The world political scene has had several climate summits. The most recent one was held in Cancun, Mexico, ending last week.
Under the new, green technologies angle, a related article appeared in NewVisions, a Ugandan publication, authored by UK independent journalist, Gwynne Dyer, titled “New technologies solution to climate change”
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Gwynne Dyer wrote:
Wind turbines, solar panels and the like tend to be more expensive than cheap and dirty coal-fired power stations. If the developing countries choose the more expensive option, who pays the difference? The old rich countries who landed them in this dilemma, of course.
People in the rich countries do not even understand that history, so they are still a long way from accepting that deal. It might be years before it happens. May be too many years.
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Today, politics, climate, rich vs poor countries and economic development, are all blended together into a poor quality soup.
On its face, it is a relatively good thing to promote shifts in technologies away from our current Age of Petroleum and Coal fuels.
A leading premise strongly debated in today’s forums is whether human industrial exhaust of green-house gasses is The Decisive Part of climate change across our planet. A majority of spokespersons in the already developed world proclaim loudly YES to that idea. The USA political conservatives shout back, NO, That is Fraud!
You can also find some astronomers in the planetary sciences field who detect that global climate change is currently observable at places such as Mars or Uranus as well as our own planet.
My perspective is that of a person who has for decades been a fan for both alternative energy technologies, and economic development / industrialization of our surrounding solar system. That leads to the ideas in which such enterprises would be coping on a very large scale with human habitation activities surrounded by environments very different than what we take for granted on the ground in many nations on this planet today. Built environments, “Closed Cycle environments & life support systems”, (CELS), are thus an important conceptual aspect, if such endeavors would be economically viable. The concept arises when we start to think about large scale economic development activity in locations near some of the asteroids, for example.
The carry over of such ideas may be important in situations where earthly food crop harvests must be kept going, even if temperature ranges and precipitation features at the selected agricultural geographical locations might shift away from what have been recent past historical averages and visibilities. How to do so at large scales quickly and avoidably thus should become a high priority topic to be supported and pursued by many institutional entities Those entities may span the whole spectrum from individuals, companies, and on up thru UN agencies or their contractors.
In the era prior to the late 1930-s through WW-2, and afterward, for USA / Europe / Japan / China, centralized national governments dominance in technologies innovation and science research support (strongly steered by national security / military motives) was not the big thing that it is today. Also, nearly 10 decades in the past, business planning, with the future in mind, not ignoring things further away than the coming 18 months, was much more in style than it currently is in USA economic culture. Hence today’s grid-locked, blame-fingers-pointing, calls on national / international governmental entities to Save Us From Doom, need not be the only way for things to go forward from now.
In his X-Files USA TV series and film produced by Chris Carter, an interesting slogan is displayed. “The Truth Is Out There”. Perhaps some diligent investigators, shining light into the shadows, and even looking for things hidden in plane sight, should be encouraged to search for, attempt to shake loose, certain rumored New Physics, Exotic Technologies, which may be sitting on rather dusty and shelves. Concerned and enlightened, publicly spirited outsiders, may deserve access to such things.
A technology milestone prise was won a few years ago. The Voyager airplane became the first ever to fly around the world non-stop without taking on more fuel. One of the science fiction authors, perhaps Jerry Pournell, quoted a video news clip filmed upon its landing. One of its 2 crew members walked back to the plane, placing a hand on it, then said, “this is what free persons do”.
– – octimotor