Green ….
August 21, 2022MaddMedic
1 Votes

One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.
“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.
“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.
Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.
“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”
“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.
“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it”
“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.
“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?” There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to a make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear, if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . .
“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.
“Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”
“How so, raw?” inquired Greta.
“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. Not that you can find oranges in Sweden anymore.
“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.
“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”
“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”
“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not any easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies using as fuel Swedish fences and furniture, which are rapidly disappearing – being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm.”
This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into and a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fibre boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet.
Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized.

When the oil stops, lots of things stop.

If we can replace oil and coal as the major sources of energy, and get rid of wasteful plastics, there will be enough oil for many generations and massively less pollution and ozone depletion.

You all know this and still choose to post hyperbole as reality.

 It's like saying Conservatives are all racist.

 And it makes as much sense.

 This guy says things that are not true, so I will post things that are not true in response.

I'm not a big proponent of nuclear energy myself, but I get your point.
It seems like that would solve the madness we live in right now.
I don't think the green people like Greta have the solution either.


But we as humanity have now reached a limit, and not only due to emerging economies such as in China and India.

I think the real solution to the problem must come from the development of the individual. (in a spiritual way)
If we live as fast as we do now, humanity will not survive on this planet.(the planet will survive us just fine)

If we don't wake up each and every one of us en masse from our consumer consciousness, then there is no future possible. It's not that we still have 2 centuries left. We see from covid how 1 small organism flattens the whole world.

Small nuclear power plants can provide the solution to the need for energy, but it is so diametrically opposed to what humanity really needs that I think it is more of a death blow than a solution.

I think when humanity collectively goes into there soul-conciusnes , that forms of energy such as nuclear fusion are being released for us.

When the current mentality does not change, these forms of enenergy would make us go extinct.

zevenenergie wrote on 08/23/22 at 10:27:34:


So specifically, what is it exactly you would like to see individuals do?

...but did you get the part where nuclear is non-renewable too?
At a full global capacity we would run out of uranium in a decade.
Is it worth the time and expense?
Along with the already known dangers and waste problems?

Battery and e-motor solutions are being developed now.
Same with windmill blades.
Lithium will soon be replaced,... magnetless generators that produce more power , and no need for balsa wood.
These are much more solvable than changes in the laws of physics to make nuclear viable.