need to understand is that wealth is also
'extracted", from the environment, and from non-measurable aspects
of life - if no one pays garndma to cook a turkey dinner for the
family, she is treated as creating no wealth, but if a con man rips off
her savings and she is forced to flip burgers at the local greasy spoon
she is creating wealth by this sort of metric, even though the world
is substantially worse off. This wealth has not been created, but
merely extracted from the general social well being. Nor is the fact
that grandma paid twenty times too much for a roof replacement a
creation of wealth, even though someone freely paid for it, a creation
of wealth.
But the part that baffles me most of all is the assertion that if no
one paid people to dig holes, they would be doing something "more useful".
In fact, the demand for labor would be even smaller, the conveyance of wealth
from huge usually institutional amassments where it is of no human
consequence to people who might make use of it is would be even weaker,
and the even vaster wealth sloshing around the financial sector would
contribute nothing to the general well being, excepting perhaps a dribble
of inflation.
Maybe economic models are based on the idea that labor is valuable.
Certainly, those of us with significant technical skills might find
something better to do with our time, so that misemploying them would
reduce general well-being to the extent that their employment is
a net positive. But where labor is in surplus, this argument fails
utterly.
The idea that public sector or mandated employment is foolish is
a typical econometric fallacy. In fact, since elections are invariably
fought predominantly on the question of full employment, and since
efficiency is expected to improve for ever and ever, wordl without end,
meaning that all the really essential work of food, clothing, and shelter
is done by fewer people, the central goal of democracy has been the
creation of meaningless labor for some time now. The US "workfare"
trend, imagined to be an economically conservative movement, is a
striking example.
I once saw a big strapping fellow asking for spare change in front of
the Belmont el station in Chicago (where I never had any problem with
the water supply, btw - perhaps dlj is thinking of the suburbs, which
are constantly clamoring for Lake Michigan water). Anyhow, there was
a scrawny African immigrant fellow who observed the scene with a tone of
astonished outrage: "What a lazy fellow!" he exclaimed to me, a stranger,
"Such a big strong man begging in the street!"
He misunderstood. In his country, a big strong man is a valuable asset.
In a developed country, where unskilled labor is of no value, a big strong
man is merely a threat. I think we'd all be better off if we managed to
convince him that we wanted him to dig a hole somewhere. With an old-fashioned
shovel. Which is Tommy Thompson's workfare, and an entirely sensible idea.
Despite having Republican origins, it's basically an expensive liberal
big-government idea that people should be forced to "work" in jobs the
economy does not freely provide, in exchange for welfare. The alternative,
which more purist conservatives are allocating, of "letting 'em starve"
is probably incompatible with the wide availability of weapons in this
country. Whatever it may say about the moral capacities of its advocates,
it speaks volumes about their intelligence. The only saving grace is an
outdated faith that the economy can absorb as much labor as is available
without public sector intervention. Unfortunately, that's bilge.
The measures that economists confuse with well-being map reasonably
well onto well-being in undeveloped economies, but I see no reason to
trust those metrics in contemporary developed societies.
If we force the financial sector, either directly or indirectly, to
pay people to dig holes and fill them back in, we manage to get buying
power from the financial sector, where it does essentially nothing, to
someone who needs cups and saucers, sheets and blankets, rice and beans.
Those who think this is a "cost" not only foolishly conclude that the
hole-digging has prevented the hole-digger from doing something useful,
they also ignore the prospect that taking a few hundred dollars from
an institution with billions and giving it to a guy with nothing could
be in some real sense a creation of wealth in the sense of well-being.
Of course, the fact is that there's a great deal that could be done with
public sector money to enhance the general welfare which no private
interest will be motivated to pay for, and that's better even than
meaningless hole-digging. But there's a huge set of dubious assumptions
behind the claim that the hole-digging is a net cost.
mt
Subject: Re: Fidel Castro: `Capitalism has nothing to offer humanity'
From: d004525c@dcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us (Orlando Fernandez)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 16:37:56 GMT
Brian Hauk (bghauk@berlin.infomatch.com) wrote:
: In response to the thread, "Re: So just why is capitalism so great" -
: Fidel Castro: `Capitalism has nothing to offer humanity'
: Why support a systen that doesn't work because it's against everything we
: stand for? Capitalists and their representatives in government claim to
: represent us, but do they? Isn't their job to maximize business profits
: at the expense of everything else? Don't they claim that what's good for
: business is good for the people? How can that be true when what's profitable
: means job loss, environmental devestation, pitting people against each
: other to divide us using racism, sexism, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-
: quebecois predudice, etc.?
: What's the alternative?
: Unknown to many people because of massive propaganda, Cuba is a country
: where workers and youth work with their government to solve society's
: problems as opposed to workers and youth in capitalist countries who have
: governments opposing everything we stand for such as equality for all people,
: full employment, protecting the environment, etc., and whose only interest
: is maximizing business profits.
: Cuba's socialist revolution is an example of the way forward for humanity,
: and must be emulated worldwide, because it's the only way out of capitalism's
: global social and economic crisis.
: The truth about Cuba should be of interest to young people, who in growing
: numbers are repelled by the racism, women's inequality, and other intolerable
: social relations reproduced daily by capitalism on a world scale.
: It is for fighters who sense that this social system, if not replaced, will
: lead to economic devastation, fascist tyranny, and world war.
January 9, 1996
USA & CUBA: ENEMIES OR ACCOMPLICES?
Sometimes I wonder whether the governments of Cuba and the USA are enemies
or accomplices. Granted, they exchange very strong words about the
embargo. But such show allows the Cuban regime to play the victim, while
the American government plays the tough guy to impress the Cuban exiles.
In the meantime, according to today's El Nuevo Herald, the exiles
themselves are sending $500,000,000 a year to their relatives in the
island, in fact, helping to finance the dictatorship, with the full
complicity of the United States of America.
WHAT'S YOUR VERDICT?
LIBORIO
c/o GUARAPISTA MOVEMENT
PO BOX 015663
MIAMI FL 33101-5663
NOTE: This letter has been sent to The Miami Herald...
LETTER FROM AUSTRALIAN FRIEND:
Hi Liborio,
> Sometimes I wonder whether the governments of Cuba and the USA are
> enemies or accomplices.
> WHAT'S YOUR VERDICT?
It has long seemed obvious to me that for all their posturing
to the contrary, ALL governments are basically accomplices.
Their enemies are their OWN people.
The governments of the US and USSR put on a big show about being
cold war enemies for a long time, but the only thing they ever fired
at each other was hot air. But they DID use each other as excuses for
oppression of their own people (McCarthyism, Stalinistic purges etc)
as well as dictatorial control over any nations who expressed any
aspirations for self-determination (the USSR in Eastern Europe, the
US in Vietnam, Latin America etc).
Every day you can see this sort of thing happening.
In Vietnam, you had largely poor, black Americans who had been
demanding fair treatment by their leaders, sent overseas to
kill (and be killed by) poor Vietnamese who had been demanding
fair treatment from theirs. America finally withdrew, but not
until the NLA (Vietcong) had been almost completely destroyed
or forced into the North Vietnamese camp, so the winners were
not the people of South Vietnam who had risen up against their
own despotic leadership and its US supporters, but the Communist
party of the North, who then sent their own cadres south to
take over where the capitalist dictators had left off.
Western leaders demonized Saddam Hussein during the Gulf war, but
no serious effort was made to get rid of him. Fleeing conscripts
were massacred in huge numbers while his 'Revolutionary Guards'
were allowed to withdraw virtually unscathed. When the Kurds and
the Marsh Arabs rose up against him, the West stood silently by
while those 'Guards' slaughtered them. When Saddam's agents were
accused (on very flimsy evidence) of plotting to kill George Bush,
the US reaction was to fire missiles into a residential suburb of
Baghdad at 2:00AM. There was no chance of hurting Saddam or his
spies, just the cleaners in the office block that was targetted and
a few dozen sleeping civilians in the surrounding homes. The
continued sanctions are starving the people of Iraq, who have no
say in whether or not the military build chemical weapons (in fact
they're the most likely target of those weapons), and will get no
help at all if they try to get rid of the leaders who do have a
say, but do you think that Saddam or his friends are going hungry?
At the Rio Earth Summit a few years ago we saw George Bush insisting
that the developed countries would do nothing more about pollution
control until the developing ones had introduced stricter
regulation, and Mahathir Mohammed (of Malaysia) saying that
developing countries could not be expected to clean up their
act until the richer ones led the way. Voila! No one does anything,
which suits Bush, Mahathir and their corporate friends and
screws the ordinary people in both rich and poor countries.
Lately in Australia, the political and business elite have been
insisting that we need to 'engage' more fully with Asia (which
is true), but represent Asia as if the whole continent shared
the values of the military and corporate despots that tend to
run most of its countries. So we get leaders here insisting that
the Australian press needs to use 'self-censorship' in order
to avoid hurting the delicate feelings of Asian tyrants, (thus
reducing Australian freedom of speech), while the likes of
Suharto, Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew are portrayed as speaking
for 'their' people (thus muffling the voices of ordinary Asians).
The 'Free Market' is about convincing the workers in country 'A'
that they have to accept lower wages and conditions in order to
compete with country 'B', while those in country 'B' are being
told the same thing in order to compete with country 'A'. The
real competition is the elite of both countries vs the people
in both countries.
Castro flies all over the world, stays in top hotels, goes to
expensive functions with corporate leaders and generally
hobnobs with the 'beautiful people'. Not much in common
with your average Havana construction worker, but a lot like,
say, Bill Clinton. Is it surprising that Castro and Clinton might
find that they share more objectives with each other than either
of them share with workers in their own countries?
- Michael
MOVIMIENTO GUARAPISTA
www.byte-site.com/guarapo
***
The world is divided into two camps: all who abhor freedom, because they
only want it for themselves, are in one; those who love freedom, and want
it for all, are in another.
-Jose Marti (1853-95)
Subject: Re: 1 lb Pu in space kills ALL
From: tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 17:59:37 GMT
John McCarthy (jmc@Steam.stanford.edu) wrote:
: Ken Olson includes:
: So now we have man's greatest stupidity or what!! 1 pound
: of plutonium evenly dispersed in the earth's atmosphere can
: give all lung cancer guaranteed.
...
: In fact 7.5 tons, i.e. 15,000 pounds, of plutonium were dispersed in
: the atmosphere as a side-effect of the atomospheric bomb tests. It is
: not established that they gave anyone lung cancer.
...
Plutonium is extremely lethal if lodged in lung membranes. I think
people are calculating that plutonium dispersed through the atmosphere
is of the same lethality as plutonium already stuck in your lung, and
that a lump of metallic plutonium falling from the sky is as good
as dispersed in the atmosphere.
It's a classical piece of advocacy pseudoscience. Typically, the victim
repeats what was implied, rather than what was stated. Some small
amount of plutonium (more like a ton I would guess) carefully divided
and inserted into every person's lung tissues would be a nasty business
indeed. It would also be quite a difficult project, one for which it
is hard to imagine a vigorous constituency.
There is no reason to suspect that plutonium that powers spacecraft
would be significantly dispersed in the atmosphere when the craft fails
and falls. As for the plutonium released from atomic bombs, it presumably
settled out of the air before most of it could find its way into any
lungs. Atomic bomb byproducts make nice tracers for ocean dynamics studies,
by the way, but I'd just as soon do without them, thanks. I'd be happier
if no country had complete confidence in their ability to set off
mindbogglingly huge explosions, radiative or otherwise.
mt
Subject: Re: 1 lb Pu in space kills ALL
From: Leonard Evens
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 1996 13:25:40 -0600
Michael Tobis wrote:
>
> John McCarthy (jmc@Steam.stanford.edu) wrote:
> : Ken Olson includes:
>
> : So now we have man's greatest stupidity or what!! 1 pound
> : of plutonium evenly dispersed in the earth's atmosphere can
> : give all lung cancer guaranteed.
>
> ...
>
> : In fact 7.5 tons, i.e. 15,000 pounds, of plutonium were dispersed in
> : the atmosphere as a side-effect of the atomospheric bomb tests. It is
> : not established that they gave anyone lung cancer.
>
> ...
>
> Plutonium is extremely lethal if lodged in lung membranes. I think
> people are calculating that plutonium dispersed through the atmosphere
> is of the same lethality as plutonium already stuck in your lung, and
> that a lump of metallic plutonium falling from the sky is as good
> as dispersed in the atmosphere.
>
> It's a classical piece of advocacy pseudoscience. Typically, the victim
> repeats what was implied, rather than what was stated. Some small
> amount of plutonium (more like a ton I would guess) carefully divided
> and inserted into every person's lung tissues would be a nasty business
> indeed. It would also be quite a difficult project, one for which it
> is hard to imagine a vigorous constituency.
>
> There is no reason to suspect that plutonium that powers spacecraft
> would be significantly dispersed in the atmosphere when the craft fails
> and falls. As for the plutonium released from atomic bombs, it presumably
> settled out of the air before most of it could find its way into any
> lungs. Atomic bomb byproducts make nice tracers for ocean dynamics studies,
> by the way, but I'd just as soon do without them, thanks. I'd be happier
> if no country had complete confidence in their ability to set off
> mindbogglingly huge explosions, radiative or otherwise.
>
> mt
If I remember my history properly, which I lived through, the major
concern about atmsospheric bomb tests was not plutonium which presumably
mostly got used in the explosion itself but rather products like
strontium 90 which was showing up in milk and in people's bones in
detectable amounts.
There is a significant point to be made about such matters. It is
unlikely that any one person was very likely to suffer harm from this
effect, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. Its net effect on
the population as a whole could mean an unaccpetalbe amount of excess
mortality. So while any given individual would be irrational to worry
about avoiding the threat, it would be rational for public health
authorities to worry about it. There are many examples like this in
medicine. For example, I recently discovered that untreated syphilis
only kills something like 15 % of its victims. That still makes it one
of the most serious diseases around and certainly justifies extreme
measures to limit its spread. When considering what to do about much
lower risks, it is sometimes difficult to make a decision. But when you
are doing it to people, even if the excess risk is small, without their
consent for your own purposes, there are some serious ethical questions
involved.
--
Leonard Evens len@math.nwu.edu 491-5537
Department of Mathematics, Norwthwestern University
Evanston Illinois
Subject: Re: Environmental Philosophy
From: Jym Dyer
Date: 05 Dec 1996 11:33:29 -0800
>> Q. Can the world grow enough food for 15 billion people?
>> A. Yes, it can, and with present technology.
>>
>> Q. Isn't the world running out of energy[?]
>>
>> A. No. Nuclear and solar energy are each adequate for the
>> next several billion years.
>
> Both the answers John [McCarthy's web page] gives here are
> theoretical rather than practical.
=o= To say the least. He's undoubtedly following the lead of
Julian Simon, whose books are listed first in the references
and who, we are told, "leads the charge against the dooom-
sayers [sic]."
=o= How practical is Simon? I was amused to find the following
in the latest issue of _E_ magazine:
"Simon says . . . that we now have in our minds and libraries
enough information to kkep the human population growing for
. . . [s]even _billion_ years. Well, I did a little
calculation. The world population is currently doubling about
every 40 years. But if you give Simon a break and calculate
it at a millionth of the current rate, that is, doubling every
40 million years, for seven billion years, there would be
more people than there are electrons in the universe. I mean,
this is the sort of crap they put out and yet these people are
taken seriously. If I believed something like that, they'd
throw me out of the National Academy of Science, I'd lose my
tenure at Stanford, my colleagues would laugh at me wherever
I went."
-- Paul Ehrlich
(Ehrlich is referred to as yet another member of McCarthy's
fictional fraternity of "doomsters." John McCarthy can't draw
connections with others in this fraternity, so he speculates
that Ehrlich is being rejected by the others as a "crackpot."
Given the above, I wonder how Simon fails to qualify as such.)
<_Jym_>
Subject: Re: So just why is capitalism so great?
From: api@axiom.access.one.net (Adam Ierymenko)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 18:47:40 GMT
In article <32A3DA87.7910@rt66.com>,
David Lewis writes:
>I wish you'd provide a list. Here is mine:
> 1) Labor Unions, but their power is on the wane especially in the US.
> They are being crushed by the influence of money on politics and
> since the Media has been bought by Big Business we don't even hear
> about it.
If there were a seperation of economy in state, I think that this would solve
the "big money influence in politics" problem. If the government did not have
such a large role in the economy and in business, then there would simply be
little for big money to buy from government.
Labor unions are a legitimate private system for bargaining with employers.
Labor unions are losing their power and membership because their role has been
usurped by government, which in turn is being bought by big business.
> 2) Media: In the past, media did a better job of moderating Capitalism.
> Now it has become a part of the problem rather than a part of the
> solution. For anyone who buys the "Liberal Media Myth" answer this:
> how can media be liberal when it is owned (increasingly) by big
> business conservatives? Media is very important since it is where
> people in general can obtain the information they need to get
>involved
> in any effort to check out-of-control power, but with it being
> corporately owned it's failing badly to do that.
One word: Internet
Mass media is dying. Lets just hope they don't regulate the Internet.
As for the "liberal media myth..." I would challenge you to find a favorable
review of Newt Gingrich in any major news media. I'm not much of a fan of
Gingrich myself, but it seems odd that any politician should receive so much
bad press.
In my opinion, the media is really neither a "liberal" or "conservative"
propaganda device. It is however a propaganda device-- for the statusquo.
The media pushes the moronic liberal-vs-conservative, left-vs-right false
dilemma fallacy, and completely ignores any other ideas which do not fit on
this Orwellian propaganda device called the "political continuum."
> 3) Consumer Advocacy Groups: these still function but are under attack
> and get very little play in the media.
See above.
> 4) Environmentalist and other Citizen Groups: Ditto.
>
> 5) Voters: The voting system is and always has been arranged to dilute
> the power of voters. Combined with media that won't tell us anything
> about real issues of concern and our "two partys = one real party"
> system, it's no wonder turn out is what it is.
The system of government which I believe would be ideal for capitalism would be
a direct democracy with a strong constitution and a system of judicial review.
The people would vote directly on the issues, so politicians and PACs would be
relevant only as propaganda devices. The government could be run by some sort
of tenured council (so they would be beyond political struggles). This council
would not make real decisions (except in emergencies), but would simply run the
government. As for the strong constitution-- this constitution should clearly
prohibit any violation of the rights of life, liberty, or property (except in
an emergency situation) in order to protect the country from majoritarian
tyranny.
> 6) Academics: are also under seige. Slapped with communist and
>solcialist
> labels and otherwise smeared in the media. You have to look pretty
> hard to find any voice saying anything meaningful about controlling
> the power of Capitalism especially in the main-stream media.
I think that Orwell had a good word for the mainstream media: prolefeed. See
above. The mainstream media spoon-feeds us the same old liberal-conservative
false dilemma fallacy.
> 7) Government: The last and the least. It's long since been bought by
> Capitalist interests and has truely become what Adam Smith called
>it:
> "The shadow of big business over society". I call it the shield of
> big business against the wrath of the people and it works very well
>in
> that reguard: we are constantly raging against the government when
> it's not in control of itself. Wouldn't it be better to go after the
> forces that are really in control of it?
See above.
>> It is saying that some tyranny is needed
>> to offset the tyranny of freedom; that some
>> uniformity ought to be added to diversify the uniformity
>> of diversity; that some monopoly must be introduced
>> to balance the monopoly of a non-monopolistic
>> market.
>
>Now THAT'S sophistry. You must have gotten an 'A' in Sound-Bite-Ology.
>No fair, I only got a 'B' :)
>
>Finally, what do we do about? Simple to say but very hard to do:
>Strengthen
>the groups that moderate capitalism and do our best to be sure that the
>pendulum
>doesn't swing too far the other way.
In a true free-enterprise system, I believe that private groups would be
sufficient. We have never had such a system though. What we have now could
be called "state-capitalism," which is also called "fascism."
Subject: Re: So just why is capitalism so great?
From: api@axiom.access.one.net (Adam Ierymenko)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 18:53:39 GMT
In article <57uula$80s_016@leeds.ac.uk>,
CDS4AW@leeds.ac.uk (A. Whitworth) writes:
>>It is moral because it is efficient and it works.
>
>Efficient for whom? Works for whom?
>
>I do not deny that it has done alright for you and I. But
>there are a hell of a lot of people out there on the planet
>who may consider that it hasn't done a hell of a lot of good
>for them - that it hasn't helped move their countries to the
>standard of living enjoyed by the USA, or that it will, in
>their lifetimes (and why should they care that it _might_,
>perhaps in the next 200 years?)
Are any of these countries capitalist? For example, Africa was first exploited
for slaves, was then exploited by colonies, and is now exploited by dictators.
There has never been capitalism there.
>The gap between the rich and poor worlds is _widening_, not
>narrowing. This is a fact. Even the World Bank admit it.
>Capitalism may be the best system to deliver white,
>middle-class Americans (/Britons/Germans/Italians/whatever)
>what they desire. But, and this may come as a surprise to
>some of you, the USA is not the whole world.
Notice the correlation between high taxes, high regulation, and the gap
between the rich and poor widening. High taxes hurt the poor and middle
class far more than the rich, who are the only ones who can really afford
to pay high taxes. Of course, even if only the rich are taxed, it still
filters down to everyone else in the form of lost economic growth, lost
technological growth, lower wages, high prices, etc.
The gap between the rich and the poor is widening (at least in America)
because the middle class and the poor are being forced to pull an insanely
huge extortionist government.
Subject: Re: Iron Fertilization
From: Leonard Evens
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 1996 10:12:30 -0600
snark@swcp.com wrote:
>
> The December 1996 Smithsonian magazine has a short article on iron
> fertilization of plankton as a means of removing carbon from the
> atmosphere. It discusses some of the early and more recent results,
> but, coming from an institution that has been under some attack for its
> liberal bias, I found the following of special interest:
>
> [speaking of some of the early, somewhat disappointing, results]
>
> "I was at the meeting in San Francisco when these results were
> announced in 1994, and I was really taken aback by the reaction to
> them. As someone who has, during a checkered career, been involved in
> a couple of large-scale engineering projects, I wasn't surprised at
> this type of 'failure.' In projects like this, the first trial
> *always* fails--think of the first American attempts at spaceflight.
> What surprised me was the reaction of the environmental scientists
> present. It was almost as if there was a collective sigh of relief, as
> if the prospect that humanity might find an easy way out of the
> greenhouse problem was just too much for them to bear. Having heard
> many of those same scientists advocate the large-scale planting of
> trees to pull carbon out of the air, I couldn't help wondering why they
> were so dismayed at the notion of growing phytoplankton instead."
>
> snark
It is unfortunate that some environmental scientists might not take an
idea seriously. But the figures I have seen do not indicate that iron
fertilization is in any way `an easy way out of the greenhouse problem'.
The estimates in the Nature articles and in other reports suggest that
this could reduce the percent of CO_2 in the atmosphere by at most 20 %
with 10 % a more likely figure. I am still not clear about what this
reduction is from but it is my impression from further elaboration in
sci.environment that this reduction is from
twice preindustrial revolution levels. If I understand correctly,
this is also a one time reduction which would not be compounded each
year since it is based on increasing the amount of phytopankton and that
most likely other nutrient limitations would come into play. But I
could be mistaken about that and I would appreciate it if someone would
clear up that point. In any case, in the face of growth at the
`business as usual' rates, even if the effect were compounded, there is
no way that a significant reduction of atmospheric growth rates for
CO_2 concentration would be occur this way. In addition, it is my
impression that calculations of the actual reduction in forcing based on
plausible models show it would not be very large.
Although I haven't recently read any discussion of planting trees as a
way of dealing with enhanced greenhouse forcing, it is also my
impression that the arithmetic does not add up there either. I
personally like trees and I plant them, but I don't expect them to
prevent climate change all by themselves. By the way, the major
proponent of planting trees, if I remember correctly, was the Bush
administration which proposed that as a way of reducing the growth rate
of atmospheric CO_2 concentrations without doing much in the way of
reducing fossil fuel emissions, which many people have somehow
considered an untouchable matter.
I might suggest two possible reasons why the author of the article might
have perceived a somewhat negative response to his presentation.
First, as indicated above, he may have been so unrealistic in his
preseentation of the possible uses of the method that his audience
reacted strongly to that.
Secondly, it might be that while most people are resonably comfortable
with the idea of planting trees in terms of its effects on the rest of
the biosphere, even those who have been doing these experiments have
pointed out that there may be unexpected and unwanted side effects of a
massive change in the ecology of the oceans. Not having to worry about
having to investigate that might easily relieve some biologists. In
other words, the possibility of using iron fertilization does not make
the problem of dealing with climate change easier to understand. It
adds yet another complication to an already too murky situation.
Having said all that, let me say that I support further research in this
area and I will not be relieved if it turns out to be of no significance
whatsoever as one means of controlling climate change. The problem of
greenhouse gases and climate change is quite complex. In addition to
the quantitative information I mentioned above, there is the question of
the other greenhouse gases which, depending on the time scale, are
likely to have significant effects comparable to that of CO_2. They
presumably won't be affected by iron fertilization. We will probably
have to use a variety of mechanisms for dealing with climate change
should it be as significant as current informed thought indicates is a
realistic possibility, and iron fertilization of the southern oceans may
indeed make a lot of sense at some point. But, he simplest thing to
do now is to take as many `no-regrets' measures as possible to reduce
the growth rate of fossil fuel emissions. Using the possibility of
iron fertilization as a way of reducing CO_2 concentration, when there
sare so many unknowns about that, as an excuse for not doing the most
obvious things seems to me to suggest a bias much stronger than any
supposedly `liberal bias' alleged at the Smithsonian. Unfortunately,
too many people look at these issues as liberal versus conservative.
They are not. We are talking about physics, chemistry, climatology,
biology, etc. If certain things happen in the atmosphere then there
are likely to be effects which we have to know about. We then have to
decide if there is anything that we could do about them or should do
about them on the basis of the best scientific knowledge we have.
Since we have only one planet, we can't try something and if it turns
out to fail, start all over again and do something else.
In this connection, I would like to refer to an article by Richard
Darman, hardly a liberal, which appeared in the N. Y. Times recently.
He mentioned that in economic and social matters we have too often
adopted policies without thoroughly exploring their consequences.
He mentioned various programs from the sixties and seventies as well as
the famous Laffer curve tax redductions, but he could just as well have
included the recent `welfare reform' legislation. These are things
that we as a people do regularly without having any scientific basis
whatsoever for believing that they will work. Yet if somone suggests
relatively modest measures such as energy efficiency improvements, it is
as if one were calling for the end of life as we know it. Much bettter
to just let thing go on as they are and then fix it up by dumping some
iron in the southern oceans. I detect in that a strong bias for doing
some very radical things but not doing other much less radical things.
Unfortunately ideology plays a very significant role in all of this, and
it would be better to try to avoid it as much as possible.
--
Leonard Evens len@math.nwu.edu 491-5537
Department of Mathematics, Norwthwestern University
Evanston Illinois
Subject: Re: Ozone hole=storm in a teacup
From: rparson@spot.Colorado.EDU (Robert Parson)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 20:35:51 GMT
In article <57qij9$53u$1@sydney.DIALix.oz.au>,
Greig Ebeling wrote:
>\yvind Seland (oyvindse@ulrik.uio.no) wrote:
>>" Estimates of the strength of the cross-tropopause residual circulation
>>indicate that nearly half of the mass above the 100-mb level is replaced in a
> ^^^^^
>>year by flow across the tropical tropopause."
> ^^^^^^^^
>
>>This does not give you the turn-over time since the stratosphere is
>>very stable, but it indicate nevertheless that the transport across the
>>tropopause is fairly large.
>
>This is not "mixing", but a description of the upward flow in the tropics.
In the good old days, Carl J. Lydick would usually step in
at this point. :-)
If the mass of the stratosphere is to be conserved, an upward flow
across the tropical tropopause has to be balanced by a downward flow
at higher latitudes. That is why it's called "troposphere-stratosphere
_exchange_."
Coincidentally, there is a paper on a related subject in the 22
November 1996 issue of _Science_, "Stratospheric mean ages and
transport rates from observations of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide",
K. A. Boering et al., _Science_ _274_, 1340, 1996. One quantity they
extract is the "mean age" of the air at various levels in the
stratosphere, i.e. the average time since the air at that level
entered the stratosphere. It is found to range from 1-2 years in
the lower stratosphere to ~5 years in the middle stratosphere.
Since the local density decreases exponentially with altitude,
this is not inconsistent with ~50% of the air in the stratosphere
being replaced in 1-2 years.
------
Robert
Subject: Re: So just why is capitalism so great?
From: api@axiom.access.one.net (Adam Ierymenko)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 18:56:08 GMT
In article <5818b0$80s_005@leeds.ac.uk>,
CDS4AW@leeds.ac.uk (A. Whitworth) writes:
>But if "losing ground" applies to a wider view than simply
>GNP/GDP, which are arbitrary and irrelevant measures, then
>the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor countries (or,
>if you like, those defined by the World Bank as
>"high-income", and everybody else) seems to indicate a
>failure. The disadvantaged in such countries, and in the
>developed world, are steadily losing their ability to
>effectively participate in the world economy and achieve
>control over their own lives. "Losing ground economically"
>is a very narrow statement. People's lives are much more
>than their economic lives.
Notice that the poorest countries are those who are not free and are not
capitalist.
>Everybody _could_ benefit, but as the system was originated
>in Europe, and spread to the rest of the world from there
>and from Europe's successor as world hegemons, the USA and
>(to a lesser degree) Japan, it seems that there is a certain
>implied racism in the system, now that you come to mention
>it. The way the world is set up at the moment benefits those
>nations the most. It's _not_ deliberate racism (at least, I
>hope not). But some nations, cultures and races definitely
>have an advantage over others at the moment. Call it racial
>stratification rather than racism.
I don't disagree that Europe exploited many other places in the world. This
is not capitalism. We call this slavery.
Subject: Re: Hanson's latest and Yuri's added errors.
From: wfhummel@netcom.com (William F. Hummel)
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 21:22:26 GMT
Don Dale (dale@princeton.edu) wrote:
: William Hummel wrote,
: >In simple terms, my objective is to achieve a more stable and harmonious
: >society. An essential ingredient is a large middle class and a far fewer
: >pockets of poverty and homelessness. For the last quarter century we have
: >been heading in the wrong direction. You don't have to worry about the
: >rich. They have far more personal comforts than they need, not to speak
: >of the political power they wield. The tax system should raise money for
: >the government AND help achieve equity. Wealth does not distribute itself
: >equitably of its own accord. In fact, without the moderating influence of
: >government, wealth would concentrate into fewer and fewer hands. If
: >there are other ways than taxation to moderate that concentration, fine.
: An eloquent statement of the morality of redistribution, with its
: consequent evasion of the right to property, not to mention judiciously
: chosen implicit definitions of "rich", "need", "political power" and
: "equity".
-----------
What nonsense! And coming no doubt from one of the privileged. The only
way you can have zero redistribution is to have a head tax, everyone pays
an equal amount. Even then the benefits of government spending will be
unequal. Does the farmer in Montana benefit as much as the fisherman in
Maine from money spent on the Coast Guard?
Morality is not the point. If it were, there would be far more reason to
seek greater equality of income. The issue I raise is tranquility, law and
order if you will, and the rich are in greatest danger by far. It is in
their own self-interest to avoid the extremes of wealth that now exist in
many countries where social unrest is just a spark away from riots. This
is not a hypothetical for one who saw the riots in Los Angeles in 1992.
The next time it will not involve just the underclass and the merchants
in their own locale.
: >: 4. More moderate tax rates collect more taxes than the very highest
: rates.
: >-----------
: >This smacks of the Laffer curve. It depends on where you start from.
: >There is no evidence to support this contention at the present tax rates,
: >and the Reagan tax cuts certainly don't support it when the rates were
: >even higher than they are now.
: It is a well known result of public finance that the optimal marginal tax
: rate at the very top is zero.
------------
Optimal in what sense, maximizing tax revenues or morality? In either case,
the optimal marginal tax rate can never be zero, and certainly not at the
very top income level.
William F. Hummel
Subject: Re: Paul & Anne Ehrlich's Betrayal of Science and Reason
From: tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 18:22:23 GMT
: On Tue, 26 Nov 1996 00:18:18 GMT, briand@net-link.net (Brian Carnell)
: wrote:
: >Well, notice how they lump all those people together. It's useful to
: >paint someone like Gregg Easterbrook as in the company of Dixie Lee
: >Ray or Rush Limbaugh.
URK! Pet peeve alert!
Easterbrook may be a liberal while Ray and Limbaugh are conservatives,
but all of them delivered less than competent representations of
scientific issues by starting with the conclusions and selecting
evidence to support those conclusions, rather than by examining
the balance of evidence to arrive at conclusions.
Advocacy pseudoscience, a.k.a., lawyers' science, all. Easterbrook's
moderate coloring probably did the most severe disservice of all.
By being well-respected among journalists and still indulging in
the worst sort of advocacy science he has done a lot of damage to
intelligent debate about open questions in environmental policy.
His Newsweek article on global warming is a paradigm of journalistic
incompetence: a spectrum of opinion among competent workers is
misrepresented as two hordes of screeching opponents.
The man personifies the failure of mainstream journalism in helping
contemporary democracies deal with complex issues.
(See Newsweek, June 1, 1992, pp 24 ff, for a stunning example of
incompetent science reporting in the mainstream press.)
mt
Subject: Re: Hanson's latest and Yuri's added errors.
From: mturton@stsvr.showtower.com.tw (Michael Turton)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 23:00:39 GMT
>Goods ain't the only thing, baby. Nobody in the world has to
put up >with drinking water as foul as Chicago's (and Chicago is on the
shore >of a fairly clean lake!), Nobody else has America's crime rate,
and >nobody else has as many sanctimonious assholes preaching at them
on >the radio.
> >The real wealth lies in having a decent community.
>
>
>-dlj.
It would be nice if the assertions in the first paragraph
were true, but they are patently false. Chicago may have foul
drinking water but it is nowhere near as bad as Taipei's where I live.
It is true that America has a high rate of violent crime
compared to Japan or Europe, but it has relatively less of other types of
crime. Compared to Taiwan, usually thought of abroad as a safe country,
America (aside from violent crime) is a much stabler and safer place to
live. Gangsters in Taiwan are far more numerous and influential than in
the US. Companies evade taxes (according to the central bank the
island has the highest rates of tax evasion in the world) and commit
environmental crimes far less in America than in Taiwan. Compared to
Taiwan, the law still has teeth and is respected in the States (it's a
common saying here "there's no law in Taiwan."). The bureacracy here is
far more corrupt than in the US and the police here are simply on another
planet -- in Taiwan policemen are common owners of brothels. Prostitution
is more common here -- Taipei alone has more than 200,000 women working
part or full-time in a city of 2.6 million (police figures) ; the island as
a whole is estimated by women's groups to have more than 500,000 (total pop
~22M). Cons and scams are far more common here than in the State, and if I
have a disagreement with a business gangsters will not show up to enforce
the business' side of the dispute, as happens in Taiwan. And
iticians....whew! I could go on all day, from the legislator who boasts
he is the spiritual advisor to the island's leading crime gang to
the President showing up for funerals of prominent mobsters. Both the
ruling aprty and the opposition fund themselves by land speculation
based on control of lucrative city council posts. Because of strict land
use rules there are common crimes here relating to illegal use of land
which have no parallel in the States. Illegal factories abound, as do all
sorts of illegal retail establishments. And of course, food regs are
routinely ignored in practice and Taiwan's food supply is probably the most
dangerous in the world -- the brain cancer rate for vegetarians in
ten times that of meat-eaters, thanks to the chemicals in the tofu and in
vegetables. A person who dies of cancer due to illegal food additives is
just as dead as one gunned down in the street.
More fundamentally, the claim that Taiwan is safe, often
made in the lit and believed by casual visitors, rests upon the
(ideological) assumption that when the State commits political murder it is
not a "crime." More than 120,000 people had vanished here by 1960 during
the purges (according to some authors), roughly 1% of the population in
1960. America may be violent, but 1% of the population has not been
murdered (yet ).
Mike Turton
sci.energy removed due to complaints
Subject: Re: Hanson's latest and Yuri's added errors.
From: "Don Dale"
Date: 5 Dec 96 13:53:11 -0500
William Hummel wrote,
>In simple terms, my objective is to achieve a more stable and harmonious
>society. An essential ingredient is a large middle class and a far fewer
>pockets of poverty and homelessness. For the last quarter century we have
>been heading in the wrong direction. You don't have to worry about the
>rich. They have far more personal comforts than they need, not to speak
>of the political power they wield. The tax system should raise money for
>the government AND help achieve equity. Wealth does not distribute itself
>equitably of its own accord. In fact, without the moderating influence of
>government, wealth would concentrate into fewer and fewer hands. If
>there are other ways than taxation to moderate that concentration, fine.
An eloquent statement of the morality of redistribution, with its
consequent evasion of the right to property, not to mention judiciously
chosen implicit definitions of "rich", "need", "political power" and
"equity".
>: 4. More moderate tax rates collect more taxes than the very highest
rates.
>-----------
>This smacks of the Laffer curve. It depends on where you start from.
>There is no evidence to support this contention at the present tax rates,
>and the Reagan tax cuts certainly don't support it when the rates were
>even higher than they are now.
It is a well known result of public finance that the optimal marginal tax
rate at the very top is zero.
Don
Subject: Re: Wind Power
From: kencorn@clark.net (Kenneth T. Cornelius)
Date: 5 Dec 1996 23:19:16 GMT
Organization: Clark Internet Services, Inc., Ellicott City, MD USA
Distribution:
Well, isn't this an interesting thread? Here we are in a newsgroup
called sci.energy, talking about windpower, and it seems to be a novel
concept to lots of people! It is nice to see Mike Bergey here, though.
I'm willing to contribute to the discussion, but I have some questions,
too. It's nice to see that there might be someone here with answers.
I'm going to use Dan Evens' earlier comments as a framework for my own.
Dan's address implies that he is associated with a Canadian hydropower
outfit, and initially at least could be expected to be sympathetic to
renewable power generally. Surprisingly, he seems quite hostile (as
well as uninformed). Let's admit right off the bat that windpower does
have some effect on the environment. So does hydropower. It is
difficult to think of any human activity that doesn't. What we should
be comparing it to, however, is fossil and nuclear power generation.
That contest would be a gimmee.
How much land is needed to run 120,000 windmills? Wrong question. Ask
how much land is needed to generate X joules of electricity? It depends
on how big the turbines are. Whether we use 10kw Bergeys or megawatt
utility-grade machines makes a difference. The big guys have rotors on
the order of 60 m in diameter and in a wind farm are spaced maybe three
diameters apart across the wind and eight along the wind (your mileage
may vary). Figure it out. Of course the space that is made unavailable
is perhaps 5% of this. What's left on the ground is access roads and
pylon foundations. All the rest of the land is still free for many
other uses--grazing, cultivation, or even habitation.
How much land is needed to generate the entire energy requirement for
the U. S. and Canada? A lot, but we got it, and we can always add
solar. If we really get serious about windmills, they'll be a familiar
sight, and some people might not like that. Of course, the mid-atlantic
and southeast part of the U. S. where I live is also the poorest place
for windpower. Most of the activity would be centered on the plains
states.
How noisy are they? The fact is that they're not very noisy. The
quietest machines make less noise that the wind blowing around them. A
lot of work has gone into designing quiet airfoils. I don't know about
the smaller machines. There was a farm with a bunch of small Jacobs
machines on Hawaii that sounded like a sailing marina with all the
halyards slapping against the masts on a windy day on the day I visited
it. That was some years ago, though, and it didn't look as though
anyone had paid too much attention to balancing blades. Even there the
noise wasn't so much from the aerodynamic noises as from stuff
vibrating.
Bird strikes? Yep, but it's not a serious problem even for the Audubon
Society. Don't put turbines in a migratory path such as around
Tenerif and use pylons instead of lattice towers. That pretty well does
it. Sure an occasional bird gets whacked. I almost clobbered a
Golden Eagle with my motorcycle once. Birds are not all that smart.
Cutting down trees? I think someone mentioned that there aren't lots of
trees where the winds blow. Anyway, there seem to be plenty of people
who want to cut down trees that have nothing to do with wind power.
Oil? Sure there will be the occasional drip from lubrication and
hydraulic systems. That's why God made drip pans.
Summing up, it would be hard to conceive of a more environmentally
benign gadget than a wind turbine. No CO2, NOX, or CO. Further, using
them would mean that the U. S. no longer has to storm deserts and worry about
what the Saudis or Israelis, among others, like and dislike.
Economically, technically, and more than likely politically, there seem
to be problems; perhaps less with the first two than the last. My
questions are in this arena.
I've just been reading some of the National Energy Research Laboratory
(NREL) stuff discussing the current and future state of windpower. It
really looks terrific--sell me some stock quick, someone! Currently
we're at close to $.05/kWhr with a projected price in ten years or so of
something like $.038. Further, today windpower can work with the
existing technology without provision for energy storage until it forms
a far larger proportion of generating capacity. That means a tremendous
amount of windpower capital can right now be added to the mix and used
profitably, and we've got a long way to go to reach that point.
There are some caveats, naturally. For one thing I suspect without
being able to prove it that the five cents per kilowatthour figure
derives from cherrypicking, so I've got to be a bit dubious about it.
Pick the best wind site in the country and stand back and cheer as the
little joules march by. For another, the 3.8 cent figure depends on
continued research, something that is far from certain to be funded.
The main technical obstacle to a complete switchover to wind is the fact
that the wind don't blow all the time. Energy storage is vital. One
way to go is wind-electrolysed water and H2 fuel cells. There are
undoubtedly others, but lots of development needs to be done.
Up to right here I've been pretty sure of myself--gimmee a 98 for
confidence level. From this point on, better make it maybe 20. I'm
speculating and waving my arms about.
A couple or three years ago there was quite a stir in the windpower
business, such as it was. Seemed like all kinds of people were snoofing
about scouting wind sites, making big talk and much smoke. One big
project that I recall was Northern Power and Kenetech near a place in
southern Minnesota called Buffalo Ridge. Kenetech had gone public with
stock at $16 and it went to about $22 before beginning a long slide to
Chapter 11 and its current value of 9 (cents, that is). The whole
windpower thingy just deflated suddenly for some reason. I am trying to
figure out just why that was. A whole industry gets killed off and the
papers don't even mention it.
It seems obvious that congress pulled the rug out somehow. Likely
this was done at the behest of the oil industry. But who, when, and
what? C'est la question. Anyone care to testify?
--
Kenneth T. Cornelius
kencorn@clark.net
