Tags
ecology, famine, Federal Research, global warming, Governmental policy, Overpopulation, Research spending, war
Global climate change is in the air here on the University of California, Berkeley campus. As I was going over to the first lecture on my schedule at Hearst Memorial Mining Building, here was one of our climate professors Dan Kammen, Co-Director of the Berkeley Institute for the Environment, setting up for a TV interview in front of the old UC Art Museum.
Dan Kammen, climate change is in the air here in Berkeley.
On February 9th I had a blog about a lecture by Dan Kammen on Global Warming.
Helene York
Helene York, Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation Sponsor: CITRIS (Ctr for Info Technology Research in the Interest of Society)
Food and Climate Change: Myths v. Facts
The food system’s contribution of greenhouse gases has long been ignored in the United States and where it has discussed it has become a matter of mythology. Constituting as much as one-third of GHGe, it should not be ignored if we are to achieve ambitious reduction targets, but we also need to gain an appreciation of the true sources, and appropriate mitigation efforts, rather than rely on ideology and folklore.
Arun Majumdar
Arun Majumdar, Director, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Berkeley Lab Sponsor: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Buildings That Think Green: The Next Generation of Smart Energy Technologies
Arun Majumdar hopes to change that. He’s leading a team of Berkeley Lab scientists to create a new generation of net-zero energy, carbon-neutral buildings. Majumdar’s goal is to reduce today’s demand by 90% in new buildings and by 50% in retrofitted old buildings by 2030.
Watch for this lecture on YouTube. Here is a similar previous lecture. Today’s lecture was primarily aimed at improving buildings and therefore is a more focused one than Al Gore’s The Unpleasant Truth, but it is more capable of being implemented.
Federal R&D Investments
Follow the money and you will get a better understanding of where the actions is rather than the words.
Most of the past research money has gone to Defense, and most of that listed as Energy has gone to atomic energy research in various ways. Renewable energy gets a lot of political lip service, but very little money.
Each of these lectures was very good in its own way, but each of them is a total failure, in my opinion, because none of them will discuss the population explosion, and how that massive increase in human population will totally overwhelm the solutions which they are each trying to implement. I have spoken to each of them personally, briefly, and each admits that I am correct about the population problem. Off the record of course. It is a politically charged issue, and is outside of their expertise so they can’t, and won’t talk about it.
It appears to an outsider such as myself, that they are all being manipulated from above by higher forces. That they are puppets on a string. That is a bit harsh but if they can not speak out on the obvious problem, and the problem is going to totally overwhelm their solutions then their solutions are worthless, and perhaps even counterproductive. Their solutions may be worse than doing nothing at all because they give the veneer that something is being done to solve the problem, when it isn’t. This is similar to what is happening on Wall Street this last week where covering up obvious investment failings eventually catches up with the perpetrators of the fraud, and the public not the perpetrators gets stuck with a tremendous bill. The accountability falls not where it should but upon the innocent people who are forced to trust these experts.
This coming ecological failing will be vastly worse than a simple loss of money on a rather large scale, it will lead to and directly precipitate global famine which will almost certainly bring on a global war much greater than we have ever witnessed. These very nice people remind me of the very nice atomic scientists of the last century, some of whom I knew, and which created their horrible genie in the bottle, all for the betterment of mankind. Here again we have well meaning people setting the world up for disaster and the more successful they are the more precarious the human condition becomes.
Rock a bye baby, in the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock;
When the bow breaks the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby cradle and all.
Unfortunately, in this case, the baby is humanity, and the cradle is the Earth. We need innovation like we have never had before! But the innovation must somehow bring human baby population under some form of rational control before the natural processes of nature solve our population explosion problem the way it always has in the past.
