Think Renewable Solar Quotes

We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me. The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are! We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic… asshole.

RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.

How, then, can Apple claim to be 100 percent renewable? It purchases a fraudulent “100 percent renewable” status from electricity producers. The basic way this works is that Apple pays utilities to give it credit for the solar and wind that others use—and to give others the blame for the coal, gas, and nuclear that Apple uses. It’s as if Apple CEO Tim Cook were traveling with nine other people on a yacht powered 90 percent by diesel and 10 percent by a sail—and Cook claimed that he traveled just using the sail, while the others traveled using the diesel. This energy accounting fraud is shameful and destructive, because it leads us to think that we can have innovators like Apple without the uniquely cost-effective energy we get from fossil fuels. Even worse, leading company after leading company, including Facebook, Google, Bank of America, and Anheuser-Busch, is claiming to be 100 percent renewable.[18]

as fast, efficiently, deeply and cost-effectively as possible. Because we have spent so many pages exploring some of the weaknesses of renewable energy sources, one might think that we are somehow opposed to these energy sources. As we wrote in the introduction, this is not the case. Even though readability prevents us from stating this at every juncture, we wish to categorically state that we support (within environmental limits) all truly low-carbon energy sources and nearly all the energy efficiency proposals we've seen so far. Both of us have even invested our own hard-earned money in renewable energy generation. We will most certainly need a lot more renewable energy, and we are certain that they are being built. The question whether or not renewable energy sources could play a major role in our energy system has already been answered: we know that they will be important sources of energy in the future. The only question is how important. We, of course, hope for the best and are excited about the potential and various benefits of renewable energy, and believe that solar and wind energy are amongst the most important tools for successful climate change mitigation.

Arguments against eternal life - Only rich people will get it (No tech has ever done this.) - Better to give money to the poor than science. (Family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) - Dead people make more room for new, other people. (Consider going first.) - Run out of resources. (Live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent.) - Overpopulation. (Colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) Stop having kids. - Worse wars. (Nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220-year-old person in 2136) - Dictators never die. (They die all the time and rarely of age.) - Old people are expensive. (50% of your lifetime medical costs occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.) - Old people suck. (Death is an inferior cure to robustness.) - You’ll get bored. (Your memory isn’t that good, or your boredom isn’t age related.) - You’ll have to watch your loved ones die. (So you prefer they watch you?) - Like Tithonus, you’ll live forever in a terrible state. (Longevity requires robustness.) - Against God’s will. (Not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.) - People will force you to live forever. Do you think less people make progress faster? What’s your target level of depriving life of existence?

My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.” She leaned forward, suddenly energized. “If more people were like us, imagine what we could accomplish. New crops to feed the millions going hungry. Stopping pandemics from raging across our world. Ending most disease and all poverty and all war. No more mass extinctions. Clean, renewable, limitless energy. Spreading into the solar system.” Twenty years later, as the hot water beat down on my back, I felt a chill run through me. “So you’re saying people are too stupid?” Basri asked. “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.

What, though, of the promise of renewable energy? Its price may be falling fast but—like all stocks in a system—solar, wind and hydro capacity take time to install.

The triumph of the commons is certainly evident in the digital commons, which are fast turning into one of the most dynamic arenas of the global economy. It is a transformation made possible, argues the economic analyst Jeremy Rifkin, by the ongoing convergence of networks for digital communications, renewable energy and 3D printing, creating what he has called ‘the collaborative commons’. What makes the convergence of these technologies so powerfully disruptive is their potential for distributed ownership, networked collaboration and minimal running costs. Once the solar panels, computer networks and 3D printers are in place, the cost of producing one extra joule of energy, one extra download, one extra 3D printed component, is close to nothing, leading Rifkin to dub it ‘the zero-marginal-cost revolution’.