Re: [Paddlewise] A last turn on Global Warning

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:55:01PM -0700, Bradford R. Crain wrote:
> I'm not sure we're not missing the boat here, so to speak. I can envision
> the construction of very large health clubs, where everyone is required
> to join, and everyone must spend x numbers of hours per week on the
> exercise bikes, which are used to generate electricity.

	...which in turn power the server farms located underneath them.

There are all kinds of creative possibilities out there like this;
the problem isn't the lack of ideas, it's a lack of minds sufficiently
open to them and -- simultaneously -- sufficiently clueful to do the math
and figure out which will work, and which just sound good at the time.

For example: why locate the server farm in Texas, where it's quite
hot a lot of the year and still more power must be used to keep it cool?
Why not locate it a few thousand miles north, where what *was* waste
heat is now a useful byproduct?

Why isn't every roof in downtown {insert name of bigcity} either covered
in solar panels or rooftop gardens?

Why aren't there half a million unemployed folks at work right now
in a WPA-like program [1] to plant half a billion trees?

Why are more soon-to-be clogged highways being built (e.g.: "Inter-County
Connector" in Maryland) when peak highway usage in urban areas is about
25 hours/week -- and could be largely mitigated by telecommuting?

	(Which, by the way, is a pet cause of mine.  I often point out
	to people that some of us have spent lifetimes building this
	thing called "the Internet" and we would really appreciate it if
	folks realized that they could actually use it to be in one place
	and work in another instead of sitting in "shiny metal boxes"
	on 8-lane parking lots twice a day five days a week.)

Would all of these ideas work?  Maybe -- the last one most certainly
would and is decades overdue, but I think analysis is required for the
others to figure out if they're a win or not.  That's not the problem:
we have creativity in abundance generating thousands of ideas like these
every day.  The problem is the lesser minds that belong to the
"...but we've always done it this way" crowd, minds which are simply
not agile enough to grasp that we can't do it that way any more and
that we can, should, and must change how we run our planet.

And this is why I was recently passed on the road by a Hummer with
a "drill baby drill" sticker.  I was unaware that lower primates with
obvious brain damage were issued driver's licenses, but apparently so.

---Rsk

[1] For non-US folks: The WPA was the Works Progress Administration,
a creature of the Great Depression.  The concept was to put masses of
unemployed to work while simultaneously tackling public works projects
that required huge semi-skilled labor forces.  Thus it (a) created jobs
and (b) got things done.  Much of the national infrastructure in place
to this day was built at that time.
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