[Greenbuilding] [BULK] Re: TSHTF

[Lawrence Lile]

William Wrote:
>I am doing my best now to be a cynical optimist--aware
of the problems but excited by the possibilities.  It
is an infinitely difficult balance to achieve (hence
the oxymoron), and one I fail on more times than not
(on the cynical side always) but for me the only one
that makes sense in this sometimes ridiculous,
sometimes beautiful world.


I hit a wall working in the anti-nuke movement years ago - it seemed
hopeless, David didn't even have a rock and Goliath was in an Armored
Personnel Carrier.  Then suddenly, Nuclear power seemingly croaked of
it's own weight, new orders were canceled, etc.  Probably had nothing to
do with our puny efforts, and more with Three Mile Island, but popular
opinion does sway those folks. 

There are rumblings about new nuclear generation in the US.  With the
price tag of a 1000 megawatt nuke at $2 billion and climbing ($2 a peak
watt), and solar cell costs plummeting toward the $1 a peak watt magic
number, the wake-up call is coming soon.  Utilities are already looking
closely at large scale solar installations, and I expect this to become
the norm within 15 years.  Nuke plant plans could make good mulch for
tomatoes, or be used for wrapping fish, School children could color on
the backs of the plan sheets,  there are a lot of uses for those plans.


  It probably seemed pretty hopeless to Mandela in his cell, or to the
victims of the holocaust, but Desmond Tutu and Ghandi both said that
eventually, these insurmountable problems fall to history's march.  

I have to keep telling myself this, because I hear so much negative
doom-and-gloom from the environmental movement.  I canceled my
subscriptions to a lot of that stuff (Progressive, Mother Jones, etc)
and got a subscription to ODE, because I could not stand the weight of
all that negativity.  (check them out  www.odemagazine.com/ they try to
print a positive spin on progressive news.)  

OK, sure, we are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and it
could have dire consequences if left unchecked.  So we must act, and
preserve our sanity in the process.   The process of changing the planet
must also involve the process of changing our inner selves.  History
will look back at our era as the Golden Age of Green consciousness,
after we fix all these problems.  


Lawrence Lile, PE, LEED AP
Project Solutions Engineering