alt.energy.renewable

On Mar 10, 8:48 pm, Fran wrote:
> On Mar 11, 4:09 am, Dan Bloomquist wrote:
>
>
>
> > Fran wrote:
>
> > > Everybody is in the 'our' group. It's part of the commons. Some of
> > > 'us' are clearly spruiking some commercial interest or another. That's
> > > spamming, but it doesn'rt exclude spammers from being amongst 'us' or
> > > spoiling the commons.
>
> > So it starts by making a distinction between the 'us'.
>
> > > Consider a communal house. I've lived in a few. Let's say someone is
> > > slack cleaning up their mess in the kitchen. One might say at a house
> > > meeting "when will the inconsiderate stop messing up our kitchen after
> > > they've eaten?"
>
> > Now there is governance, a deciding body. The body decides to admonish
> > the 'violator'. It is a punishment.
>
> Not necessarily. Perhaps those who violate will take the hint without
> sanction.
>
>
>
> > > The 'our' does not exclude, but it does attack those seeking to misuse
> > > the commons to get private advantage.
>
> > And if the violator refuses to reform?
>
> It depends on what the violation is, the context, the harms etc ...
>
>
>
> > >> So it clearly implies an intent of
> > >> 'ownership'. To move the goal post to 'me' is irrelevant as 'me' is a
> > >> part of your 'our'.
>
> > >>> Even going no further than the syntax, this was silly. I said
> > >>> nothing at all about 'law enforcement' nor implied it.
> > >> 'Our' implies ownership.
>
> > > It implies a common interest, which is not necessarily the same as
> > > ownership.
>
> > If there is governance, there is rule and rights to property. You need
> > permission to post on 'my' blog.
>
> Indeed, which means that your blog is not part of the commons. Yet the
> general access given to unmoderated newsgroups makes them part of the
> commons. There is a kind of governance of course. In some states of
> the US laws about cyber bullying and stalking are being developed. One
> can, in theory be sued for defamation. Criminal use of the medium is
> also possible in areas like national security, pornography etc.
>
> > > What about public roads? Are they 'our roads'? Does our imply shared
> > > space or owned space?
>
> > The use of the road is a privilege. The road is owned by the state.
>
> Yet anyone can use them. Pedestrians, even non-citizens don't trespass
> by their presence.
>
> > The
> > state enforces 'proper' use. The road is not a 'common' in the old
> > meaning of the term.
>
> Yet conceptually, the distinctions are moot. I need not have a licence
> to walk or ride a bicycle on public roads.
>
>
>
> > >> Ownership requires enforcement. And that
> > >> clearly contradicts, 'common'. Go figure.....
>
> > > Not necessarily, unless one wants to include in enforcement, social
> > > pressure, taboo and so forth. The laws against littering are rarely
> > > enforced, but many people observe them anyway, especially if they
> > > think others are watching because they don't like the idea of
> > > embarrassment. There's no law about how close behind somebody one may
> > > stand at an ATM, but almost everybody stays at least 6 feet back
> > > because closer would seem threatening. People shush their kids in
> > > theatres, hold lift doors for people running and negotiate changes in
> > > laned traffic according to cultural convention. Neither rules nor
> > > enforcement are always necessary.
>
> > It is nice when folks cooperate and are polite. But if someone starts
> > stepping on toes, there will be enforcement.
>
> Perhaps, ultimately, but in many cases 'enforcement' is informal.
>
> > > So too it is with this place. I'd like the spammers to stop. I can't
> > > stop them though and don't wink at coercion. I do believe that when
> > > the financial interests of the global polluters club are dissipated,
> > > that almost all of this anti-biofuel anti-AGW spamming will stop.
>
> > I wish AGW were really our biggest concern.
>
> The health of the biosphere is a top order concern, and within that
> AGW, as a trigger factor is huge. In 2003, for example, the Pentagon
> in an exercise in 'thinking the unthinkable' (their words) tried to
> model what might happen if and when the Gulf Stream was stopped by
> admixture of glacial melt water to the North Atlantic. The Gulf Stream
> may not stop in our life times, or even those of our grandchildren,
> but it's a remote possibility, and a terrifying one, given that pretty
> much the entire habitable surface of the planet is intensively
> occupied.
>
> There are other scenarios in which rising CO2 negatively affects the
> transpiration of plants in the Amazon, contributing about 20% of the
> decline in rainfall being experienced as a consequence of extended El
> Nino and other events. As the plants dry and heat rises, savanna
> spreads in place of trees, and decomposition of biomass accelerates,
> the Amazon is transformed from a CO2 sink to a CO2 emitter and a flux,
> the order of magnitude of which is larger than anything we've known
> before follows, and then we really do have a run away escalation. Some
> say that this might happen as early as 2040.
>
> This would not not merely be an 'environmental' catastrophe, but a
> human one. That biosphere is our life support system. There are no
> other biospheres to live in. We protect it or we live in misery or
> perhaps not at all. Given the way the world is organised, it's not
> hard to see who'd be hurt worst and how the privileged would go about
> seeing to it that they were as little inconvenienced as possible. The
> overheads of protecting all those threatened lifestyles and property
> would not be cheap, and come necessarily at the expense of the mass of
> the populace.
>
> > As far as biofuels from
> > crops, I think it is a sham. And I think that because of what the
> > numbers say.
>
> Well I don't believe biofuels are the whole answer by any means.
> Plainly, we humans have to start finding ways to consume less each.
> Biofuels could be a transitional technology, bridging the growing gap
> between crude oil availability and demand for it. With serious effort,
> it's not unreasonable to think that fossil oil demand could be made to
> plateau by about 2015, and actually decline over the next few decades,
> blunting the price shock effect of declining reserves and spiralling
> prices and allowing time for new more sustainable technologies to take
> up the burden. Biofuels can buy us time. They are, along with a number
> of other measures, a 'keeping wolf from the door' technology.
>
> > Fran,
> > I'd like to see a sane world. Years ago I pointed out that we would soon
> > use up the spare capacity of Saudi Arabia and there would be no more.
>
> Right now the morlochs are thinking of burrowing into the sea floor in
> the Arctic for more. It's claimed that there are more "Saudi Arabia's"
> there and with extended ice melt ...
>
> > The idea was generally treated as a canard. "Limits to Growth" was held
> > up as evidence to my fallacy.
>
> >http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3551
>
> > I've talked about how our financial system was becoming very fragile and
> > would be incapable adjusting to the 'limit'. Here we are. The fed needs
> > to support the bubbles on one hand but is face with resource inflation.
> > An impossible conundrum.
>
> > We can talk about crop fuels and nuclear and solar. But they will be
> > part of a world much different than this for those who survive.
>
> The world must change. It's not sustainable. We are doing the macro
> equivalent of living off money stored in the mattress by our parents
> and tossing our crap out into the streets to save being charged for
> garbage collection. It's going to be hard to compete with the cost and
> convenience of doing that, especially since those feeding off it have
> grown massively in number. It's going to cost us more to live in a way
> that averts transferring our costs to successive generations. Yet if
> we start changing now, then it might not cost us all that much more,
> and we should definitely go that way.

Fran, you DON'T GET IT! The warming that is committed by the carbon
we've already burned is..... committed, too late to do anything about
that now, we already burned it. As for the future, we simply don't
have the carbon to do this again! That means that A) you're right,
change is inevitable. B) Dan's right, AGW is the absolute least of
our worries. and C) It is probably already too late to make the
changes that would allow life to continue in an orderly fashion.

In an ideal world, we would transition to a more public
transportattion intensive densified population regime powered by
nuclear power. That'd be great.... if we'd started 20 years ago. We
DIDN'T!

That means that the very best that we can hope for (and I mean HOPE)
is to drill everywhere possible for every shred of oil that we can
find, while simultaneously building nuclear power plants and wind-
farms as fast as we can make them come off the line. At the SAME time
building coal to liquid plants, wood pellet mills, and every other
economical or even marginal source of btus and killowatt hours we can
reasonably lay hand to. At the SAME time, we need to heavily
prioritize development of the PHEV and a vast expansion of the
electric generation and distribution systems. All of this needs to be
done with an absolute minimum of legislative, litigious, and process
resistance. Anything less than ALL of that will result in the end of
technological civilization in all probability.

We do not have the luxury of "wanting" to do things in a "friendly"
manner, we're gonna die if we don't fix this, starting right now and
on a truly massive scale.