Written on June 15th, 2010 by adminno shouts
The oil spill in the gulf has once again put question marks over the oil industry and our dependence on oil for our energy needs. How can you put a price on the damage to the environment, the coastline and the seafood we eat from the millions of gallons of crude oil leaking into the sea.
It may seem pretty obvious but hanks to the clean benefits of solar energy it has no such problems. Leaking solar energy is not likely to do much damage. We should be focusing more and more on the clean renewable energy technologies we have available to provide for some if not all of our energy needs and we need to put more effort into reducing our energy requirements so we can call an end to the oil based economy and start on the clean and renewable energy based economy in the future.
Written on June 8th, 2010 by adminno shouts
So Apple has released the latestversion of the iPhone, whoopee-do. Pardon me while I ignore all the hype and question whether this really is such an important event in world history but it could be very significant as a pointer to the end of human civilization as we know it.
Didn’t we just have an iPhone released that was supposed to be the best phone on the planet? Oh, maybe that was a year ago. A whole year, wow. So what has changed since?
Sure, the iPhone looks cute and it is a beautifully designed little thing but does the world really need another 110 million mobile phones thrown in the rubbish bin because a thinner, faster, improved screen version has been released? Hopefully, the old models will be recycled but is the the great achievement of the human civilization, to be able to come up with another wasteful technology product that everyone feels they must have and then replace, every six or twelve months?
The success of the human race may prove to be its downfall. Like a virus that grows and grows until it eventually kills its host we have come to dominate our home planet. We have bred and increased the population to the point where the resources of the planet are being stretched to supply our needs and our needs have grown along with the population.
Once we would have been happy to have enough food to eat and enough wood to build a shelter and keep warm. Now, it seems, we have to have homes and lives full of technology that is draining not just our capacity to provide the energy to power all these gadgets but it is also draining us of the limited time we have every day.
Thre was once a time when a product had a limited lifetime. That time was usually limited by how long it would last before finally breaking down. With todays efficient design and manufacturing that is far less of a problem and manufacturers have had to find another way of convincing us it is time to replace a product.
The result is a constant stream of new releases. Just like with the washing powder adverts of years ago, each new version of our phones, computers, TVs and cars is New And Improved but can life be sustained at this pace?
Humans have been successful because we have been able to think ahead and learn from our mistakes and we are naturally lazy and always look for a better and easier way of doing things. We have developed technology that has enabled us to improve our health, our comfort and our lives to a degree unimaginable to people of a few generations ago but how much longer can this go on at the incredible rate of change we are experiencing these days.
A thousand years ago at a time when the Romans were conquering Europe people no doubt thought of it as the end of the world and for many of them, it probably was, but in those times change took decades or even centuries. Looking forward it is impossible to imagine what changes there might be in the next thousand years but one thing is very clear. We cannot go on as we are doing right now.
The popluation is growing enormously and there are few undiscovered places left to be exploited to supply our growing needs. Our demand for resources grows exponentially though the supply of those resources is finite and reducing as we use them. In the past plague, pestilance and wars kept the population in check while local supply of food and resources limited the possibilities of the local population. Now the worlds resources are available to all, at a price, but the cost is more than just money.
We have been on a consumption binge that has lasted twenty or thirty years but the financial impact of this became clear when the world financial system came close to collapse. Hopefully, we are working our way out of the problems that caused but it is easier to print money to sort out a fnancial crisis than it is to find the minerals and food to sort out a world short of both.
The simple fact is that we cannot continue as we are now. The new iPhone may be a magnificent example of man’s ingenuity, design skills and technological achievements but we need to face up to the fact that we need to reduce our consumption of the resources available to a far more manageable level if we want future generations of humans to have any chance of having a happy and healthy life.
The resources we are throwing away will not be replaced. When they are gone nothing will be left for the future. It may not happen within our lifetime but if we have any concerns for future generations then we should be thinking about the long term consequences of our actions now.
Written on May 14th, 2010 by adminno shouts
The huge oil disaster caused by the explosion and fire on the oil rig off the gulf coast at the end of April which continues to cause huge amounts of oil to be leaked into the sea each day should be a warning not just about the risks of offshore oil rigs but also any other potential risk.
We are always being told how safe things are and that there is no need to be concerned. The oil industry would claim an excellent record but that is of no use when things do suddenly go terribly wrong.
Just suppose this was a nuclear power plant that suffered catastrophic failure and it was as difficult to shut down and secure as this oil well is proving to be. What chance would the local population have and how wide an area of the country might be permanently unusable?
It is all very well saying there is only a one in one hundred thousand chance or whatever the figure is, but when you have 1,000 nuclear facilities around the world that suggests we can expect to get one failure every ten years.
We actually have 437 operating nuclear power stations at present, according to the European Nuclear Society, with another 55 under construction. The old plants are reaching the ends of their lives in many cases and new construction is likely to be safer and better designed than the earlier ground breaking installations but if there is one thing to be learned from the OIL rig disaster in the USA. If it can go wrong, it might.
It doesn’t matter how many safety features you have installed. You can train people until they are blue in the face. Whatever you do, nothing is certain and mistakes, errors and unexpected events can occur that throw all your plans and security measures out of the window.
We are facing an enormous environmental disaster from a simple underwater pipe that carries oil out of the ground heaven forbid we ever have to deal with a nuclear power station out of control that we are unable to shut down or contain.
Accidents happen, that’s why they are called accidents, and I don’t care how well you plan something is sure to go wrong sometime though human error or malfunction.
Remember the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because some of the calculations had been done in Imperial measurements and others done in Metric? They were very clever people who managed to make such a careless mistake. People make mistakes, it’s what makes us human.
