Waterpower Quotes

Cultures may be classed into three types: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. ...until the seventeenth century, all cultures were tool-users. ...the main characteristic of all tool-using cultures is that their tools were largely invented to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic world of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles and cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools (...were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization... (Neil Postman)
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. View quote
James Howard Kunstler