Those capacitor guys sure know how to throw a party.
The “virtual water” content of oil, too, is increasing, and is a concern to everyone involved in Policy I know.
That Canada was able to lobby the EU to ignore this problem with tarsands is nothing short of a victory of diplomacy over commonsense. It’s not that tarsand oil is so dirty. It’s that it is so wet.
China has the same problem with fracking. Everyone who fracks does, and it will come to a head for them, because you can’t cheat at Physics forever.
The general solution to the problem of the commons is privatization, as a very sage Denizen pointed out in a recent thread. Economics is just a way of wording the problem. Can we learn from the physical world what its limits are, and match the shape of economic incentives to the shape of the underlying world?
Thank you for the references. My excuses for mental laziness are being removed one by one.
While Venice is sinking, it’s also well and rigorously studied, with recent and impressively supported data disentangling natural from anthropogenic sources of variability.
While there are places on coasts in the world rising, I think few of them rise a third so quickly as Venice naturally subsides; half of Venice’s change in depth is sea level rise, not subsidence.
All of us ought consider the impact on the present value of our long term investments in oceanfront of it turning from a perpetuity to an annuity with a fixed end date. Or find Snow Birds who don’t care or can’t do math.
The important figure in Sustainability equations is the denominator, the amount we must invest to obtain a return. Increasing the denominator will cost us more than proportionately we obtain.
A very long time ago, I was invited and prepared, and all arrangements were made, as a system analyst to consult with a farm cooperative in Nicaragua, with the objective of creating a network on the then little-known Internet, so the farmers could leverage their investments and logistics. It could have been a proof-of-concept for independently run mutually beneficial information exchange in agriculture.
The night before I was to fly out, my hosts took 40 American visitors to their region hostage in some short-term and silly dispute. All the hostages were before long released unharmed, but the network never happened. It took decades for the farmers to catch up with what they could have had, except for the ignorant and misguided disputatiousness of their hotheads.
Don’t let the core value of the idea be taken hostage by ancient grievance.