![Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operate... complex systems at gigantic scales. Renewable energy sources are not compatible with those systems and scales. Renewables will not be able to take the place of oil and gas in running those systems. The systems themselves will have to go. Even many "environmentalists” and "greens” of our day seem to think that all we have to do is switch inputs. Instead of running all the air conditioners of Houston on oil- or gas-generated electricity, we'll use wind farms or massive solar arrays; we'll have super-fuel-efficient cars and keep on commuting over the interstate highway system. It isn't going to happen. The wish to keep running the same giant systems at [a] gigantic scale using renewables is the heart of our illusions about solar, wind, and waterpower. (James Howard Kunstler)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/41/james-howard-kunstler-able-1009541.webp)
Fossil fuels allowed the human race to operate... complex systems at gigantic scales. Renewable energy sources are not compatible with those systems and scales. Renewables will not be able to take the place of oil and gas in running those systems. The systems themselves will have to go. Even many "environmentalists” and "greens” of our day seem to think that all we have to do is switch inputs. Instead of running all the air conditioners of Houston on oil- or gas-generated electricity, we'll use wind farms or massive solar arrays; we'll have super-fuel-efficient cars and keep on commuting over the interstate highway system. It isn't going to happen. The wish to keep running the same giant systems at [a] gigantic scale using renewables is the heart of our illusions about solar, wind, and waterpower.
James Howard KunstlerRelated topics
able air commuting compatible complex day electricity energy fossil gas giant heart highway human interstate massive oil place race renewable running scale solar switch system take think use using wind wish greens scales houston waterpowerRelated quotes
Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By "oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By "corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a "person,” with "rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, "a corporation... is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance... It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.
James Howard Kunstler
Arrangements to make people pay for using a program, including licensing of copies, always incur a tremendous cost to society through the cumbersome mechanisms necessary to figure out how much (that is, which programs) a person must pay for. And only a police state can force everyone to obey them. Consider a space station where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill. And the TV cameras everywhere to see if you ever take the mask off are outrageous. It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks.
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
Richard Stallman
Comets are flying around the solar system. As they near the sun, they develop a tail as material is blown off by the solar wind. Most astronomers agree that comets cannot be more than 10,000 years old. They would have completely disappeared by now. Some scientists have recognized this as a serious problem for the theory that the earth is billions of years old, so they have proposed a new theory that new comets are constantly being introduced into the solar system to replace the old ones that burn out. They say they are coming from the "Oort Cloud.” No one has ever seen this Oort cloud, Oort never saw the Oort cloud! There is NO scientific evidence for its existence, but in their mind, this answers the serious problem the short lives of comets creates. There is a simpler answer, of course: the universe is NOT billions of years old!
Kent Hovind
11. We shall sing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion: we shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis; shall sing the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons; bloated railroad stations that devour smoking serpents; factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke; bridges like gigantic gymnasts who span rivers, flashing at the sun with the gleam of a knife; adventurous steamships that scent the horizon, locomotives with their swollen chest, pawing the tracks like massive steel horses bridled with pipes, and the oscillating flight of airplanes, whose propeller flaps at the wind like a flag and seems to applaud like a delirious crowd.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
We had a large old-fashioned battery, a wet cell, in the kitchen, hooked up to an electric bell. The bell was too complicated to understand at first, and the battery, to my mind, was more immediately attractive, for it contained an earthenware tube with a massive, gleaming copper cylinder in the middle, immersed in a bluish liquid, all this inside an outer glass casing, also filled with fluid, and containing a slimmer bar of zinc. It looked like a miniature chemical factory of sorts, and I thought I saw little bubbles of gas, at times, coming off the zinc. The Daniell cell (as it was called) had a thoroughly nineteenth-century, Victorian look about it, and this extraordinary object was making electricity all by itself-not by rubbing or friction, but just by the virtue of its own chemical reactions.
Oliver Sacks
