Fossil Fuel Technology Quotes

Looking more closely at Earth’s atmospheric fingerprints, human biomarkers will also include sulfuric, carbonic, and nitric acids, and other components of smog from the burning of fossil fuels. If the curious aliens happen to be socially, culturally, and technologically more advanced than we are, then they will surely interpret these biomarkers as convincing evidence for the absence of intelligent life on Earth.

The open secret of our relationship to climate is how good we are at living in different climates thanks to technology.

All measures of conservation, as well as all technologies meant to wean us from fossil fuels, are worth pursuing in the same way that doing something is always more than doing nothing.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.

The explosive development of technology was analogous to the grown of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power.

There are two lessons here: First, weather, climate, and climate change matter—but not nearly as much as they used to, thanks to technology. Climate livability is not just a matter of the state of the global climate system, but also of the technology (or lack thereof) that we have available to deal with any given climate. Second, having that technology is useless unless we have the energy to run it.

I live in the United States, in Southern California, which is naturally a near desert where I would have died of drought (or not lived here) in previous generations. But thanks to irrigation, air-conditioning, sturdy homes, and other technological advances (especially high-energy transport, which enables me to trade with people far away for goods I could not create under the local circumstances), this is one of the most wonderful places on Earth to live: I can enjoy warm, temperate, low-humidity weather without the downsides of the desert.

Technology enables us to live in practically any climate. Consider that in the United States, a large country, we are home to every type of climate imaginable: from polar Alaska to desert California to swampy Florida to scorching Texas. And yet in each state we have a life expectancy of over seventy-five!11

But these assumptions could not accomplish much on their own. What gave them power, and made them able finally to dominate and reshape our society, was the growth of technology for the production and use of fossil fuel energy. This energy could be made available to empower such unprecedented social change because it was “cheap.” But we were able to consider it “cheap” only by a kind of moral simplicity: the assumption that we had a “right” to as much of it as we could use. This was a “right” made solely by might. Because fossil fuels, however abundant they once were, were nevertheless limited in quantity and not renewable, they obviously did not “belong” to one generation more than another. We ignored the claims of posterity simply because we could, the living being stronger than the unborn, and so worked the “miracle” of industrial progress by the theft of energy from (among others) our children. That is the real foundation of our progress and our affluence. The reason that we are a rich nation is not that we have earned so much wealth— you cannot, by any honest means, earn or deserve so much. The reason is simply that we have learned, and become willing, to market and use up in our own time the birthright and livelihood of posterity.

In 1900, 2 percent of fossil fuel production was devoted to producing electricity, by 1950 it was above 10 percent, and in 2000 it reached more than 30 percent. In 1900 global electricity generation stood at 8 terawatt-hours; fifty years later it was at 600, powering a transformed economy. The Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus calculated that the same amount of labor that once produced fifty-four minutes of quality light in the eighteenth century now produces more than fifty years of light.

There are some quotes from a story in the Los Angeles Times called “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” Leading environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin: “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”13 Paul Ehrlich: Developing fusion for human beings would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.”14 Amory Lovins was already on record as saying, “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”15

Decisions made decades or even centuries ago—how we treat wastewater, the use of alternating current instead of direct current for electricity grids, pipelines laid for fossil fuels—all of these shape not just the technologies and systems in use today but those that haven’t yet been built. That continuity means there’s a path dependence—that the kinds of systems we have today depend on the characteristics of the systems that came before—in addition to growth and accumulation, as these systems build on each other. We now live surrounded by technological systems of nearly unimaginable scale, extent, and complexity.

He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power. He believed in the gradual de-urbanization of modern metropolises by distributing the population more evenly in self-sufficient small towns and villages. Relying on the gentler technologies, he would build a new agricultural society.

So, whether the aliens explore with chemistry or with radio waves, they might come to the same conclusion: a planet where there’s advanced technology must be populated with intelligent life-forms, who may occupy themselves discovering how the universe works and how to apply its laws for personal or public gain. Looking more closely at Earth’s atmospheric fingerprints, human biomarkers will also include sulfuric, carbonic, and nitric acids, and other components of smog from the burning of fossil fuels. If the curious aliens happen to be socially, culturally, and technologically more advanced than we are, then they will surely interpret these biomarkers as convincing evidence for the absence of intelligent life on Earth.

Based on these two successes, Pan’s opinions on social issues had grown more and more influential. He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power. He believed in the gradual de-urbanization of modern metropolises by distributing the population more evenly in self-sufficient small towns and villages. Relying on the gentler technologies, he would build a new agricultural society.

The point is, you must show them how to live and not just teach them theory while contradicting yourself in practice, because cynicism, hypocrisy and insincerity are adult character traits that children have no way of appreciating. Children learn by imitating our behavior, and if it contradicts our thinking then at best they learn to simply ignore what we say and at worst become troubled by it. Suppose you teach them about the environmental devastation they will witness during their lives, and explain to them that it is being caused by burning fossil fuels, and that during their lives fossil fuels will disappear altogether with nothing to replace them … while continuing to burn hundreds of gallons of heating oil to heat an oversized house, driving all over creation in an oversized vehicle, jetting off to the tropics on brief winter holidays and going on shopping sprees to buy on a whim things you don’t need. Then what you would be teaching them is that you can’t be trusted. And this doesn’t help them; instead, it damages their spirit. It is better to have an ignorant fool for a parent than a well-informed hypocrite because being a fool is not a moral failing. Fools deserve pity and mercy; hypocrites—neither.

Where people are striving, busy and stressed, emotions are denied or derided. The head and heart then separate, and this allows people and governments to act with great cruelty, resulting in violence, abuse and war. Today, in striving discontent, we move the world forward with science and technology, but rape the Earth of minerals and oil and are careless of pollution. Where there is no reverence for nature, there is a feeling of separation from it, which makes people feel they have the right to change it, genetically modify it, clone it or damage it by chopping down its forests and polluting its rivers. Disconnection from the heart, and its consequences of cruelty, slavery and injustice, also took place when Atlantis devolved, but even in their most dire times they rejected the idea of using fossil fuel because of the damage it would cause to the planet. However, in the darkest days they did clone, genetically modify, and implant people and plants. Right-brain societies are inevitably child centred, for children are considered to be a gift to the community. In Atlantis, the little ones were loved, honoured and included, even in elementary decision making. It was considered to be a collective responsibility to pass on the traditions and wisdom to the next generation, for they had no individual wealth to leave as a legacy. EXERCISE:

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

You’re probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a ‘global civilization.’ But, honestly, it wasn’t all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right? “But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now. “Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left. “Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ‘collapsing.’ “You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.

I didn’t know it yet, but this new priority would mean enormous changes in the way I saw the world and environmentalism. Previously environmentalists worked to stop bad things—pollution, clear-cutting, overfishing—but we more or less accepted the big-picture American economy, with the established industries that made it up. Not anymore. Now we were about to find ourselves in a different business: helping to foster a different kind of economic development, one based on knowledge and technology rather than fossil fuels. After thirty-five years of working to clean up after twentieth-century industrialism, environmentalists were about to plunge into creating its twenty-first-century replacement. But before we could go full tilt toward the new, we had to stop the last spasms of the old—an energy future crafted during George W. Bush’s first term by Vice President Cheney.

Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell us which countries have historically cut their carbon emissions the fastest and the most. The leaders in this game are those countries that built a lot of nuclear in the 1980s, like France and Sweden. It is worth noting that these cuts were accomplished with technology from the 1970s, and were achieved completely by accident, as a by-product of energy policy enacted for completely different reasons. There was no active climate policy, but the results were many times better than what Germany has managed with its Energiewende since the early 2000s. It is worth imagining what an active and evidence-based climate policy that pushed aggressively for renewables, energy savings and nuclear could therefore achieve. Image 10 - The best ten years of emissions reductions in four countries. A major part of Germany’s reductions, called “Wallfall”, are due to the country’s unification and the following closure of many of ineffective power plants and industry in eastern Germany. In addition to these countries, also Belgium and Finland have cut their emissions markedly with nuclear power.

What Was the Industrial Revolution? Most fundamentally, the Industrial Revolution was an economic and technological revolution in which humans started to use fossil fuels to generate power for machines to manufacture and transport things in massive quantities. Factories first appeared in the late eighteenth century in England, and methods of industrial production quickly spread to France, Germany, and the United States. Within one hundred years, the Industrial Revolution spread to Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim, including Japan. As you read this, a wave of industrialization is sweeping through India, Asia, South America, and parts of Africa.

To do so, we first have to learn to see it for what it is—by cutting through all of the buzzwords, the marketing hype, the pseudoscientific shibboleths and mumbo-jumbo. Then we have to learn to evaluate it: if it is efficient, then by what measure, and who stands to benefit from its efficiency? Efficiency as a euphemism for corporate profitability shouldn’t fool us. Efficiency is a measure that relates productivity (output) to labor and resource inputs; it is meaningless unless we understand all the implications of these inputs and outputs. For a solar panel, does it simply input solar radiation and output electric current? No, its input is all the energy—mainly from fossil fuels—that went into mining, refining, fabricating, finance, design, research, sales, shipping, installation, tech support, maintenance and disposal. Its output is, yes, a modest amount of electricity. It could well turn out that your solar panel is a way to convert a lot of fossil fuel energy into a bit of electricity with the help of sunlight. How efficient is that? Perhaps it would be more efficient to use less electricity—or to not use electricity at all.

technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels—especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas—needs to be progressively replaced without delay.

Biodiesel is a renewable fuel produced from animal fats or vegetable oils (edible and nonedible) through the transesterification process. The triglycerides of fatty acids present in the aforementioned feedstock are responsible for their high viscosity and make them undesirable for their use as fuel. Pure oil/fats have less density and heating value than the fossil-derived fuels. Therefore, the transesterification of the oils/fats is carried out to reduce their viscosity and to enhance the density and calorific value [75]. During transesterification, the triglycerides react with alcohols such as methanol or ethanol in the presence of an alkali catalyst such as sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide at atmospheric pressure around 50–70 ℃ temperature [76]. Transesterification produces fatty acid alkyl esters as the main product, which is called biodiesel, while glycerol is formed as the by-product. The length of the carbon chain in the biodiesel varies over a wide range from C8 to C25 [77

Although biodiesel is chemically different from petrodiesel, it has similar properties, so it could be used as a drop-in fuel (pure form) or could be blended with its fossil-derived counterparts [78]. One of the greatest advantages of using biodiesel is that it can be used in the existing diesel engines (compression ignition engines) with very less or no engine modification.

Hydrogen plays a significant role in hydroprocessing technology, which can be obtained from different sources such as fossil fuels, biomass, and waste.

In the world of glossy climate plans in PDFs and stock photography, CCS is a shining saviour. In the grimy real world, CCS is a failure. This disconnect persists because CCS serves an emotional purpose rather than a technological one. It coats the fantasy of continued, unchanged fossil fuel use with a protective rhetorical magic. It remains persistently ‘around the corner’, while serving as a justification for the ever-worsening expansion of fossil fuel projects and the cause of delay of real action.

Fossil fuels and electrical energy are global commodities which are primarily controlled by Monopolies and Cartels.

In 2016, ten additional countries were added to the OPEC cartel to form OPEC+. These countries are Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Oman, Russia, South Sudan, and Sudan. Make no mistake. The OPEC+ Cartel was formed to exert even more monopolistic control over global fossil fuels production supply and pricing. OPEC+ now directly controls well over 80% of the world’s proven oil reserves. Therefore, every consumer in the world is subjugated to whatever prices and production OPEC+ dictate.

Still, there is one sense in which I am less grim than in my younger days. This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. Some of that conviction stems from human ingenuity—watching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily. And much of that conviction rests on events in my own life over the past few decades. I’ve immersed myself in movements working for change, and I helped found a group, 350.org, that grew into the first planetwide climate campaign. Though we haven’t beaten the fossil fuel industry, we’ve organized demonstrations in every country on the globe save North Korea, and with our many colleagues around the world, we’ve won some battles.

This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. Some of that conviction stems from human ingenuity—watching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily. And much of that conviction rests on events in my own life over the past few decades. I’ve immersed myself in movements working for change, and I helped found a group, 350.org, that grew into the first planetwide climate campaign. Though we haven’t beaten the fossil fuel industry, we’ve organized demonstrations in every country on the globe save North Korea, and with our many colleagues around the world, we’ve won some battles.

Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Solar street lights have emerged as a sustainable and efficient lighting solution, harnessing the power of Solar Street Light Price in Bangalore, a city known for its technological advancements and focus on sustainable practices, the adoption of solar street lights has been on the rise. This article delves into the pricing dynamics ofSolar Street Light Price in Bangalore, exploring the factors influencing costs, comparing price ranges, and providing valuable insights for individuals or organizations looking to invest in this eco-friendly lighting option. 1. Introduction to Solar Street Lights Overview of Solar Street Lighting If you've ever walked down a dark street and thought, "Wow, this could really use some more light," then solar street lights are here to save the day. These nifty lights are like your regular street lights but with a green twist – they harness the power of the sun to illuminate your path. Importance of Solar Energy in Street Lighting Solar energy is like that reliable friend who always has your back – it's renewable, sustainable, and abundant. By using solar energy in street lighting, we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, cut down on electricity bills, and contribute to a cleaner, greener future. Plus, who doesn't love soaking up some vitamin D during the day and then basking in solar-powered light at night? 2. Benefits of Solar Street Lights Energy Efficiency and Cost Savings Picture this: solar street lights gobbling up sunlight during the day, storing it in their metaphorical bellies, and then gleefully lighting up the streets at night without a care in the world. Not only are they energy-efficient, but they also help save on electricity costs in the long run. It's like having your cake and eating it too – or in this case, having your light and saving on bills. Environmental Impact and Sustainability If the planet could talk, it would give a standing ovation to solar street lights. By opting for solar-powered lighting, we reduce carbon emissions, lower our environmental footprint, and take a step towards a more sustainable future. It's basically like hitting the eco-friendly jackpot – brighter streets, happier planet. 3. Factors Affecting Solar Street Light Prices in Bangalore Quality and Brand Reputation Just like choosing between a gourmet burger and a fast-food one, the quality of solar street lights can vary. Brands with a good reputation often come with a higher price tag, but they also offer reliability and performance that's worth the extra dough. Technology and Features From fancy motion sensors to remote-control options, the technology and features packed into solar street lights can influence their prices. It's like picking a smartphone – the more bells and whistles, the higher the cost. But hey, who doesn't love a little extra tech magic in their lighting? 4. Price Range Analysis of Solar Street Light Price in Bangalore bustling city, solar street light prices can vary based on features, quality, and brand. It's like playing a price-matching game where you can find something that still sparkles like a diamond while staying within your budget. Popular Models and Their Prices Bangalore offers a wide range of popular solar street lights at a variety of price points, ranging from sleek, contemporary designs to robust, effective models. There is a solar street light with your name on it, whether you are a tech-savvy enthusiast or a buyer with a tight budget. 5. Tips for Choosing the Right Solar Street Light Considering Your Lighting Needs Prior to entering the solar street light market, consider your lighting requirements.

I believe the evidence is clear that nuclear is the safest energy technology

As citizens, we hate to see even one coal mine accident, one spill of hazardous liquids, one example of industry corruption, but we must use that feeling to advocate for proper laws and best practices, not to drive us to outlaw crucial technologies.

Those with the most basic skills have become the new power brokers in society – carpenters, plumbers, and anyone with any experience in medicine or farming are now the leaders, while those who were educated in the modern technology have become redundant. They’ve had to start learning the old skills that previously were replaced by machines run on fossil fuels.

What is needed are ecosystems that are designed to produce our food, fuel, animal feed, medicine and fibers, and ecosystems that can do so without the use of fossil fuel technology, those that can tolerate extremes of weather and potentially changing climates, and that can thrive without supplemental irrigation from vulnerable and increasingly expensive public utilities.

Instead, infrastructural systems are repaired or rebuilt in modular increments, like steadily working through the replacement of water mains in a neighborhood or fixing potholes every spring. But that continuity has a flip side: it locks us into these ways of doing things. The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to keep fast typists from jamming the keys on manual typewriters, but it’s still in use on smartphone touchscreens. Decisions made decades or even centuries ago—how we treat wastewater, the use of alternating current instead of direct current for electricity grids, pipelines laid for fossil fuels—all of these shape not just the technologies and systems in use today but those that haven’t yet been built. That continuity means there’s a path dependence—that the kinds of systems we have today depend on the characteristics of the systems that came before—in addition to growth and accumulation, as these systems build on each other. We now live surrounded by technological systems of nearly unimaginable scale, extent, and complexity.

Beyond the industry’s medium-term goals, we need a plan for fossil fuel companies to pick up their pace and eliminate methane emissions by 2025. Oil and gas companies need a strategy for field measurement and monitoring and equipment upgrades. Many companies still operate with valves that are designed to release methane, based on the pressure of gas running through the valve. This legacy equipment can easily be replaced with modern valves that don’t bleed gas. The technology exists today and costs only three hundred dollars per valve.

believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power. He believed in the gradual de-urbanization of modern metropolises by distributing the population more evenly in self-sufficient small towns and villages. Relying on the gentler technologies, he would build a new agricultural society.

The Honorable Harvest…does not say don’t take, but offers inspiration and a model for what we should take. It’s not so much a list of “do not’s” as a list of “do’s.” Do eat food that is honorably harvested, and celebrate every mouthful. Do use technologies that minimize harm; do take what is given. This philosophy guides not only our taking of food, but also any taking of the gifts of Mother Earth–air, water, and the literal body of the earth: the rocks and soil and fossil fuels.

We are facing a new energy transition. In terms of technology, the challenge of our century is moving from fossil fuel to clean energy sources, and to generate smart electricity grids.

failed to create an arm of the government that will be forever attached to his name, nothing like Obamacare or remotely resembling social security. But the thrust of the Inflation Reduction Act can still be described as transformational—and it will change American life. The theory of the legislation is that the world is poised for a momentous shift. For a generation, the economy has taken tentative steps away from its reliance on fossil fuels. New technologies emerged that lowered the costs of solar panels and wind turbines and batteries; the mass market showed genuine interest in electric vehicles and heat pumps. But the pace of adaptation was slow, painfully slow given the looming changes to the climate. On its own, the economy was never going to evolve in time to avert the worst consequences

of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

ChatGPT doesn’t even try to hide the biases it has learned from its radical pro-socialist masters. The New York Post put it through a series of tasks that made this point abundantly clear: 12 • ChatGPT would “gladly tell a joke about men, but jokes about women were deemed ‘derogatory or demeaning.’” • Jokes about overweight people were not allowed. • It would tell you a joke about Jesus, but it refused to joke about Allah. • It refused to write anything positive about fossil fuels. • It was “happy” to write a fictional tale about Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 election, but it said it “would not be appropriate” to write a fictional story about Trump winning in 2020. These and similar findings have led many people, like National Review’s Nate Hochman, to distrust ChatGPT and its AI technology because of their “brazen efforts to suppress or silence viewpoints that dissent from progressive orthodoxy.

The whole world appreciates what oil and gas have done for us. Every major technological advance is thanks to the power that fossil fuels have provided, but it’s now time for change. Our time burning carbon emitting fuels has come to an end. It’s time we invested in something new.

Without a solid ethical grounding, children risk growing into adults who, however outwardly accomplished, lack emotional depth, have impaired social and family relationships, and are vulnerable to depression and despair. But the danger goes further and broader: in the many interviews I conducted, the recurring theme was ethical accountability. Issues that are critical today will be urgent tomorrow. Who will regulate AI? Who will have access to the extraordinary medical breakthroughs that are surely coming? How will technological research be controlled? What reasoning will shape our decisions about energy production and fossil fuels? How do we prevent democracy from deteriorating under authoritarian encroachment? “Winner takes all” isn’t a moral philosophy that can successfully carry us through this century. Our children need to understand how to make complex decisions with moral implications and ramifications. More than any other area of concern I have after researching this book, I’ve concluded that it is exactly in this area of moral reasoning that the stakes are so high and our attention so lacking

In 2009, physicist Robert Ayres and ecological economist Benjamin Warr decided to construct a new model of economic growth. To the classic duo of labour and capital they added a third factor of production: energy (or, more precisely, exergy), the proportion of total energy that can be harnessed for useful work, instead of being lost as waste heat. And when they applied this three-factor model to data on twentieth-century growth in the United States, UK, Japan and Austria, they found that it could explain the vast majority of economic growth in each of the four countries: Solow’s mystery residual, long assumed to reflect technological progress, turned out to reflect the increasing efficiency with which energy is converted into useful work.36 The implication? The last two centuries of extraordinary economic growth in high-income countries are largely due to the availability of cheap fossil fuels.

The vague contention that the economy must be decarbonised via the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy is inadequate when building the new infrastructure required currently relies on continued and expanded environmental plunder, such as the mining of cobalt and lithium for batteries. Resource extraction is responsible for 50% of global emissions, with minerals and metal mining responsible for 20% of emissions even before the manufacturing stage.[36] The ‘green’ industrial revolution proposed by social democrats may end up with a carbon neutral system of production by the time it is finished, but in the meantime it would be anything but. That mankind and nature have been so profoundly alienated from each other under capitalism requires that they be reunited if the planet is to remain habitable.[37] One of the ways that this alienation has been most concretely institutionalised has been through the international prohibition and under-utilisation of the hemp and cannabis plants, the most prolific and versatile crops on Earth that were used for thousands of years before capitalism for food, fuel, medicine, clothing and construction. As we shall see, not only does hemp remain capable of providing for most of humanity’s needs, it is the key not only to reversing desertification and stabilising the climate, but also furthering technological and industrial progress. We therefore argue that saving the planet is bound up with ending this alienation and completing the transition from a labour-intensive extraction-based economy to a hemp-based fully automated system of production. A green industrial revolution must be precisely that – green.

We should be innovating tomorrow’s technologies rather than erecting today’s inefficient turbines and solar panels. We should explore fusion, fission, water splitting, ...algae grown on the ocean surface that produces oil… This is one more cost of the relentless alarmism. Since we’re so intent on doing something right now, even if it is almost trivial, we neglect to focus on the technological breakthroughs that in the long run could actually allow humanity to move away from fossil fuels.” -pp. 14, 15

Along all the process steps of making electricity out of fossil fuels, at least 50% of the initial available chemical energy is lost in the various conversion steps.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground. What we must do instead is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy - in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.

While climate change threatens our environment on the one hand, and fossil fuel depletion threatens our economic system on the other, solar energy holds out the promise of protecting both of them.

Evidence available from research to date from the Department’s activities, from that of many other agencies and from other nations is sufficient cause for serious concern, even at the most optimistic end of the range of predicted results. This is of particular interest to the Department of Energy because U.S. fossil fuel use accounts for approximately 23 percent of the global total emissions of CO2 resulting from combustion. . . . The prospects for future growth in the use of renewable technology appear especially promising as research continues to improve their efficiency, economics, and reliability. Renewable energy use can reduce carbon emissions and give developing countries attractive alternatives to the use of fossil fuels and further depletion of forests.

Truckers spend more than $50,000 per year on fuel costs alone. They are also getting clobbered by the EPA and other government entities because of the dirtiness of diesel fuel, which is one of the most harmful fossil fuels that can be burned (if you have ever seen the exhaust on a tractor trailer, then you know what I am talking about here). The fact of the matter is that there is a better solution found in domestically sustainable and attainable natural gas. But what makes natural gas better? http://www.troybohlke.us/2014/01/emis...

They use a fossil fuel in a most inefficient manner, even though I am certain that, even with their primitive technology, they know better. I think they may even hide efficiency inventions, as nobody could be that stupid.