[Gllug] [OT] Technobabble

[David Damerell]

On Monday, 21 Nov 2005, Jim Bailey wrote:
>On Nov 21, 11:50, David Damerell wrote:
>>Perhaps it is unclear to you that this is someone _talking_ but it is
>>their _actions_ that affect the environment. And their actions are to
>>increase emissions and energy consumption year-on-year.
>My original post was to show that eco-design in building could be used
>to greatly reduce energy consumption and thus make the possibility of
>purely renewable energy policy much more likely over the longer term.

And if you hadn't chosen to make some obviously absurd assertions
about China, you might have just had Nix pointing out where you're
talking rubbish.

>>That's just the usual nonsense. An obvious counterexample is that
>>coming up with clean industrial processes in the Victorian era would
>>have been enormously expensive and would not have provided any benefit
>>to an individual firm surrounded by a thousand dirty industrial
>>processes.
>The replacement of Newcomen's engine by Watt's produced fuel savings of
>around 75%,

Very good, tell me something I already know! Now, would designing and
installing chimney scrubbers with the technology of the era have made
any sense? No.

>>A "bivalent debate" is one where when you talk nonsense someone points
>>it out, right?
>Support the claim of nonsense David, 

I'm not the one claiming China is taking effective action.

>>No, orders of magnitude more somewhat cleaner cars is *not* one of the
>>things necessary to save the environment. It is one of the things that
>>will ensure the destruction of same. What is needed is _fewer_ motor
>>cars (and cleaner ones wouldn't hurt, either).
>Fewer cars would be a _nice_ option but the vast majority of people
>don't want to give up their car and unless forced to do so by a police
>state won't give up their cars.

Thank you, Captain Obvious! Perhaps you'd care to tell me that the sea
is wet next?

Obvious but not relevant, passing over the observation that China's
_got_ a police state; it's still the case that orders of magintude
more (you *do* know what an order of magnitude is, yes? and that to
use the expression of motor cars in China is literally true, yes?)
somewhat cleaner cars won't do us a blind bit of good, and what we
_do_ need is fewer of the things, whether we like it or not; one of
the many reasons why your vision of a painless transition to a
fluffy-bunny future is completely false.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> Distortion Field!
Today is First Sunday, November - a weekend.
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