[lbo-talk] Re: Galloway, Creativity Gap

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Mon May 23 20:18:51 PDT 2005


On 5/23/05, Simon Huxtable <jetfromgladiators at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> > > From: Gar Lipow <the.typo.boy at gmail.com>
>
> > The details of the Britains religious hatred laws I
> > don't know. Tend to be
> > close to a freedom of speech absolutist, so I might
> > well be against them.
>
> The law regulates against incitement to religious
> hatred. It's as vague as that.
>
> More here:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3873323.stm
>
> > But nuclear power - horribly overpriced way to
> > produce electricity. Wind is
> > cheaper per kilowatt hour. And the UK coast has
> > plenty of wind, not mention
> > some of your highland areas.
>
> This is shaping up to be a major debate in UK
> politics. Wind power is a political no no in the UK.
> Liberal politicians tend to agree with it in the
> abstract whilst locally opposing it for reasons of
> political expedience. In general, residents of areas
> where wind farms are located object to the blot on the
> landscape that wind farms create (I tend to find them
> eerie, rather than ugly). Wind provides less than 1%
> of Britain's energy at the moment.
> The debate is not between wind and nuclear power. It a
> debate over how Britain should cut its fossil fuel
> omissions and how that energy gap should be filled.
> Nuclear is being promoted as a relatively cost-free
> way of filling that gap. Somewhat lost in the debate
> is the idea of energy conservation.

Yes efficiency makes a great deal of sense; in the U.S. I think we could cut use by about 75% without compromising production. Britain, being more efficient to begin with probably has a slightly lower potential -60% as a silly wild arsed guess But you have to get that remaining precent from somewhere. When it comes to electricity don't see why wind should not fill a great deal of the gap.

FWIW, an environmentalist friend of mine tends to the
> view that nuclear is perhaps the least worst solution.

He prefers nuclear energy to wind energy - because people don't want to look at windmills. This does not puzzel me. It appalls me. We are blasting the top off of mountains in the U.S. to mine coal; the UK has a fair sized coal industry too. And people oppose wind energy because wind generators spoil the look of the landscape? I mean I'm not doubting you. We have the same phenomena in the U.S. I think the problem with wind generators is that they are put up where rich people have to look at them. All energy forms have social costs (including efficiency - the mercury in flourescent bulbs for example.) Wind has about the lowest social costs of any energy form - but since they can't be mostly imposed on the poor the way the costs (for example) of coal or uranium mining our, it stirs up tremendous opposition.

I seem to remember that one in four children in Harlem have asthma - largely due to coal use.

Simon
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