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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (6711)	2/27/2001 1:13:17 PM
From: Greg or e	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I can't argue with the advantages of solar in the "LONG RUN". Unfortunately humans are notoriously short sighted. There is also a conflict of interest when so much money is being made in the oil industry. Technological advances have done a great deal of good. Don't get me wrong, but they have also caused most of the problems we have today. It seems every time we solve one problem we create two new ones. Slowly but surely, we are wearing this earth out, like an old pair of jeans. We keep putting patches on it, but I am not as hopeful as some that we are even capable of creating a utopia, even if all the political wrangling were to cease tomorrow. Again that does not mean we can just ignore the problems, and should not do what we can, but the way I see it, we are just rearranging the deck chairs on a slowly sinking ship. Greg

To: cosmicforce who wrote (6711)	2/27/2001 1:55:57 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Solar is a one time, up front capital investment. People who have solar end up paying less in the long run. To generate a significant fraction of our electricity from solar power would not only require a very large up from capital investment. It would also require a lot of land and you have to consider maintenance costs and cloudy days. it galls me that Tim couldn't see that the world he was proposing was basically a planetary-scale terrarium where man's impact on the ecosystem was total. I wasn't proposing anything. I was merely stating that human economic and technological progress can continue even if our population continues to go up. Depending on future fertility trends it is likely that the world's population will peak at 10 to 25 billion people. At that level we do not need to make the world in to anything like a terrarium. Tim