Two of my major hobbyhorses, energy and terrorism have come into focus rather sharply in the last week or so, so perhaps that's the trigger I need for another Blog post. The terrorism thing first.
Again the fundie Muslims are bent out of shape about cartoons, and this time it's South Park. I haven't watched it in years, but I remember that for good or ill they take no prisoners when they have something they want to say. Their attempts to portray Mohammed (in a bear suit) caused a paroxysm of self-censorship from Comedy Central and a tepid, scarcely noticeable debate in the media about freedom of speech. There were some vague threats from a couple of disgruntled wannabe jihadists in the US and corporations started staining their britches.
Admittedly terrorist acts are one of the things that insurance usually doesn't cover, but again we see the fear-based religious double-standard. Mock the Christians as grossly as possible (and boy, do they go there!) but the worst thing they'll do (vanishingly rare individual exceptions aside) is picket you. Usually that is reserved for abortion clinics, and almost always kept within the laws of trespass and harassment. Equally, no Buddhist fatwas will descend on you for being insufficiently enlightened, but the slightest hint that some Muslim, somewhere, might object to what you say and you're scrambling for cover? Cowardly at best, submissive at worst.
So no big surprise this past weekend that there was an inept car bomb in front of Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom, in Times Square NY. I am relieved that the perp was so incompetent (I guess his internet bomb plans weren't so great), but others in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are not so lucky. The most recent thing I've seen is very specific to the U.S. but a good example for the contortions lefties will go through to make things conform to their pre-determined worldview. That is an entire book in it self, but the continuing see-no-jihad attitude of many of the liberal media simply put denies demonstrable reality.
Nothing really new there, so on to the oil spill. Since 20 April 2010 (two weeks ago as I write this) when the rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and later sank the well that it was drilling has been spewing out thousands of barrels of oil a day. Happening as it is in the Gulf of Mexico, there are lots of easily accessible beaches to see the damage this will eventually cause there, and of course there is major fishery action in that area, so this is a serious environmental disaster, or at least it looks like it will be. The oil is coming from over 5,000 ft down which complicates capping it, but is also causing a lot of it to not make the surface. This is something new, and no-one really knows how long it'll take to stop and what the environmental effect will be.
Of course this happens soon after Obama approved more offshore drilling, and the political reaction is pretty predictable. None of that changes the fact that we continue to need the oil, so wishing it away is not practical and won't happen. I have thrown my $0.02 into a discussion of this with some people I sort-of know, and there were proposals of things like raising the price of gas to $3/L to get people off of it. This isn't like cigarettes or booze that if it's more expensive people will simply use less. There are places to cut consumption certainly (no more Sunday drives for you) but I will continue to point out the effect on food and other things requiring transportation.
It's a popular Green position (not always baldly stated) that there are too many of us. Personally I agree; I have no idea what the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet is, but what I do know is that the higher our technology, the larger that number will be. Sufficiently high technology will give us essentially unlimited electricity which will eliminate most if not all pollution from power generation and reduce our per-capita footprint. Regardless of this, you don't get something for nothing in this universe, and the tech for this does not yet exist. There is an environmental cost/impact to anything that we have to build, and a lot of the "green' alternatives are causing more real problems than a nuclear power plant, the only viable non
carbon-generating source that is proven to be scalable to replace our reliance on fossil fuels.
Wind turbines are a blight on the landscape and they slaughter flying things by the thousands. Small individual ones to provide more juice at the household level (as conditions permit!) are a good idea, and that's the sort of thing that should be supported; if there's already a house there, putting a small wind turbine on it has negligible additional environmental impact, even multiplied by the number of them there would then be. Likewise solar panels installed on your roof. Big fields of them take up agricultural or nature space with undeniable environmental
impact and I'll throw it out there (for you to check!) that it takes c.30 years for a solar panel to generate the amount of energy it took to produce it. I have no proof for that as yet, but smarter people than I also think that it sounds plausible.
An argument I have used in the past was to compare the environmental "footprint" of a hydro project versus a nuclear power plant. Everyone gets their shorts in a bunch about disposing of the waste, but even a pessimistic storage forecast writes off MUCH less land than flooding hundreds of km2 with a reservoir. I personally have a real hate for wind farms, and I also consider them a scam. It is one of the least effective ways to generate industrial levels of electricity, and it is not (and won't be under any conditions I can see in my lifetime) cost-effective. I'd rather back onto a nuclear power plant than a wind farm, and that's because I understand both of them. The "wop-wop-wop" of the blades would drive me insane long before I would die of old age, which is the only health risk of living next to a properly engineered and run nuclear plant. See my previous post about the worst-case scenario of any First-World nuclear plant (ok, it was Three Mile Island, and it didn't even make anyone sick despite mostly melting down).
What is common to both of these things? The media of course. "They tell you your opinions, and they're very good indeed"; verily, a pox upon it. That's not the way the media is supposed to be of course. It should represent a plethora of diverse views, but the major media outlets are all owned by a handful of conglomerates so diversity of views is restricted. This is where the internet (the parts not invented by Al Gore at least) comes in. Instead of pamphleteers toiling over expensive and relatively rare presses in their basements and workshops, we now have millions of people all capable of putting what they think out there. Most of it is poorly researched (if at all) but increasingly that isn't much of a distinction from the "Mainstream Media". Fact-checking is more and more left to the blogosphere, with predictably uneven results and dissemination thereof.
Unlike the days when Walter Cronkite could end each news broadcast with "and that's the way it is" there are a load of sources for whatever you want to know. Iranians used cell phone cameras to show the world what their government is doing to them, and there is more and more like this each year. It's a bitch to filter and prone to exploitation or blockage, but the truth is indeed out there if you care to look. Competition is a good thing for our media, economy, and by extension for our environment and security. You don't have to "fight the power" all the time, but you certainly should fact-check it. Hell, fact-check me; I'm pretty sloppy here, but I'm up front about that as I am with my agenda, at least as much as I know what it is myself...
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