RE: selective climate change and changes in food production

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown:
> Did Jesse Ausbel give an idea of how Wall Street and the world's
> financial oligarchy can make enough money off the great
> restoration such that they will allow it to happen ?
>


Jesse Ausubel is interesting and worth doing a search on. He's a
techno-optimist like Julian Simon but much better informed. He's worth
reading on the history of energy and capitalism, but his optimism about the
future often seems lunatic, to me anyway. He's a believer in the hydrogen
economy. People who proselytise for the H2 economy preface their missionary
statements with remarks like 'hydrogen is the most plentiful substance in
the universe, and is also the cleanest form of energy'. Unfortunately, as
most schoolkids know, its chief earthly form is H2O, which is not noticeably
flammable. Since it costs more energy to split H2O and release the hydrogen
than the hydrogen itself produces, and since the only sufficiently available
terrestrial energy is fossil fuel, the H2 economy turns out on examination
to be irrelevant to the problem of depleting fossil. H2 is a sink not a
source of energy. Ausubel has in hs time also been a great propagandist for
things like mag-lev railways. He has written wonderful sci-fi social
optimism about the future of civilisation, with visions of great, leafy and
clean metropolises linked up by a vast planetary network of underground
tubes thru which mag-lev trains will rush you from Boston to London or
Shangha in a matter of minutes. However, all the maglev experiments failed,
the companies went bust and that was that. When we Brits built a  new
airport in Birmingham about 25 years ago there was a maglev train which took
you to the baggage hall, a distance of about one mile. The train was slow
and mostly broke down. It was almost quicker to walk. Eventually the maglev
was replaced by reliable, cheap and fast diesel-powered buses.

As for Paddy on 'inflection points', Les did just did a great job on that.
Also good on this is Barkley Rosser, incidentally.

Mark Jones