Diurnal Thoughts on Wars
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Response to “Energy”.
Thanks, Frederick Bott.
I was thinking about writing something similar, and now I can let you run with it instead. Quantifying the ‘necessary’ use of energy vs the unnecessary could be the next step from here. I’ve thought some about seasonal migration of humans as the planet gets hotter, but also about daily migration of energy. One of the selfish attitudes about solar is that “it doesn’t work at night”, but in reality, neither do most people. The recent fluff action by the government to eliminate daylight savings time illustrates how we don’t adjust to natural cycles.
There are a lot of places that the electricity doesn’t stay on 24/7, and they appreciate it a lot more when it comes on.
Instead of worrying so much about battery backup, fossil fuel reliability, and perpetually wasted energy, humanity could do with some connection to diurnal living.
From there, we could capitalize on the impetus to do things more efficiently (insulation, turning things off, not buying things that require always-on power).
When people start complaining about wars and gasoline prices on TV, maybe it’s time to turn the lights and TV off and go to bed. It’s not about ignoring reality: it’s about turning off the advertising.
Eventually, high voltage DC lines could circle the world, (see “China”), but for now, most of the stuff people are doing doesn’t really need to be done anyway. In the U.S., <1% of the people grow all the food for the other 99%. Most of the economy involves people driving around for the sake of driving around (then paying someone to mow their useless grass yard), then “investing” where they place bets with money they’ve never seen on the competitive moral turpitude of men (usually) who pledge moral allegiance to piles of money (corporations).
We are burning oil to grow corn to feed cars to get poor efficiency. I went to see my senator 25 years ago to tell him this was a bad idea. No, he didn’t listen then, either.
They could have passed a law requiring employers to provide transportation to work. Instead, they built more lanes and pretended that the ethanol (oxygenate) would reduce ozone in cities and ignored what growing it did to the farms.
Now, it’s all about the electric cars. faaaaaahhhck! (There are valid mechanical reasons to shift to electric vehicles, but the hype is not concerned with usefulness, repairability, reliability or ending the trillion-dollar parts and oil change industry).
Just pull the plugs at 5:00 pm and look around for things that need to be done without electricity. Go to sleep when you’re tired and plug things back in when you wake up.
Take the rest of the day off.
