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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9750cc6 | Hubbert laid this out in the Technocracy Study Course: Should the fruit flies continue to multiply at their initial compound interest rate, it can be shown by computation that in a relatively few weeks the number would be considerably greater than the capacity of the bottle. This being so, it is a very simple matter to see why there is a definite limit to the number of fruit flies that can live in the bottle. Once the number is reached, the.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8832ac1 | Politicians and economists who argued for perpetual economic growth were deluded, Hubbert said. The population of the United States would hit a maximum "of probably not more than 135,000,000 people" in the 1950s, and after that the nation simply would not contain enough new consumers to need more consumer products. Hoodwinked by the fantasy of continuing growth, the ruling class had lost sight of these basic scientific realities. They were .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| fc1e600 | Hubbert visited a friend who was attending a big natural-resource conference sponsored by the new United Nations. At the conference Hubbert was startled to hear a prominent geologist assert that the world still had 1.5 trillion barrels of obtainable oil, enough to last centuries. "I nearly fell out of my seat," Hubbert recalled later. "I was up here, relaxed, visiting with my friend--and good God Almighty! And nobody said boo." A trillion-a.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d1e8f72 | These ideas might have been expected to draw fire from Hubbert's employer--he had become second-in-command at a big Shell Oil research center in Houston. But they attracted little notice until 1956, | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 0b3047a | Because energy is critical to modern life, these utilities, as we now call them, became so politically important that many governments seized them as essential tools of the state; other nations contented themselves with heavy regulation. Either way, utilities have become a prominent feature of the contemporary landscape. Economically speaking, the advantages of Wizard-style, hard-path centralization and scale were so overwhelming that until.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 1b7aecd | Solar research had been the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety faded, so did the interest. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| c2252fe | President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the "imminent exhaustion" of fossil fuels and other natural resources--"the weightiest problem now before the nation." Afterward Roosevelt asked the U.S. Geological Survey to assay domestic oil reserves, the first such analysis ever undertaken. Its conclusions, released in 1909, were emphatic: if the nation continued "the present rate of in.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b2c302f | becomes as hot as the sun? Earth, he knew, reflects some heat back into space. But why isn't all of it reflected? What keeps our planet cozily warm, Goldilocks-style, and not too hot or too cold? | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 27131f8 | of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don't pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth without concern for the consequences--littering on an epic scale. People were doing the same with carbon dioxide. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 69fa7a9 | To Margulis, the Great Oxidation Event had lessons for today. The first was that people who thought that living creatures couldn't affect the climate had no idea of the power of life. The second was that the onset of climate change meant that Homo sapiens was getting into the biological big leagues--we were tiptoeing into the | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 02ed57e | Wizard-style renewable advocates like the venture-capital-backed firm that built Crescent Dunes scoff at these ideas. Even in the best of circumstances, the process of replacing the present coal-and-gas grid with a new, renewable-energy grid--all the while keeping the old grid running--would be long, expensive, and risky even if it weren't being sabotaged by the people who are supposed to support it. Insisting on using small-scale component.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| cc7bb5b | Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e1ae55e | Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes--they are Borlaugians through and through, hard-path advocates in solar guise. But many or most renewable-energy supporters are Prophets who view Big Solar and Big Wind with almost as much distaste as the Big Coal and Big Oil they seek to replace. From its inception, Crescen.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f389924 | Germany, richer than India, has about seventy energy-storage projects, about a third of which collect the output from wind and solar plants into banks of batteries. The price of batteries, like the price of photovoltaics, has been falling. Renewable-energy enthusiasts imagine great warehouses full of batteries, soaking up excess sun power by day, releasing it by night, keeping the lights on in the dark. But no matter how cheap the batteries.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 31db630 | Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India's electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| df790c1 | Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a nattily dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian alike, to invest in Gujarat. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 94b0693 | Realizing that solar had become essential to oil production, petroleum firms set up their own photovoltaic subsidiaries. Exxon became, in 1973, the first commercial manufacturer of solar panels; the second, a year later, was a joint venture with the oil giant Mobil. (Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999.) The Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), another oil colossus, ran the world's biggest solar company until it was acquired by Royal Dutch Shell, .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 2182e54 | Sun power's image as the province of baling-wire hippies was at odds with reality. Today's multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil. The first wide-scale use of solar panels had come in the 1960s: powering military satellites, which couldn't use fossil fuels (too bulky to lift into space) or batteries (impossible to recharge in orbit). By the 1970s photovoltaics were cheaper, but the in.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 661a695 | When Chapin tested these novel photovoltaics, they converted about five times more solar energy to electricity than the older selenium panels. But they were still terribly inefficient. Chapin estimated the cost of silicon panels that could supply electricity for a typical middle-class home at $1.43 million (about $13 million in today's dollars). It would be cheaper to cover the entire roof in gold leaf. Daunted by the economics, most resear.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f3bb484 | Fuller and Pearson placed a thin layer of the first type of doped silicon (extra electrons) atop a layer of the second type (extra holes). The two Bell researchers attached the little assembly to a circuit--a loop of wire, in effect--and an ammeter, a device that measures electric currents. When they turned on a desk light, the ammeter showed the two-layer silicon suddenly generating an electric current. The same thing happened with sunligh.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f8a4efb | Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect. But Fritts's invention remained a laboratory curiosity. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 6fc1239 | As schoolchildren learn, the sun washes Earth with every imaginable type of light wave--X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, you name it. About a third of the total is reflected from clouds. Another sixth is taken in by airborne water vapor. That leaves roughly half of the incoming light--most of which is visible light, as it happens--to pass through the atmosphere. Almost all of that half i.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| dccb78d | Brand cites the example of France, which constructed "fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation's electricity in just twelve years." Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electricity, a far greater proportion than in any other nation. Today, according to World Bank figures, France emits 5.2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. The corresponding figure for the United States is 17. France shut down its last coal-fired po.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| aa66869 | Two years after winning the divisive 1968 election, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, declared that "the environment," "the great question of the '70s," was a "cause beyond party and beyond factions." The Clean Air Act of that year, which set up U.S. emissions regulations, was one of the world's first general air-quality laws, more stringent and comprehensive than any of its predecessors. Congress passed it overwhelmingly: 73-0 in the .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| ef6fe84 | Katrina was a relatively modest storm that overwhelmed inadequate dikes and levees. Many climate scientists believe that in days to come governments will need to get better at shoreline defense. The world has 136 big, low-lying coastal cities with a total population of about 550 million people. All are threatened by the rising seas associated with climate change. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f5a9392 | In the past few decades, China has lifted more than half a billion people out of destitution--an astonishing accomplishment. That advance was driven by industrialization, and that industrialization was driven almost entirely by coal. More than three-quarters of China's electricity comes from coal. More coal goes to heating millions of homes, smelting steel (China produces nearly half the world's steel), and baking limestone to make cement (.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 77b73de | Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world's annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-British-Dutch-Belgian team in 2014). It could put as many as a billion people at risk by 2050 (a Dutch team in 2012). Test cases occurred in 2017, when storms inundated Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5b80ec0 | Much the same is occurring in India. Already the world's fastest-growing economy, India will become the world's most populous nation (probably by 2022) and its biggest economy (possibly by 2048). It, too, runs on coal--with similar consequences. New Delhi, ringed by coal plants, is said to have the world's most polluted air, worse than anything in China. India's outdoor air pollution causes 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a 20.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| d9e13d7 | Shanghai, with an average altitude of thirteen feet, is among the many Asian cities vulnerable to rising waters. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 54b1a3b | About 85 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite and lignite; and petroleum (33 percent) in its various forms, including oil, gasoline, and propane. Coal and petroleum are used differently. Most petroleum is consumed by individuals and small businesses as they heat their homes and offices and.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 477cd7b | Oil and gasoline use is diffuse, scattered in the global crowd. The world has 1.3 billion vehicles and perhaps 1.5 billion households. Cutting emissions from these cars and homes means changing the daily lives of billions of people, a mind-boggling thought. Reducing global coal emissions, by contrast, means dealing with 3,300 big coal-fired power plants and several thousand big coal-driven steel and cement factories.*10 The task is huge, bu.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 910c3ff | Measurement began in February 1958. Within two years his instruments showed that the world's store of airborne carbon dioxide had increased in that period from about 313 parts per million to about 315 parts per million. Keeling worked on Mauna Loa from 1958 until his death in 2005, during which time the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air rose to 380 parts per million. Combined with the work by Revelle and Suess, Keeling's meticulous, d.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 24ab2be | To their dismay, DeConto and Pollard had realized that Antarctica might be more vulnerable than previously thought. Increasing temperatures would attack the ice in two ways: warmer air would melt it from above, forming pools on the surface, and warming ocean currents would eat at the underside of the sheet, creating large cracks. The pools on the surface could drain through the cracks, widening them and splitting the ice sheet into unstable.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| c610e55 | For a geophysicist, what's going on is stunning," my friend told me. "We used to believe these systems needed thousands of years to make these shifts. Instead it's happening so fast that it's terrifying. Conceivably, you could start seeing truly bad effects in a hundred years." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5a0c02f | And this is one of the great difficulties in thinking about climate change: what seems terrifyingly fast on the geological scale is unfathomably long on the human scale. By "truly bad effects" DeConto meant flooded coasts, vanished islands, awful droughts, and, maybe, storms of unprecedented power. But even if these occur in the time he fears--even if they transpire in the geologically insignificant span of a century--they will not be seen .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8922df7 | On the one hand, forcing other people to clean up our mess violates basic notions of fairness. On the other hand, actually preventing climate-change problems would require societies today to make investments, some of them costly, to benefit people in the faraway future. It's like asking teenagers to save for their grandchildren's retirement. Or, maybe, for somebody else's grandchildren. Not many would do it. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8e1860f | Intuitively, I am hard-pressed to believe that most people would endorse the notion that the future of humankind is worth no more than a single apartment. Chichilnisky, a major figure in the IPCC, has argued that this kind of thinking about discount rates is not only ridiculous but immoral; it exalts a "dictatorship of the present" over the future. Economists could retort that people say they value the future, but don't act like it, even wh.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5914be3 | The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 8399258 | Logically speaking, the desolation in Children of Men is peculiar. As Scheffler points out, all people have known from childhood that they will die. As individuals, we have no long-term future. Personal extinction is guaranteed. But this tragedy--one that will be directly experienced by every single man, woman, and child--provokes no public alarm. No tabloid has ever blared the headline, "All 7.3 Billion of Us to Vanish Within Decades." Our.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| ef4e24a | What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard to parse, they think that humanity's fate is worth more than an apartment. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 73820f4 | In the middle, where most people spend their days, it is hard to distinguish morally between positions. It is easy to disparage people who think only of their family or neighborhood. But higher up the ladder is not necessarily better--think of the numberless instances where people, genuinely believing that they are acting for the benefit of larger entities, have ended up doing awful things. Would the world have been better off if the soldie.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| cc61684 | Climate scientists encountered Lorenz's ideas in 1965, when he gave the keynote address at a conference in Colorado called "The Causes of Climate Change," the first big scientific gathering devoted to the subject. As he described the instability he had uncovered, his audience made the connection with carbon dioxide. Conference organizer Roger Revelle, who had been skeptical, was persuaded. If small changes in initial conditions could have e.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 4b9f748 | Geoengineering may reduce temperatures globally, but there will still be local losers and winners--places that experience too much or too little rainfall, places subject to sudden temperature extremes. And no matter how much sulfur dioxide humankind throws into the heavens, the carbon dioxide will remain; to counteract the ever-increasing total, more sulfur must be launched into the air every year. Indeed, stopping it suddenly would be disa.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5bd9b68 | On August 27 Richard Harding Davis, star of the American correspondents who were then in Belgium, made his way to Louvain by troop train. He was kept locked in the railroad car by the Germans, but the fire had by then reached the Boulevard Tirlemont facing the railroad station and he could see "the steady straight columns of flames" rising from the rows of houses." | Barbara W. Tuchman |