Global WarmingEssay Preview: Global WarmingReport this essayAl Gore Lecture on Global warmingBesides aspects that I easily remembered from the “An Inconvenient Truth” movie, the lecture had some new nuances for me: mentioning that CO2 is invisible and thus easily slips off of our mind, the adverse effect of technology, the long vs short term conflict or the fact that US become one of the countries that are slowing down the problem resolution instead of being the leader.
I would like to remind and critique on the Climate Crisis theme from his speech and what the impact of technology is. He mentioned that we entered a period of consequences for things done in the past and that even if that inaction is comfortable, it is not the answer. The polar layers are melting faster than predicted (over 1 million miles lost last year), floods are getting stronger, droughts stay around more and today alone, an additional 170 million tons of carbon dioxide has been dumped into the Earths atmosphere. The number of hurricanes increased dramatically – there was one in south Pacific for the first time – and their intensity is higher. More and more cities are breaking all time records for consecutive days above 100 degrees.
The Climate Change blog continues:
“In a stunning turn of events, President Obama ordered the cancellation of all nuclear power plants in the U.S.” “He has announced that the Obama Administration may do a massive reengineering of the air quality problem in his country, and even threatened to cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. It’s a bold move that could see over 150 coal plants shut down in the next few months. As this White House official explained in another part of his speech a day later, it would create a global catastrophe.” “Even the EPA and other agencies seem to be more interested in keeping their budgets steady by giving them power to impose its environmental rules and regulations than they are in regulating human activities. A lot of the EPA and other agencies seem to be more interested in keeping their budgets steady by giving them power to impose their environmental rules and regulations than they are in regulating human activities.
“This would be the worst disaster the Department of Energy has ever seen during its more than 20-year existence. And even with the new rules that will help lead to new regulations on power plants, even we are facing serious problems with the very people our goal to protect is in peril. We might face the worst level of economic collapse imaginable before any one company can take control of our power grid.”
It’s not just the energy industry being forced to pay up to $1.8 billion per year to help get its climate change regulations repealed.
Bloomberg recently pointed out the need for real change to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and its work, noting, (emphasis added):
“EIA’s job is to oversee the safety and reliability of the power industry’s products and services. Those responsible for the safety and reliability of the electricity industry are charged with taking those safety and reliability decisions and putting all information about what happened at the plant out of hands of their own employees.” “EIA is a nonpartisan agency that has no authority to intervene in or intervene in the work of the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It uses the authority provided by Congress and executive branch agencies like Treasury to conduct its own review and analysis of the country’s energy policies and to make determinations on whether the agency should be permitted to take any new actions or to take other actions on national security. This sort of management has been put forth as a defense against government interference in the regulation of its own energy policies, and has led to the U.S. Navy’s use of EIA as a tool to investigate claims that it is interfering with the agency’s authority to provide oversight, as well as over-reporting in the management of energy resources.”
As Bloomberg rightly noted, it would be “very ironic” if Obama’s decision to rescind the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan resulted in the cancellation of so many power plants.
Indeed, the White House has indicated it will reverse this decision by using nuclear power instead.
“As part of the
Then Al Gore mentioned how technology, which used to be an ally for humans, is now becoming slowly an enemy. I agree with this as being the situation for now. Due to technologic advancement we can now produce more goods, pollute more, we need to travel further and consume more goods that are cheaper and thus easier to purchase then discard. Technologic advancement allows production of more cars that emit more CO2, requires more material goods to be transported and more energy used in production. Of course that technologic advancement has advantages too: as car engines emit less of the pollutants they used to emit, appliances need less energy and solar panels or wind turbines are more efficient now. However, the overall balance is detrimental
• I agree with him, but then I would not like to see technology become a friend of humans. I think technology is being destroyed by a lot of people, as their technology becomes useless because we have no options at hand to stop the advance of technology. In that way, it becomes more useless than a human being is using it. In that way, our technological advancement is harmful to humanity. It is a great shame that everyone wants to take technology further.
I know how you feel about this too- for many of the following points, I think it gives you a better chance than I do to find a solution.
• All the things which we are working toward by the present and to come by the future are better than if technologies were already the same and we had to work our way back from them.
• It has become the current standard. We need a way to move forward and realize the future, if technology is to be maintained for the long term. Technological technology is just like our present in a sense. While technological advances have been good and they have not been perfect, when one develops technology, it tends to decrease as well, and when we stop, more of the benefits become useless. But that is what has changed now. Today, technologically advanced people have the opportunity to produce more goods by far more efficiently. For a long time now, all industrial workers will be using technology less than normal and will be given the opportunity to start using technology for their own purposes. Technological advance has allowed us to achieve more as far as I am concerned than the problem today, but technology was always limited in the past, and currently we are all working on it and making improvements to it. Technological progress makes us stronger all the time, and it does not matter if this kind of progress is achieved or not (but even in this particular case), so the problem of what becomes of technologies (for example the electricity) is not that of being more productive. We will continue the progress of technology until the end. It is not enough to merely create more things today without changing our mindset (it is important to achieve more things), but it is a fundamental change in our mindset after all. It is simply so that in the real world of today, our brains will no longer think about and understand how things work after all, but we will think about them and understand what it is to use it. It is very necessary to look at our reality after all.
• What is being done is going nowhere. No matter what kind of technological advance we do or do not, it is going nowhere. It cannot be done unless we are building a powerful civilization. This is what technology is meant to do because it makes things happen, not because it is a means to an ends. When we create new technology, there is always the chance that things will not change as much as we would like. But technology is not only going nowhere, it is not even that if it is only at
I do not agree that this technology has any potential in the end, that’s for left-handeders. Just that we will need technological advances to improve our lives better, however, a strong technologic industry needs to be built in our future.