October 11, 2025

The notion that humans are infinitely repairable machines is absurd.

We're not like the automobiles in Jay Leno's garage where even the exotic stuff like Chrysler turbine cars can be repaired.

From an evolutionary perspective humans who had fully functional grandparents around, biological or adopted, were more likely to survive. Longevity beyond getting our grandchildren to reproductive age was mostly irrelevant. After that we humans become less functional, eventually suffer some fatal system failure, and get recycled into the biosphere.

I don't think there is any magical way to sidestep that reality. I'm not saying it's not worth trying, but not to the extent that people already living are deprived of necessities and comforts.

The end point of medical progress is that is we all die of our own unique diseases or highly improbable accidents. As we approach that limit medicine becomes increasingly difficult. If we haven't hit the point of rapidly diminishing returns yet, at least for the more affluent members of society, we may be getting close.

I tend to associate this line of thought with the Fermi Paradox. In this universe certain things may not be possible. Faster-than-light travel might be one, time travel another. It's also possible that the longevity of naturally evolved intelligent beings such as ourselves is constrained in ways we do not understand and could not change even if we did. It may be impossible to maintain complex systems such as ourselves and the systems required to sustain us across light year distances at sub-light speeds.

In any case there's no point in building environmentally destructive and expensive supercomputers to find new drugs if that environmental destruction and economic displacement these supercomputers cause kill more people than any potential medical discovery would help.

March 2, 2025

The site formerly known as twitter no longer exists in my personal internet universe.

Here on DU I wish I had the option of auto-trashing links to the site. Instead I put people who compulsively post those links on full ignore.

Scrolling through Musk's trashy site and reposting whatever crap you find there here on DU is largely a passive activity and doesn't actually make the world a better place.

You've got to confront people face to face -- family, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. You don't have to be mean, but you ought to let them know where you stand. Sending money to agencies of resistance and relief for victims of this maladministration is another positive pursuit.

December 29, 2024

How extreme car dependency is driving Americans to unhappiness

Automobiles are bad for the environment no matter what powers them. They are also a cause of unhappiness and misery for many people, especially for lower income people who are literally forced to own and maintain automobiles under threat of economic ruin and homelessness.

Automobiles do not make us free. The television advertisements are a lie.

The people with the smallest environmental footprints generally live in cities and don't own cars. We ought to be rebuilding our cities, turning them into attractive affordable places where car ownership is unnecessary.

Electric cars (or even worse, hydrogen powered cars...) will not save the world. We will be a happier and healthier people in the long run if we start tearing down highways rather than building more.

November 6, 2024

The typical U.S. American voter is stupid, mean, and fearful of the future.

They wrongly believe that bullies like Trump, equally incurious as they are, will stand up for them.

I can't claim to be disappointed, it was made very clear to me as a young man, sometimes by extreme acts of violence, that I would never be accepted into their communities because I was among those they feared. I'm completely alienated from the affluent 99% white middle class world I grew up in. There's no way in hell I would ever go back.

I'll not be suffering the foolishness of the Trump voter however this turns out. I will not let them live in my head and I will not be afraid.

October 19, 2024

Solar and wind power are the best thing that ever happened for the natural gas industry...

... and the gas industry knows it.

Any ignorant Texas politician who disagreed would probably face a back-room "reeducation" by blunt object. That might not change what they tell their gullible constituents, but they'd certainly never say "NO" to the likes of Elon Musk, Waren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, or Google.

Projects like this will only prolong our dependence on natural gas and do nothing in the long run to reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses humans eventually dump into the atmosphere.

The best capacity factors claimed for large solar projects in the California deserts is 28%. (This is probably an exaggeration.) This means solar is unable to meet electrical demand 72% of the time. California burns gas when the sun isn't shining.

The capacity factors for typical home solar power systems in California is less than 20%, often much less.

Wind and solar power alone are not economically viable without fossil fuels, especially natural gas.

The actual useful output of this scheme is not equivalent to an 875 megawatt nuclear or fossil fuel plant running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as this article implies. The carbon intensity of the overall hybrid system is at best about 4/5 that of a purely natural gas fueled system. This project is 875 megawatts of intermittent solar power applied to 875 megawatts of filthy fossil fuel power as greenwash.

If google built an actual 875 megawatt nuclear power plant they wouldn't need the fossil fuel or solar power plants and their carbon intensity would be vastly reduced.

That is an entirely different nightmare, of course. Would nuclear powered Artificial Intelligence actually make our world a better place?

June 11, 2024

I went to the Natrium website where they say it can power 250,000 to 400,000 homes.

I've said previously that "homes" is a misleading and even childish unit for measuring energy, but I also know that the average relatively innumerate "layperson" isn't going to be wrapping their heads around exajoules anytime soon.

Residential use accounts for close to 20% of the energy used in the U.S.A..

From that, we can conclude from TerraPower's own figures that one of these plants could support the entirely carbon-free middle class lifestyles of 50,000 to 80,000 U.S. Americans.

If we want to make the math easy, which I do, we might say that one of these reactors could support the basic necessities of clean water, healthy food, and comfortable basic housing for 500,000 to 800,000 people.

The Natrium website gives the obligatory nod to wind and solar power, which is always amusing. If you build enough nuclear power plants you don't need wind or solar power. The converse is not true.

Unfortunately it seems that any new energy resources are going to be used on Artificial Intelligence (or Idiocy, depending how you look at it) and new energy-intensive tools for spying on people.

May 21, 2024

Stuff that makes me optimistic about the future and stuff that does not.

Just rambling here.

Stuff that makes me optimistic:

Vegan, vegetarian, and low meat diets.

We talk about fossil fuels so much we forget that agriculture is the other way humans are destroying the natural environment. This includes turning crops into fossil fuel substitutes like ethanol, biodiesel, or supposedly "green" jet fuels. I oppose factory farm meat and dairy production. It's bad for the environment, it's bad for the workers in those industries, and it's especially bad for the animals.

My wife eats a vegetarian diet, approaching vegan. I'm mostly vegetarian as a means of reducing my environmental footprint. I've learned to cook without meat, and have found good substitutes for meat and dairy products in all my cooking.

I look forward to a time when the most popular burger at the local fast food places are not made of meat. I can already buy such burgers at many of our local fast food places, including McDonalds.

Three positive and proven ways of halting human population growth.

These three ways are the economic and political empowerment of women, easy access to birth control, and realistic sex education. Regressive forces in human societies oppose all three. Pushing back against these forces is the most effective sort of activism any environmentalist can engage in.

Dam removals

Dam removals and the restoration of formerly wild rivers makes me happy.

Maybe someday soon we can tear down the dams at Hetch Hetchy and Glen Canyon instead of leaving them as potential time bombs for future generations to deal with.

Alas there are some people who would build even more dams to support their renewable energy follies.

Important technologies

Plastic pipe is one not often talked about. With that we can bring clean water and indoor plumbing to everyone in the world. We can also carry away wastewater. There are eight billion people on earth. Other forms of plumbing, especially copper, have huge environmental footprints.

Nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely. High temperature reactors would be well suited to the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers and plastics with neutral, or even negative, carbon dioxide emissions. We've probably passed the point where organic farming can feed all eight billion of us. That doesn't mean we currently use the nitrogen fertilizers we produce using fossil fuels wisely. Nuclear power can also be used to desalinate water.

Electric high speed rail can replace fossil fueled airliners for trips of less than 500 miles and its a lot more comfortable too.

Stuff that does not make me optimistic about the future.

And then there are the ugly, the "green" distractions that will only prolong our use of fossil fuels and further damage whatever is left of the natural environment as we know it:

- Electric cars.

This planet cannot support a car for every adult human, no matter what those cars are powered by. It's not just the cars, it's the expensive infrastructure that supports our car cultures as well. We ought to be rebuilding our cities, turning them into attractive affordable places where car ownership is unnecessary.

- Large scale wind and solar developments on previously undeveloped land.

These will not "save the world" as they are entirely dependent on fossil fuels for their economic viability and will only prolong our use of them. "We had to destroy the environment in order to save it!" is not an ethical position.

East of Denver, Colorado, I've noticed the scars left on the land by wind development look pretty much the same as the scars left by gas development.

The wind, solar, and natural gas industries coexist in a morbid symbiosis. The wind and solar enthusiasts like to pretend this isn't so.

- Fusion power

For various reasons, some of them still unknown, fusion may never be a practical energy resource. The world burns as we wait for some miracle that never comes

- Batteries.

Even if batteries were as cheap as dirt the number of them required to support a modern electric grid at even 99% reliability through times of no sun and no wind is entirely ludicrous. (And 99% is more than three days a year without electricity.)

Wealthy people might live unattached to the electric grid with their huge solar arrays, battery packs, wood stoves, and stand-by fossil fuel generators, but they never explain how all eight billion of us could do that. The problems of wind and solar power are largely the same at any scale, from a tiny house to a national electric grid.

- Conservation

Try explaining that to someone who can't afford shoes, let alone a bicycle. If we choose to avoid a great die-off of the human population we'll need more energy, not less.

November 14, 2023

Knowing how to fall without breaking your neck is an important life skill.

More important, actually, than not falling.

November 2, 2023

We should just stick with the names Adam and maybe later his "helper" Eve gave them...

... as later inventoried by Noah and his family on the Ark.

My personal take is that the author of that was possibly being sarcastic too. Name all the animals? Are you fucking kidding me?

Naming all the animals really wasn't a possibility before Carl Linnaeus applied eighteenth century accounting technology to the task.

Personally, I'd like to know what names people who lived here in the Americas gave these birds before the European invasion. I'm certain these birds had Native American names. Naming is what humans do.

May 16, 2023

I used to be an anti-nuclear activist, and a radical one at that.

When I first started posting on DU I was a little less radical, but still on the anti-nuclear side of the fence.

I thought renewable energy could save the world.

Alas that experiment has been done and the numbers are in. It's clear that aggressive renewable energy schemes in places like California, Denmark, and Germany have failed. They're not economically viable without substantial fossil fuel inputs, especially natural gas. No amount of hand waving about batteries, hydrogen, pumped hydro, or any other energy storage scheme changes that. It has to do with thermodynamics. Human laws and creative accounting can't change that.

California, for example, already has many gigawatts of solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage schemes. You can subtract fossil fuels out of California's energy mix and model any sort of renewable energy utopia you like. None of them look good, none of them scaled up can support eight billion people.

If we don't quit fossil fuels now billions of humans are going to suffer and die because of global warming.

It's not much better if we switch to fully "renewable" energy sources. Billions of people would suffer and die, mostly for lack of food, clean water, and adequate shelter.

We've worked ourselves into a corner. Eight billion humans are dependent on high density energy sources for food, shelter... our very survival. Most of that energy now comes from fossil fuels.

The only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which we must do, is nuclear power.

Claiming that renewable energy will save the world is just another flavor of climate change denial.

Many of the arguments I hear from renewable energy enthusiasts remind me of the arguments I hear from Creationists. These arguments somehow make sense to the creationist, but they make no sense to anyone living outside their bubble.

For many of the anti-nuclear activists I used to work with, some of them I'm still in occasional contact with, their activism was essentially a religious belief. Atomic bombs and atomic power were the apple in the garden of Eden that Satan was tempting mankind with.

It might not be coincidence that I first met Helen Caldicott when I was an impressionable (and slightly psychotic teen) in the community room of a Lutheran church. That's how I fell in with an anti-nuclear crowd. They could use a university library researcher and dumpster diver. I loved university libraries and dumpsters.

Like any otherwise sane human I abhor nuclear weapons. I remember as a kid the cold war nuclear drills, diving under our desks when the alarm went off with our butts facing the windows, ready to kiss our asses good-bye. I'm glad my children only knew the fire and earthquake drills. The earthquake drills were similar to the cold war drills, but you got to leave the classroom when the shaking stopped. When I was teaching we had a big earthquake, and we spent most of the rest of the day out on the playground until the buildings had been inspected for serious damage. That wouldn't have been the case if the USSR had dropped a bomb on us. My students and my children didn't worry about "The Bomb" as I had as a kid. There is some sanity in the world, all these years since Fat Man.

As I've said, I've changed my mind about nuclear power. In a world where toxic wastes of every kind imaginable, most with a half life of fucking FOREVER, I'm not going to worry about a little plutonium unaccounted for amidst the horrific death toll of a tsunami. I'm absolutely certain worse shit was spilled in the tsunami, carcinogens and mutagens of all sorts, but it was the kind of familiar shit we ignore in our daily lives.