I enjoyed this podcast but I was concerned when George talked about the carbon footprint of wind power so I looked it up. I found the Yale Climate Connections website which provides a chart of studies over the last 5 years looking at this. The chart shows how much Co2, per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated per wind turbine from cradle to grave. All studies fall within a range of between 5-26 gms of C02-equivalent per kilowatt-hour. In contrast, natural gas are responsible for 437-758 gms - and coal ranges between 675-1,689. It would seem George has this very wrong which is a shame as it makes me question everything he had to say. The Yale site also directs us to The National Renewable Energy Laboratory that has a page for comparing the carbon footprints of various electricity generation technologies. You might want to post a link on this site. Would you go back to George and ask him to clarify how he came to his figures.
On a positive note, I really look forward to this podcast every week. Keep up this amazing commitment to getting information out there. You are a fantastic journalist.
Aug 26, 2022·edited Aug 26, 2022Liked by Rachel Donald
George and Rachel,
Just great to see how your threads wove and connected. We all see hard times coming, seemingly from our globally shared blindness of some sort. I liked how the contextual learning methods of Montessori and permaculture came out as environmental awareness. What I also noticed is that family life somewhat universally like that too, human and animal, as primarily centered on contextual and collaborative environments. In society people are mostly trained to think in terms of using power to increase their power, though, something that doesn't work at all in a family.
So why do we organize our economic system around it? Is it just not paying attention as societies become so powerful over nature, they destroy the planet? So... if there's such a big difference between the two models, could we identify it as two modes of thought? In one you seem to notice all kinds of relationships and collaborate. In the other you use concepts for investing power to gain more power (or money) hardly noticing what other than quite immediate relationships are affected. Is that a clear difference in the mechanism, and between 'context' and 'concept'?
I look at root meanings for help on those things. Don't "con-ceptual" insights (i.e. made in the mind) and "con-textual" insights (i.e. read from complex nature) of two different dimensionalities? Business concepts, in particular, seem made for human use and stripped of most else, as ‘tools.’ Aren't such ideas as for how to use money to make money, concepts of control? The contextual understanding, though, seems more for an appreciation of a world mostly made by other thing, to be responded to as a whole. Does that difference go anywhere?
The Wind Turbine comment aside, there were some interesting points in this podcast.
The difference between Systems Programming and AI, particularly machine learning, is much as George describes but I think if I hadn't studied it a bit myself it would have been hard to understand his explanation. Machine learning is great at finding patterns and recognising those patterns, such as behaviour in social networks and detecting cancer cells. These patterns can be saved as 'trained' models which can be replayed with new data. There is a free course by Andrew Ng which is worth looking at, although the calculus was a bit over my head.
Permaculture is definitely worth a look. A lot of people see it just as a way of growing food, but more than that, I believe it is a system design approach to living sustainably in any environment. Geoff Lawton is someone worth looking up for a comprehensive explanation and he has many videos on his YouTube channel.
It would be interesting to get someone on here to talk about the Transition Towns movement and the vision for local communities that can persist through the energy transition. Maybe Rob Hopkins would be up for it.
"We may have a civilizational collapse and it may never happen".
Bingo!
AI requires vastly more energy than humans who only 'need' nutritious food, clean water, and modest shelter. The problem is as he has alluded to up to this point is we value that which we don't need more.
Mr Mobus' regurgitation of that debunked old Facebook myth about wind turbines costing more in energy to manufacture than they give back in generation was enough for me to question the validity of his other points in the conversation.
I thought it was wise of you to just let that one go.
I enjoyed this podcast but I was concerned when George talked about the carbon footprint of wind power so I looked it up. I found the Yale Climate Connections website which provides a chart of studies over the last 5 years looking at this. The chart shows how much Co2, per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated per wind turbine from cradle to grave. All studies fall within a range of between 5-26 gms of C02-equivalent per kilowatt-hour. In contrast, natural gas are responsible for 437-758 gms - and coal ranges between 675-1,689. It would seem George has this very wrong which is a shame as it makes me question everything he had to say. The Yale site also directs us to The National Renewable Energy Laboratory that has a page for comparing the carbon footprints of various electricity generation technologies. You might want to post a link on this site. Would you go back to George and ask him to clarify how he came to his figures.
On a positive note, I really look forward to this podcast every week. Keep up this amazing commitment to getting information out there. You are a fantastic journalist.
George and Rachel,
Just great to see how your threads wove and connected. We all see hard times coming, seemingly from our globally shared blindness of some sort. I liked how the contextual learning methods of Montessori and permaculture came out as environmental awareness. What I also noticed is that family life somewhat universally like that too, human and animal, as primarily centered on contextual and collaborative environments. In society people are mostly trained to think in terms of using power to increase their power, though, something that doesn't work at all in a family.
So why do we organize our economic system around it? Is it just not paying attention as societies become so powerful over nature, they destroy the planet? So... if there's such a big difference between the two models, could we identify it as two modes of thought? In one you seem to notice all kinds of relationships and collaborate. In the other you use concepts for investing power to gain more power (or money) hardly noticing what other than quite immediate relationships are affected. Is that a clear difference in the mechanism, and between 'context' and 'concept'?
I look at root meanings for help on those things. Don't "con-ceptual" insights (i.e. made in the mind) and "con-textual" insights (i.e. read from complex nature) of two different dimensionalities? Business concepts, in particular, seem made for human use and stripped of most else, as ‘tools.’ Aren't such ideas as for how to use money to make money, concepts of control? The contextual understanding, though, seems more for an appreciation of a world mostly made by other thing, to be responded to as a whole. Does that difference go anywhere?
- cc's by email
The Wind Turbine comment aside, there were some interesting points in this podcast.
The difference between Systems Programming and AI, particularly machine learning, is much as George describes but I think if I hadn't studied it a bit myself it would have been hard to understand his explanation. Machine learning is great at finding patterns and recognising those patterns, such as behaviour in social networks and detecting cancer cells. These patterns can be saved as 'trained' models which can be replayed with new data. There is a free course by Andrew Ng which is worth looking at, although the calculus was a bit over my head.
Permaculture is definitely worth a look. A lot of people see it just as a way of growing food, but more than that, I believe it is a system design approach to living sustainably in any environment. Geoff Lawton is someone worth looking up for a comprehensive explanation and he has many videos on his YouTube channel.
It would be interesting to get someone on here to talk about the Transition Towns movement and the vision for local communities that can persist through the energy transition. Maybe Rob Hopkins would be up for it.
"We may have a civilizational collapse and it may never happen".
Bingo!
AI requires vastly more energy than humans who only 'need' nutritious food, clean water, and modest shelter. The problem is as he has alluded to up to this point is we value that which we don't need more.
Mr Mobus' regurgitation of that debunked old Facebook myth about wind turbines costing more in energy to manufacture than they give back in generation was enough for me to question the validity of his other points in the conversation.
I thought it was wise of you to just let that one go.