This continues a series on the syllabus of Pierre Desrochers’ course at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Energy and Society, which gets my vote as the single best course on its subject in North America if not the world.
Part I explored the course description as well as the videos and readings from the first two weeks of the class; Part II covered carbon-based energy.
General
“Electrification.” Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century. National Academy of Engineering. 2000.
Bradley, Robert L and Richard W. Fulmer. Energy: The Master Resource, Kendall Hunt Publishing Company, 2004, Chapter 2: Using Energy, pp. 19-20, 25-29, 30-31, 45-48.
Environmental Literacy Council Website.
“Electricity.”
“Electric Current and Power Transmission.”
“Electric Power Grids and Blackouts.”
Lomborg, Bjørn.…
“[Bjorn] Lomborg’s performance careens far across the line that divides respectable (even if controversial science) from thoroughgoing and unrepentant incompetence…. He has needlessly muddled public understanding and wasted immense amounts of the time of capable people who have had to take on the task of rebutting him.” – John Holdren (2003)
This April 1st is a good time for skeptics of settled, high-sensitivity climate science to make amends. My apology goes to the distinguished John P. Holdren.
My comeuppance (below) reminds me of the episode of Dallas where J. R. Ewing befriends a pretty young secretary at a friend’s office. He talks her up, she bubbles.
At J.R.’s next visit, she bashfully asks if he would like to go to a party with her.
“Sorry honey,” he responded.…
Continue Reading“Earth Hour not only coincides with Venezuela’s involuntary, chronic blackouts. It also joins this week’s complete, abject defeat of the Green New Deal. The 0 – 57 drubbing–with not a single Democrat voting “yes”–signals that self-made electricity blackouts will not be tolerated in the US.”
The joke goes: “What did the socialists use before candles.” The answer: electricity.
Such is true today in Venezuela, which is likely to encounter this Saturday’s Earth Hour (a turn-off-the-lights protest against modern living [1]) with an involuntary period of darkness. Atlas is shrugging under the Maduro regime, with electricity experts having fled to freer countries (a classic “brain drain”).
Venezuela is fiction-to-fact with Ayn Rand’s epic novel, Atlas Shrugged. But Rand in a previous book set up a fictional account of the fate of electricity in a dystopian world–what Earth Hour seems to long to bring about.…
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