Fires, Cars: More Deadly Than Nuclear Power!
The extraordinarily powerful magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in Japan were truly terrible — many lives were lost and there was great destruction.
President Obama’s heart went out to the people of Japan and he did his presidential best: “during this enormous tragedy, please know that America will always stand by one of its greatest allies during their time of need.” We know that’s true because he wrote it and because he told us, compassionately, to assist the Japanese while filling out brackets for the NCAA basketball tournaments:
One of the things I wanted to do on the show was, as people are filling out their brackets — this is obviously a national pastime; we all have a great time, it’s a great diversion. But I know a lot of people are thinking how can they help the Japanese people during this time of need. If you go to usaid.gov — usaid.gov — that will list all the nonprofits, the charities that are helping out there. It would be wonderful for people to maybe offer a little help to the Japanese people at this time — as they’re filling out their brackets. It’s not going to take a lot of time. That’s usaid.gov. It could be really helpful.
As White House press secretary Jay Carney stated, it was
“entirely appropriate for the president to be addressing a crisis of this gravity as he’s standing before a whiteboard talking about the basketball tournament [.] There are crises all the time,” he said, “for every president.”
“And again, this one is happening halfway around the world, and it is severe, and it is important, and it is the focus of a great deal of the president’s attention, as are the events in the Middle East, as are the agenda items that he is pursuing to grow the economy,” Carney said.
“It’s a hard job, it requires a lot,” Carney said. He also noted that Obama took a moment on ESPN to urge Americans, while they are doing their brackets, to go to usaid.gov and make a donation for earthquake victims.
Having done so much, President Obama and his delightful family were off to Rio, where they substantially improved the image of the United States while giving other great world leaders amusement. They needed it and were appropriately grateful. Some have been critical of the timing of the visit, but these criticisms are unjustified. As President Obama’s communications director said, “You can’t allow what’s happening in the world to consume the presidency. You have to be able to walk, chew gum and juggle at the same time.” President Obama excels at all three, albeit not necessarily at the same time.
We can do little more than to help Japan, as best we can, to mitigate the damage as best they can. We also have our own serious problems with which to deal; flying into fits of self-recrimination and searching for scapegoats will do neither the Japanese nor us any good. Recognizing, however, that it is certain to happen, here are some modest proposals.
1. Unfortunately, we do not yet know with certainty how massively, or even which, human activities cause earthquakes or, therefore, how to prevent them. Well-funded academic research must now begin so that answers to these perplexing questions can soon be found. In the meantime, to whatever extent earthquakes are not caused by man-made climate change, former Governor Palin, former President Bush, or other Republicans, little can be done to prevent them. Trying harder to appease Gaia might help; it is possible that sacrificing virgins or goats would as well. Unfortunately, reputable scientific experts in the relevant fields of study have been unable to reach a consensus, probably due to lack of critically needed federal funding.
By the Lord Harry, Dan is right. Except for the bicycles. Two wheels are an insult to those people who do not subscribe to the binary fixation our modern world has. The transgendered, lesbian, gay and bi-sexual already have enough dismissal and discrimination without having to add bicycles to their woes. And if it is jobs he is looking for, well, empowered women are just about the only positive that has come out of our increasingly stinky world, so we need a Government Stimulus Program to get women into the carriage business. Women can carry people intercity, interstate even; and part-time, flexible-option women can serve as taxis in our local areas. Real conversation might return as all the carriers will be multi-tasking communication experts.
Oops. You cannot advocate using horses or donkeys to pull vehicles, as that is enslaving animals. PETA will sue.
Of course, you can always have humans harnessed up, fitted with bridles and cross-trainers, and make them pull surreys, etc.
The “Friends of Gaia” will be happy to sit on top and wield the whip to ensure that they do their job diligently. While no doubt making them listen to endless “Earth Power!” and “Get Rid Of Humans!” screeds on iPods.
The difference between a “deep-ecologist”, a totalitarian, and a nihilist is one of semantics, not substance.
clear ether
eon
Well, if Obama has his way, we won’t have ANY form of energy. He won’t allow new nuclear power plants to be built (even the ones on the drawing board have been there for years), he HATES coal, and won’t let us drill more for our own oil and natural gas. So I’m thinking, “What’s left?” And please, if anybody talks to me about windmills again I’m going to puke. How many windmills will it take to produce enough electricity for New York City, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or any other major city? I’m sick of Obama chasing windmills. We need everything we can get our hands on, which is why the Europeans are so desperate to get their hands on Libyan oil. They are not stupid. Libya is very close to Europe, transport costs from Libya to Europe are very low, and there’s lots of oil. I never thought I’d say this, but the “Green” Europeans are now a lot more pragmatic and aggressive about getting their own oil than Obama and the United States is. Well, if you live long enough, few things will surprise you. This still does.
Energy safety is the end result of a number of very difficult subjects taught in engineering school, then followed by years of disciplined practice. By its nature, it is lethally dangerous, if uncontrolled. By its nature, its exploitation, it is only useful, if it is economical. (Hungry people do not live in unheated homes due to personal preference.) My country, America, has struggled with the pros and cons of energy for two generations, yet has never formed a viable policy, on a matter of life and death. Positions of leadership, e.g. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner, which once was chaired by the geniuses of the complex technology, are now held by people who come from Capital Hill, lawyers, political science majors, or academics. Unaided, they could not find the front door of a nuke. Most can not read a drawing.
The compliment to any applied technology is commerce, cost, an intense study by engineers. An engineer, by definition, holds hands with a businessman and a scientist. He is neither, but if he lets go of either hand, he ceases to be an engineer. Yet, I challenge anyone to recall any experienced engineer, in the last two generations, who spoke to the nation on energy, via the national media. America is led by lawyers, or businessmen, technically ignorant people. As the recent financial debacle has proven, they are not good at judging financial risk. Are they any better at judging the relative risks of dying, due to energy?
There is enormous, albeit ignorant fear, of various forms of energy, which rests on the hate and distrust of large organizations, and corrupt politicians. People do not hate a gamma ray; they have no idea what it is. They hate GE, or the NRC, with some ill formed reason.
America’s energy infrastructure is creaky. The grid may collapse; it will become hideously expensive, beyond middle class people’s ability to pay. To continue our standard of living, we must allow engineers to function, under the following rules:
Thou shalt not lie, and
Thou shalt not steal.
Lawyers, businessmen, and scientists can come to the meeting, sit in the back, and must obey the rules.
I hate to break the news to you, but engineers are just as corruptible by political fads as anyone else. Case in point: mass transit. You can’t have a rational discussion with those people. I’ve tried. They’re religious fanatics. They may not be corrupt in the economic sense, but they’re corrupt in the sense that they consider the public’s interests and wishes to be irrelevant, because they’re working toward a higher good.
Sorry, but if you put engineers in charge of policy, you’ll just get more political prostitutes like in the climate science field, only with the letters “PE” after their names.
You are absolutely right. As an ex-engineer at a major battery company, I know that besides an economic self interest, some engineers have distorted sense of what is practical. I’m sure there are windmill and solar power engineers that will argue the viability of replacing carbon-based energy power with wind and solar. This must be so, because Jeff Immelt, the GE CEO who advises Obama on economic policies also advises Obama that sooner or later wind and solar power will replace oil and coal as leading energy sources. And I’m sure that Immelt gets his information from his engineers. But maybe he exaggerates. GE is a leader in both solar and wind power energy in the US, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies every year from the federal government to maintain those divisions. They made billions in profit last year and didn’t pay any federal income taxes, but still received the subsidies. Immelt was also a proponent of cap-and-trade. I call that crony capitalism at its worst. Corporations like GE give free market capitalism a bad name.
GE is a leader in energy generating capital goods, period. Solar, wind, nuclear, gas, coal- doesn’t matter what the power source is, GE makes systems to build it. They’re just pushing solar and wind now because that’s where the money is, what with $25/MWh subsidies.
Add white sugar, cheap booze, and crossing the street without looking. Other hazards to health, mental as well as physical would be, unflushed toilets, Hollywood, ignorant, semi-literate school teachers, and Keith Olbermann.
Windmills and corn save lives. Government made poverty is the answer.
Vote Democrat, become a slave today, it’s our only hope.
There are only two things about this you can know with absolute certainty: we need to expand government to protect us from these dangers and taxes must be raised on everyone except the politicians and their friends who have special dispensations because they are morally superior.
A super ‘green’ zealot told me the other day that bovine flatulence causes earthquakes. She did mention that the impact on Mother Gaia was confined to the area surrounding the herd, so this would probably not cause a tsunami. She also said that Gaia is not happy about this, so we can expect to be punished.
Larry, you are correct, again, but look at the rules. Regardless of the alphabet soup after the name, technically educated people must obey the rules. Our experience is common: those who profess working toward the higher good, are, in fact, are often seeking higher office, more power. E.g. they seek the power to force people into mass transit, by fudging the costs and benefits. Some are just dumb, but others willing break the rules for private gain. (I omitted the rule governing chastity, or Washington D. C. would become a ghost town.)
Consider society’s technical failures: the BP oil well blowout, the New Orleans levees collapse, the I 35 W bridge collapse, the Bhopal disaster, the Challenger disaster, the Big Dig overruns, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the 35 year TVA nuke outages. Add your own known fiascoes. In each debacle, there were engineers who knew before the disaster occurred, that unbounded risks existed. Yet the organization went forward, and after the disaster, the CEO always claims no one told him, he is not a real expert, or was in high school when the decision was made. I suspect the captain of the Titanic was informed of high humidity reported in the engine compartment, and excessive ice in the drinks on deck. I suspect Ohm’s law may be true, but am certain of the law of organizations: whoever tells the big boss the unvarnished truth is transferred to Fukushima.
Because the boss does not want to know; he wants stock options. He violates both rules.
As technology becomes more potent, more lethal, we must tie liability for undue technical risk, over time, to decision makers. Our regulatory, litigious, corporate system has failed. Our technical societies are irrelevant. The game is how to obtain subsidies, get the appropriation, supported by sweet answers on technical risks which will occur after my funeral. E.g. if climate change is shown to be harmless, it will be proven while Al Gore’s grandchildren are enjoying his estate in their retirement. He carries no risk of being incorrect, while today, coal miners are betting 100% of their net worth. And their lives.
I propose that Al be required to know technology and cost, earn a P.E. (or something) or be shunned as an ignoramus. If any one violates either rule, their alphabet suffix vanishes with painful consequences.
Putting prostitutes in charge, with letters behind their name, signifying their contribution, would be no worse. As it stands, with out leaders, do not let your kids grow up to be PEs. Teach them Mandarin.
Not disagreeing with any of that. But that is a subject that you or I could both write books on, and maybe someone has. That’s at the heart of the climate issue; how to institutionally make high stakes decisions based on the best information available from science while keeping ideology and politics out of the process. They sure haven’t done that in the climate field, and I don’t know how we’re going to do that with other high-stakes policy issues.
But we’re going to have to. There’s too much on the table. I don’t think I need to remind you of Ike’s 1961 farewell address, but the old General sure saw this coming with 20-20 vision.
Let’s remind some of the posters on this site what you are talking about:
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/technological elite.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
Sorry Dan to burst your bubble. Horses and donkeys emit methane gas which every gorbot knows is bad; and bicycles-don’t they require steel and making steel requires… oops, fire and fire=bad.Since we have to close all nuclear power plants immediately because of Japan, and all coal and gas fired plants must be shut down NOW to save Ma, and all hydroelectric dams must be dynamited to save the fish, this leaves what for the greenies to plug their Piouses, Leaves, Volts and epi-pads into? Windmills? No wait birds fly into them. Solar? No wait, the only mine in the US which produces the minerals needed to make them was closed and the only other source is….wait for it…China. So this leaves us where? Lets form a committee to study the issue, gathering all the best minds from around the world, make a Dept. in Government, heck maybe a cabinet position, award a peace prize or two….
Those are but minor flaws. After properly protracted study as you suggest, the solutions will be found. Maybe we can outsource all uses of fire to North Korea and Libya. Gas bags can be fitted to the horses and donkeys and the collected contaminants can be sent to those places to fuel the needed fires.
On the other hand, the United States could just become a province of China, under President Obama’s benign governorship. That would be the easiest way for him; there would be no distractions from an obdurate bunch of Republicans and we would all be happy; we might even get HuCare. Hu knows. We are almost there now and maybe our debts could be negotiated. All possibilities are clearly possible and all must be considered, intensively, before final proposals are submitted.
Do I detect a little tongue in cheek, sarcastic humor from an ivy league academic here? Of course he graduated from Yale in 1963 so that would make him about, well, pretty old but definitely a breath of fresh air.
A little tongue in cheek? Well, yes; and that makes lots of stuff very difficult to swallow unless previously masticated and thoroughly digested by the news media.
@9. Algernon Swinburne:”Horses and donkeys emit methane gas which every gorbot knows is bad; and bicycles-don’t they require steel and making steel requires… oops, fire . . .”
Obviously this requires that our nation should focus on making sustainable wooden bicycles.
Although it has received little notice, President Obama has been working diligently with his top advisers, often until after well three o:clock in the morning, to devise criteria for requests for grants to conduct studies on the feasibility of sustainable large scale cement bicycle manufacture. He is quite familiar with cement bicycles; indeed, their compassionate use under his guidance to thwart kinetic
terroristcriminal activity in the United States is thought likely to result in another well deserved Nobel Peace Prize later this year.There are no barriers through which he will not push, no novel approaches he will not explore, no investments he will not demand, to make his beloved country one of which he can eventually be truly proud.
Unless, of course, Dan you’re a taxpayer — in which case you just might wonder what convoluted philosophy of lemon socialism inspired President Obama to include in his 2012 budget $36 billion in government loan guarantees for constructing new nuclear power plants. http://www.youtube.com/user/ScurvyNewsNetwork?feature=mhum#p/a/u/0/VGhE4XKa2Rs
Which is none at all. The loan guarantees are just that- insurance, not loans or grants. Insurance, which, by the way, the utilities pay handsomely for. They will bring money into the Treasury, not draw from it.
Every human being who has died has been exposed to oxygen.
It is obvious that oxygen kills.
We must outlaw oxygen now!
You dream of the lethality of fire, but oxygen gets ‘em all. Every one. In fact, it wasn’t the jews who killed Jesus, it was oxygen.
Please, all you greenies, stop your use of oxygen today! It’s killing you!