spaceshaper’s Recent Comments

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  Nice article, Tom. Worth it for the Gibbon quote alone.On Michael Specter's new book 'Denialism' misses its targets posted 5 days, 6 hours ago 43 Responses

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  'Too much conservation'? Sorry Dan, I'll entertain a good contrarian viewpoint with the best of them but I just can't follow you there. And from my perspective this 'infant industry trying to make its way in a mostly hostile world' is growing up fast and gaining support every day.On Simple lifestyle tweaks key in climate change fight posted 5 days, 14 hours ago 47 Responses

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  Actually Dan it was me that wrote the line about maintaining emissions in order to destroy them, not Jestbill. But that's neither here nor there. You have spoken to the motivations of energy investors on both sides of the renewables fence as if you know what you're talking about, and if I interpreted that incorrectly when I wrote of an insider perspective I apologize. But you've not yet responded to my question. By your lights, and in the interests of personal environmental responsibility, did I do wrong to insulate my house and replace an aging, ailing 9SEER heat pump with a 16SEER unit?On Simple lifestyle tweaks key in climate change fight posted 5 days, 16 hours ago 47 Responses

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  I suspect that our differences in perspective correlate to the gap between an industry insider and an ordinary consumer like myself. Your arguments seem circular. Are increases in electricity rates not in any case inevitable in the wake of the internalization of carbon costs which are on the rather close horizon? Conservation enables consumers to accept these rate increases without pain. Heating and cooling my all-electric non-solar-anything home now costs less than my monthly cell phone bill, following a few simple and fairly inexpensive conservation upgrades. Are you really telling me I did a bad thing?On Simple lifestyle tweaks key in climate change fight posted 6 days, 2 hours ago 47 Responses

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  So I have to say I still don't get it. Even accepting your framing of the economics, it would seem, to put it in the simplest terms, that WITH conservation we might simply retain existing coal capacity without significant new investment in renewables, while WITHOUT conservation we would get existing coal capacity + (probably) new renewable capacity + (probably) new coal capacity. I can understand how not conserving might increase investment in new capacity, which may or may not include renewables. Giving a boost to new energy technology is all well and good but don't the high-emissions facilities keep chugging away in either scenario? And shouldn't our real goal be to actually reduce those emissions?On Simple lifestyle tweaks key in climate change fight posted 6 days, 3 hours ago 47 Responses