[SGVLUG] Voting... researching props

[David Lawyer]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2008 at 05:00:19PM -0800, Charles Blanchard wrote:
> And yes, thank goodness for the opportunity to "self educate" via the  
> internet. If only more people would make the effort... <grin>

Yes, but it's not easy.  For example, suppose you want to find out the
feasibility of the energy policies proposed by the Presidential
Candidates (or the energy props.).  For example: what is the potential
of proposed renewable sources of energy and how does this relate to
the financial crisis?  The combined effect could cause something like
what Kunstler predicts in his book "The Long Emergency".  There are
people writing about this on the internet but most of them don't
understand it very well (and that includes Kunstler himself --I've
written a critical review of his book.).  And many of them are
promoting something for their own benefit that may have a poor
benefit-cost ratio.  In fact, I was unable to find any really good
article on the topic.

One of the best that I found (at least for energy) is:
http://www.energyskeptic.com/Energy_In_A_Nutshell.htm Energy in a
Nutshell by Alice Friedmann

But the situation is somewhat worse than she describes: She doesn't
understand the error made in every embodied energy study that I've
seen: failure to properly account for human energy.  And she failed to
discuss the need for humus (derived from crop "waste" that's proposed
to be used for biofuels).  Humus keeps minerals needed by plants from
sinking into the subsoil.  She says we are going back to the age of
wood fuel and I think she is partly right.  After searching energy on
the internet for hundreds of hours, I only found out about her when she
sent me an email regarding my articles on transportation energy on the
Internet.  My email as at thousands of places on the Internet so that
people can contact me about what I've written with comments,
questions, and suggestions.  But I also get a mountain of spam as a
result.

So a major problem is that the only people who research such broad
topics are a very few people that don't seem to have the time to do it
adequately and/or comprehensively.  This means that to "educate"
oneself on these matters requires that one spend many thousands of
hours.  Furthermore, since all this involves physics, chemistry,
biology (for biofuels), engineering, economics, and maybe geology, few
people are well qualified to research it.

There's a lot more I'd like to say but this email is already too long.

			 David Lawyer