Spence’s Recent Comments

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  Well man, just off the top of my head, there is solar thermal, hydro, wave generation, power cells attached to off-the-grid sources, and of course the fact that when the wind isn't blowing in Iowa, it might be blowing in New Mexico, or California, or North Dakota. There are a ton of engineering solutions to renewable lags, just like there have been engineering solutions for the last hundred years or so to deal with fluctuating energy demand. Even, say, a backup natural gas generator in case of total renewable drop off is a much better solution, and none of these possibilities actually require new technology. All of them are already proven.On Lester Brown speaks sense on the food/climate crisis posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago 12 Responses

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  Oh Jesus, not the "We enlighten Westerners are better for the environment then the dirty savages" argument again. What is the environmental footprint of the average Chinese compared to the average American? We're the five percent of the population that eats of 25% of the resources, so tell us again how that is sustainable? A world where everyone lives and uses resources like the Western middle class is a horrific idea, and you can't justify it with cherry picked examples (hum, I wonder if a cleaner London was accomplished by simply outsourcing dirty industrial production to poorer places? Ya think?).

  We lived for generations in a harmonious loop with nature, but you are claiming that all that knowledge is worthless in the face of our modern brilliance. We are the pinnacle, and we will innovate our way out of species overshoot without sacrificing nary an SUV. If only the rest of the world would live like us. We'll never run out of anything, right? The market will solve all our issues, and of course, that improvement you claim over the last fifty years had nothing to do with tightened regulation...

  Same old song.

   

  On The fallacy of climate activism posted 2 months, 4 weeks ago 100 Responses

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  Excellent beat-down Tom, and I'm not at all surprised that someone writing for the "free market" AEI would of course be getting huge checks cut from the government. The neo-con con has always been about fat corporate corruption sheathed as principle.

  But what really bothered me about Hurst's argument, and what really made me wonder if he ever even read Pollan's writing, is that most of all, Michael Pollan writes about health. He writes about the effect of modern agricultural practices on our bodies. After all, the subtitle of The Ominvore's Dilemma is A Natural History of Four Meals. The book is about meals and about eating and about what food does to you. The entire point of farming is to produce healthy food, but CAFOs and pesticide-soaked industrial farms are ruining the health of Americans, no doubt including Blake Hurst. Yet he doesn't even bother to address the issue. Maybe because he has nothing to say.

  On An 'agri-intellectual' talks back posted 3 months, 1 week ago 49 Responses

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  Dude, do you have a mouse in your pocket, or is that the royal we? Before you push uranium, come on out here to New Mexico, and we can go on a lovely tour of area uranium mines. BTW, uranium is not a renewable resource. It is, however, in its enriched form, deadly, polluting, and very, very dangerous for a very, very long time. I know I've said it before, but there is a reason no nuclear powerplant can buy insurance on the free market. The market considers it too risky. So should we.

   

   

   

  On The limits of today's electric car technology posted 3 months, 1 week ago 18 Responses

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  Glad to see our very own hydrogen hackjob back in the comments. At least after a solid spanking recently, he's dropped the lie that electric cars run off a coal-powered grid produce more pollution then those burning gasoline from crude, but he's still trotting out the old "solar is useless at night" chestnut, despite a generous recent schooling. Oh, and what's this, a brand new fantastic piece of fiction?

  As you say, the technology, which is barely useful for portable laptops, has not changed in decades.

  Funny, since I'm typing this on a portable laptop, as, I guess, are the majority of Grist writers and commenters. And guess what? The practical battery life of laptops is leaps and bounds ahead of where it used to be. indeed, laptops are a great example of how incremental change, in both battery technology and in energy-saving hardware, constantly improves and makes more usable a technology, and a silver bullet, or "black swan", are still nothing more then a pipe dream.

  Ya know, I don't have any objection to hydrogen as a technology. It's just that the shrill shills who dish lame talking points for it have pretty much convinced me that it's a non starter. After all, it's always the adulterous pastor who preaches the loudest sermon.

  On The limits of today's electric car technology posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago 18 Responses