Re: [FRIAM] How many years left

[Steve Smith]

I wonder how much more “efficient” cars have gotten. They have certainly gotten lighter over the years. But are they really getting that much more energy from gasoline? My contemporary cars get about twice the fuel mileage that my earlier vehicles did.  This is a combination of being lighter, more aerodynamic, having better drive-train efficiencies, improved combustion due to combustion chamber design, fuel management, and spark management.   Vehicles with similar weight but (in my case) with 4x4 or AWD get about 50% better gas mileage than their 2WD counterparts from 30-40 years ago.   My "economy cars" from the 70's/80's rival even the hybrids.  I have to coast a lot, manage my speed carefully, avoid sitting at idle, but yes, they clock in about the same as a Prius or even an Insight, but it takes a lot of care. “I wonder why we, the apologists and denialists for anthropogenic crises are so quick to take credit for man's great abilities to fill every corner of the world, to dominate every climate, every landscape, yet insist that we could *never* be the cause of major systems imbalances in the world”   I suppose the same is true in reverse. There are those that apologize for our greatness and deny that we’ve done wonders yet insist that we could never be the cause of our own destiny. It’s all a matter of perspective. I'm usually on your side of the arguement.   I'm a human-chauvanist (thanks to Robert Heinlein) and I think we will outlive every other species on the planet, even if we have to escape it, leaving a burnt-out cinder behind.   We are wicked-clever, and we *will* find a way. But what I want to know is why in all of our awesomeness, we don't spend a little of it in introspection.   Why don't we look at what we are doing and ask whether we really want to be so exploitative?   To hear one side of the debate you think we are on the verge of self-extinction through abuse of the planet, but to listen to the other, you would think we are also on the edge of extinction if we don't exploit every resource to the greatest of our ability.   For the nuclear-buffs, "what if fission was out of our reach?".  What if nuclear power simply were not an option?  Would we *really* be on the verge of disaster?  Sure, it is convenient, but that isn't the same as saying it is necessary. Sometimes I wonder, if a conservative is someone that resists change, then are those that “save the whales” and fret about “global warming” or “global cooling” also conservative? Did those mammoths died because they didn’t change; that they were too “conservative” of a species and didn’t adapt and evolve? Did they really die or did their genes live on in other species? If we hunted them to death and that’s bad, is it also bad that they supplanted other species during their rise and caused them to go extinct? The rhetoric of conservative/liberal is mostly duplicitous and argumentative to me.  I'm an anarchist.  We have some choices that other species do not have, that our ancestors did not have for the most part.   We are the smart-ass Hippies who knew it all, who became Yuppies who knew it all, who are now blaming "them" for FFing everything up.  To paraphrase the Obama slogan, "we are the ones we've been whining about". Right now is a *really good time* to take serious stock of our (collective) situation and put down our "childish things" (another Obamaism?) and ask ourselves what is really happening in this world and whether we want to do something different (if we even can).   This is environmental, sociological, economic, political.  I hope Obama and his inner circle are as smart and aware as they (sometimes) appear to be.  I hope his detractors are as wrong as their arrogant self-rightous blustering implies.   I hope the rest of us at least take our role in this seriously, err on the thoughtful side, take a chance by asking some of the harder questions (pro and con) and considering what we can and might do about the answers. Our parents spent their lives trying to avoid/repair the mistakes their parents made (depression, world wars, etc.) and we are doing the same I fear.  I hope not to condemn my own children to fighting/repairing from my mistakes while ignoring their own real plight and opportunities.  “I think I'll choose to live in a region of the multiverse where humans *do* recognize their self-destructive habits”  I don’t think you have a choice. If in this universe we destroy ourselves, our conscious continuity will only live on in those other universe where we don’t destroy ourselves. I think you are right. I was merely being rhetorical.   I think multiverse theories are generally moot, no matter how interesting.   I have a thin belief (whatever that means) that to be conscious is to be able to span and navigate these possibilities...   but I'm not sure I know what that really means. Imagine all those other universes where a killer asteroid hit the Earth, or nuclear war, or plague killed everyone. We’ll, here we are and there we’re not! But I'm sure my ur-selves in their uber-competence would have found a clever way to escape the worst of it, to live on and speculate and cogitate and pontificate endlessly. I think I need to go back to inspecting the lint trapped in my navel now, maybe I can felt it up into a fresh cover for my yurt... the 20-year warranteed plasticized canvas is starting to age.  - Steve

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