[emmetb]

Attempting to enforce maximized co-operation is merely to reward manipulators. People will co-operate when they actually believe that supporting other(s)’ goal(s) is also the best way to achieve their own. Demanding altruism is merely sanctimonious twaddle.

I beg to differ, people have a built-in, hard-wired capacity for co-operation, altruism, empathy, love etc. These things are much more than just masqueraded selfish impulses. As a species, as a planet, our survival crucially depends on all these “soft”-values, at least as much as on the “hard”-values. The mere fact that there are these biological traits proves this: otherwise evolution would surely have unburdened us from such excess bagage.

The question about how soft/hard boiled you like your leaders still remains of course. I’m not too cynical in this respect. The higher educated people are, the more they start paying attention also to the “soft”-values. I do believe that the more well-informed, empowered people get. The more they start to appreciate moral leaders. Generally speaking that is.

[emmetb]

This thread is at risk of going up in flame(war)s. That would be a pity because there is also an interesting underlying debate going on.

Acceptable rules are the ones which provide just the minimum restraint on action necessary to keep agreed-on goals accessible to all. Those which favor some at the expense of others break the game or society in the end.

What should be our more fundamental premisse: to minimize restraints, or to maximize cooperation?

[emmetb]

Rezwan wrote:
According to the book “The Optimistic Child”, the most important social skills are Assertiveness and Problem solving. (Assertiveness is a “useful midpoint between passivity and aggression”).

I’m all for people standing up for themselves. If you do this often enough, early enough and skillfully enough you can head violence off and have a really nice, functional world.

The most important social skill is altruism. The ability to identify with others that are far removed from yourself. How wide a circle are you willing to draw?

The absolute extrema of this is directed panspermia:
http://www.physorg.com/news184915200.html
To dedicate our enginuity and our resources to ensure the survival of the simplest and hardiest of life. A beatiful way to recognize our general insignificance and our greatest significance at the same time. Only very few people would raly behind that idea. Certainly not the most aggressive ones. While the rest of humanity is busy fighting over the last remaining resources. It might just be this kind of altruistic act that leaves the biggest imprint on history, on a cosmological scale.

[emmetb]

A few years ago i visited the fast breeder nuclear reactor in Kalkar, Germany. They had just cut open the reactor core so that visitors could enter. Quite a unique opportunity to see a nuclear reactor from the inside out (even one that had never been fully operational). My eyes basically popped out when seeing all those massive sodium-based cooling systems, which must have costed billions of dmarks to install in the first place, simply being dismantled and shipped out for recycling. The giant cooling towers were already being converted to serve as a climbing wall, for the amusement park that they were constructing there.

At least they picked the right location for ITER. Cadarache will be a great place for an amusement park! 😉

[emmetb]

That’s one white elephant.

[emmetb]

There is an independently organized TED event on the gulf oil spill. The clip linked below is from Ronald Atlas. He’s talking about bioremediation:
http://tedxoilspill.com/live/#Session2 (skip ahead to: 21:50)
Some highlights:
Note that he mentions that there is an intrinsic limit to how much fertilizer you can add before adverse effects take over (29:30).
With respect to specialized microbes he’s very skeptical (32:00).
He has a very funny story from his work on the Exxon Valdez disaster (34:42) 🙂
With respect to the shorelines/marshlands he says it’s usually better to let the oil weather naturally than to excavate it. So i guess he dismisses ex-situ bioremediation here (37:40) So, maybe i was a bit overoptimistic there :red:

One of the other speakers, in the next session, impressed me as well:
http://tedxoilspill.com/live/#Session3 (skip ahead to: 1:37:00)
I was particularly struck by the emotion of the speaker. Somewhere halfway into his talk. You can really see this subject touches deep with many people. It should, i think.

Finally, the fourth session, on the future of energy, would have been a great opportunity for promoting focus fusion:
http://tedxoilspill.com/live/#Session4
As far as i could see, skimming over it, all the speakers focus on renewables. They claim that technologies such as solar, wind, photosynthesis can replace oil on the long run. Of course we know they are on the wrong track. Powering the world on those renewables alone would quickly use up all the available land areal and resources. Unless, of course, we do something about our consumption. In this sense it is perhaps good that we go through this crisis phase of kicking our fossil fuel addiction before moving on to fusion. At least it is making many people think very creatively about how to make all kinds of processes more energy efficient and safer (33:40).

There is one speaker, Klaus Lackner, who has some background in fusion (the chair does not specify what kind of a background exactly). But even he does not mention fusion. He DOES, however, advocate a mass-production/distributed-generation approach that is very close to what Eric Lerner is proposing with the plasma focus (41:50).

[emmetb]

If this indeed works as advertised this would only be great. I’m still skeptical because it might not work as well in the real problem areas which are the beaches and marshlands. Also nothing is said on the fertilizer that is being distributed with the bacteria allowing them to eat the goo. That’s what the whole eutrophication thing is about: such high nitrate levels might also turn on lots of other stuff that we don’t want polluting the oceneans with toxins, destroying the food chain by driving out naturally occuring plankton (by which to oceans account for the highest uptake of CO2 on the planet; exceeding even rainforrests). The image linked below is the result of a comprehensive study about human impact on the biosphere in the anthropocene era:
http://e360.yale.edu/content/images/0923-nature-graphic.html
There are two areas where we are WAY outside the safe zone, biodiversity and nitrogen (fertilizer).

Of course, if these microbes do their work, safely, that would be great, basically it would be a quick fix. Still, mechanical removal, followed by bioremediation at a controlled site, seems like the most risk-free and durable solution to me. (Unfortunately it is also way more expensive than simply spreading some magic powder over the ocean).

[emmetb]

oops, i broke my own promise…

[emmetb]

by the way, how many posts i need to make here to get rid of “Newbie” classification?

[emmetb]

http://heroicimagination.org/

last link, i promise, now i, for one, will shut up on the subject ’cause talk is cheap 😉

[emmetb]

The video linked below, contains some ideas that might be interesting to this present disucussion. On several levels, actually. First, there is the presentation technique which is absolutely genius in its simplicity and clarity: a good way to launch a viral video that explains your idea (maybe not this one though). Second, there are some gem insights there in the actual content. In particular how (young) people perceive time and look to the past/present/future. That made me realize it might be a good idea to hammer home the time-dimension: tokamak fusion technology is 50 years into the future and always will be, where LPP is putting out monthly reports and hopes to come to some conclusion on feasibility this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg

We need people to be future oriented. We need to GET people to be more future oriented. This holds for mainstream fusion researchers who fail to leave their disproven solution concepts (tokamaks). It holds for environmental organizations who fail to recognize that past disasters with fision power should not automatically make us abandon anything that has a nucleus in it. Lead by example i would say: there is no point in saying Green Peace has always been opposed to nuclear energy therefore i won’t talk to any environmental protection activists. Instead look at it this way: convince just 1 of these organizations to change their stance and embrace your proposition and you’ve won a powerful vote. This will, admittedly, be hard because by their very nature these organizations ARE conservative and past oriented.

This should be at the heart of your message: look to the future, support us.

[emmetb]

Friends of the earth is a large green activist organization. As it seems FFS is seeking to market its green potential with this proposed video, why not try to partner this one with these guys? They have been known to do this:
http://www.foei.org/en/who-we-are/member-directory/alliances

Especially the European branch seems very well organized:
http://www.foeeurope.org/about/contact.htm

Here in Europe they are most well known for their Big Ask campaign, a petition for EU citizens to ask for tighter CO2 emmission laws. Thom Yorke, from Radiohead, is one of their most well known champions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c08F727f4Ig&NR=1

As a start we could ask if Thom Yorke can provide the background music for this video :coolsmirk:

[emmetb]

Try to focus on the positive rather than the negative. Make the problem clear, but don’t fall into the trap of finger-pointing, express concern rather than anger. Personally i don’t like the space-narrative in there. Better keep it down to earth. Would expect this to work better for your intended audience here.

How about showing a contrast instead, something nice that would appeal to people, rally them to your cause. Like, after the depressing footage of birds covered in oil, cut to a desert turning into a lush green environment using FF desalination plants. Could have a bird flying around there as a backreference 😉

Maybe use excerpts from the latest oval office address concerning the oil spill, and Pres. Obama’s call to make a push for clean energy?

[emmetb]

@breakable: Thanks for the link, that was interesting.

The clip show in situ bioremediation being applied. Note that this can lead to eutrophication of the affected area. Eutrophication is a severe problem in and of itself. (Maybe one of the greatest climatological disasters waiting to happen. Cyanobacteria blooms can thoroughly destroy an ecosystem’s ability for CO2 uptake. Global blooms could turn the oceans into CO2 sources instead of CO2 drains. If this were to happen it spells global disaster.)

A quote from an oil-spill contingency plan by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute:
“There are very few cleanup options which do not cause significant impacts
to these sensitive habitats. However, there may be conditions under
which bioremediation may be considered, particularly for lighter oils. In
wetlands with shallow, poorly mixed water bodies, the potential increase in
eutrophication and ammonia caused by aggressive bioremediation needs to
be considered.”

[emmetb]

Ex situ bioremediation, possibly with a first round of phytoremediation to clean any heavy metals. On the long run this would be the most beneficial process. The displaced contaminated soil can eventually (after initial phytoremediation) be used for conventional agriculture.

The energy costs of this are the initial superficial excavation of contaminated soil from beaches and marshland, transportation to a suitable location for processing, seeding with air, fertilizer and microorganisms, building infrastructure to prevent leakage of toxins into environment, mixing with existing soil, and, possibly, desalination for irrigation if the location does not have a freshwater supply. If i am not mistaken desalination is a process that has been discussed in this forum before.

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