[lit-ideas] Re: Fukushima
- From: "Veronica Caley" <molleo1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:39:57 -0400
Andy "we made huge amounts of money exporting oil, and of course all the
government stimulus money that went into fighting WWII. We peaked in oil in
1970 or so."
What a quaint idea. A country goes to war and pays for it. I am not sure if I
am a pessimist or a realist. I lean towards the latter. And I despair of
the prospect that there seems to be no politician talking to citizens as if
they were adults." Namely, jobs are not just going over seas, they are being
cannibalized from one state to the other, and some are lost to robots. Which I
learned was expected to happen when I was in school in the
sixties. And, everyone above the poverty level needs to pay taxes. And, if
the government doesn't spent a lot to pull us out of this, we may never get out
of it, because population is growing but jobs are not. The Japanese are
developing robots to care for old people. This too is happening in the Western
countries. But who cares? As long as the stock market mostly goes up...
Veronica Caley
Milford, MI
From: Andy ----- Original Message -----
To: lit-ideas
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 7:15 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Fukushima
I wonder if anyone has been following Fukushima. It's off the media's radar
screens, but it's very alive and well. It's an extremely serious situation,
far more serious than Chernobyl. The worst part is that the technology for
dealing with the melted down cores is at least 10 to 15 years away. It has to
be why the media isn't reporting on the story.
Energy is the hugest problem. It's the reason Japan built so many reactors
in such a seismically active part of the world, because they fought a war
essentially over oil, lost, and had no alternatives. Still, the lure of
profits in the so called free market bewitched and bedazzled and TEPCO built to
a worst case seismic scenario of 8, which when it happened turned out to be a
9. They're American designed reactors by the way, designed by GE. Compounding
the irony is that there is no such thing as a free market, there never was,
there never will be, but that's another story.
For Lawrence, WWII was fought over oil, not freedom. Hitler wanted energy,
in the form of farmland in Poland and the USSR. Farms are energy because farms
are food, and food is energy for people the way oil is energy for machinery.
Try to live without either food or oil. (Napoleon said an army marches on its
stomach.) Russia had (and still has although their oil has peaked) huge
reserves of oil and gas. We were at the time of WWII the Saudi Arabia of oil,
we made huge amounts of money exporting oil, and of course all the government
stimulus money that went into fighting WWII. We peaked in oil in 1970 or so.
Oil imports are going down from 2/3 to apparently half our needs, but that's
because we're simply driving less and our manufacturing base went overseas,
most notably exported to China, but we still import at least half our oil, and
oil is a finite resource in any case. We have not moved away from being
absolutely incapable of functioning without it. China is at this time running
rings around us in terms of renewable energy (wind, solar) because they too are
now importing oil and even coal (after being an exporter) and know they have to
do something about it. Still, their water is a disaster and they're running
out of arable soil, which so far they solve by importing water in the form of
virtual water in crops. They seem to be aware that they live on a small planet
with finite and dwindling resources, plus they don't have the burden of dealing
with the myth of the free market, so it's wait and see how they do.
Still looking for something cheerful. The irony though, if pessimists ran
the world, there would be plenty of cheerful things, because most problems
wouldn't happen. A pessimist would have built the reactors to a worst case of
12, would regulate more, not less, would find better ways to run an economy
than by encouraging meaningless consumption, and on and on. Maybe people
prefer optimism because it's so, what's the word, exciting, leaving never a
dull moment...
Andy
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