"Environmental Activism as Carbon Imperialism: Nightmare for the Poor"

Energy generation for now is not scalable from a sustainability standpoint, but putting eggs in different baskets does accelerate the process for cleaner tech.

The biggest problem is that if i or my ancestors own a pile of dirt thats not just good, but great at doing one single thing, im probably going to spend a lot of the money i get from the dirt pile and make sure it still profitable in 20-30 years.

Cant say the same thing with a "bird killing" wind generator right now... but maybe its owner will figure that out when the next thing threatens to repoace it.

 

The big advantage of coal is that it's very plentiful and easy to obtain. Besides that it still takes money to build a coal fired plant and to build transmission lines. It takes money to store and process coal also. All of that also takes capital.

This is why I'm saying this needs to be thought of differently. The thinking is we need to build a massive powerplant to provide power for development but for providing power to provide access to the global information network for education that power can be generated on a smaller scale. We should be looking at generating power on the village and neighborhood level. This where can start small smaller scale generation based on renewables that can provide power on the local scale but also feed into the grid. Using smart grid technology distributed energy can provide enough power to meet many of the needs of modern society while also being far more efficient and resilient than the model of large scale centralized power generation.

 

It kind of neuters coal's cost advantage. It cost a lot of money to put a man on the moon.

 

I'll just this say this about the direction of Biden's climate initiative.... there's a very good chance that Biden/Dems get over their skis because they implement things whose effects will take longer to arise than the mid terms. That is, the Dems need to create some jobs in the short term with their initiatives instead of a bunch of do-goodery.

Electric vehicles are a no brainer but does this help the midwest in the short term where they manufacture diesel engines? Replacing aging buses,school buses, garbage trucks with new, more efficient, less emission emitting vehicles still kills two birds with one stone. Just an example.