Back when the national grid was first built they just went ahead and did it. Compulsory purchase orders on the land, pick the best route (with some consideration given) and get on with it. We need that sort of thing to get us into the 21st century.
Yup, it's exactly what has happened for the future off-shore wind farm... the German government had to create a super entity to rubber stamp the project without consultation.
Either that or someone figures out a really cheap way to bury cables.
The problem is that buried high tension cables render the land above useless, so nobody wants them buried either...
You are right about UKIP. We had an interesting, or rather I should say unfortunate dose of reality when the Liberal Democrats got into power recently. They promised not to raise student tuition fees, even signed a contract to that effect at universities around the country. A few months after getting in they tripled them £9,000 which is close to â9,000. At least this time they may actually pay for their lies at the next election.
Actually we were discussing that with Brits colleagues yesterday. I wouldn't put too much hopes on the average voter tho... most are one issue voters and have the proverbial long-term memory of a goldfish. What can I say, originally coming from a fictional country that has been government-less for more than a year now (and where people would still vote for the same guys today if a vote was called for).
Are you saying people wouldn't object to having a nuclear facility in their back yard, or new power lines to connect those up? This is hardly a problem unique to renewables. Some people actual like wind turbines, but no-one likes nuclear or fossil fuel stacks.
Thank you for seeing it as well;) It's "we don't want nuclear" so we spend money to implement on renewable energies. Then it's "oh but we don't want to see that either, move them out of our sight". Once you build them further to accommodate their requests, it becomes "oh but we don't want to see any cable". From what I read today there is the same problem in the UK, especially in Wales. No objections whatsoever to open sky coal mining on one part of the coast but screaming bloody murder when there's talks of on-land wind farms and pylons to bring the power to the cities. I wonder if they considered what regular power blackouts would do to the real estate value of their property.
Switching to renewable would have been a wonderful opportunity to have a mostly decentralized generation with a smart grid to level the load when required. However, I wouldn't hold my breath while waiting for it to happen...
Okay, in practice people still do some very dodgy things as you point out, but no-one in the mainstream green movements is arguing for that. It is simply a failing of regulation and of the market to provide responsible solutions.
I did some reading about the Green Party in Germany. I think they have altered their stance a lot due to politics rather than what is best for the environment.
Political power corrupts... I have seen its effects first hand when I worked in the EP. Sort of reminds me of the UKIP (or was it the Brit Independence Party?) that ran on a platform all about "slashing the large MEP salaries and perks" and promptly forgetting about that once they became beneficiaries. As the French say "electoral promises only bind those who believe in them".
I think it is important to separate the two - even if we disagree about how to go about being greener I think at least we can agree that the basic idea is a good one.
Oh absolutely, the goal is worthy of praise and I'm all for it! Unfortunately, the most vocal part of the movement is more about "talking the talk" than "walking the walk"... especially now that it is so heavily politicized and subsidized. There are some guys doing amazing work the bootstrappy way, trying to rethink our way of living in order to reach a sustainable society without giving up the perks... they're almost invisible to the media even tho they have been active since the 70s.
I think this quote from the article you mentioned pretty much sums it up:
The tactics of the power-line opponents are simple and perfectly understandable. The more arguments that can be presented against the project, the more likely it is that the future route will run further away from one's own community and closer to the neighboring village instead.
They will say anything, but that doesn't mean they actually believe it. It is just your standard NUMBYism, people worried about house prices and so forth.
In the meantime, that tactic does cast a serious doubt on the ability to phase out nuclear in the announced time frame, don't you think? How do you expect to bring the power from the large offshore wind farms in the announced time frame if it takes 10 years to build 100km of power lines?
I don't know how you got from "use less chemicals" to subsistence farming though. I'm not singling you out but I have noticed that a lot of anti-greens do this, especially on Slashdot. You say to them "might be nice if we didn't pollute so much and used more renewable energy" and they take it to mean you advocate an Amish way of life and dragging everyone back to the 1600s. The great thing is we don't even have to choose any more, we can both be green and measurably improve quality of life.
Funny how having serious doubts about the sanity of the green movement does get you painted as "anti-green"... even tho you yourself practice greener gardening that what is currently required for the "organic" label.
How do people get to that is quite easy... what the green movement seems to conveniently forget is that the "less chemical" method is actually the production method we have been using until the late 40s with large pinches of mysticism thrown in. They do recognize that it is the "old way" method but somehow they don't remember or try to minimize the effects it had on society the last time.
The "less chemical" is a bit disingenuous as well... in reality they are shifting from one chemical (man made) to another chemical that just happens to be readily available in nature. For example, instead of using one chemical for pest control that is safe for mammals if used in the correct doses they use concentrated pyrethrin that is natural but toxic to fish and mammals in concentrated forms. Or they use a nicotine tea if it is a small scale operation... nicotine's LD50 is a fraction of DDT but the argument seems to be lost on them. Also quite funny is the fact that man made nitrogen is perfectly acceptable in organic fertilizer but don't you dare try pointing that to them or suggest using organico-mineral fertilizer. Also don't try to point out to them that whatever the source of the nitrogen, the water pollution remains the same. If you can read French, I can point you to a forum thread where ardent proponents of organic agriculture demonstrate their total ignorance of the nitrogen cycle, LD50 of the thing the promote as green alternatives to common pesticides and so on.
Jetting off to work, more later if you are still interested in the discussion. Or we can even take it off slashdot as this thread is probably going to get closed soon.
Germany doesn't have any solar thermal power stations. You are probably thinking of small scale heating for individual buildings, not large scale power generation. What power company is it, BTW? Last year 17% of power in Germany was from renewables. No power company is 100% renewable because even if all its own generators are it would still have to buy in power from fossil and nuclear sources to meet demand.
Isn't the energy market deregulated anyway? I can choose which power company supplies me, can't you? It seems unlikely that the government would allow a monopoly supplier to put bills up by such massive amounts.
Germany globally doesn't have... here we have widely rolled out solar thermal co-generation for new developments and for the administrations. You are right that it isn't electricity co-generation tho, it is communal hot water and heating. The local utility is the supplier of pretty much all infra services (roadworks, bus, natural gas, compost, swimming pools, water, sewers...), it used to be a branch of the local government until it got bought by RWE (one of the biggest suppliers in Germany). The prices have gone up, the service has gone down. The installations were booked/paid before the privatization of the sector, due to the long delays between project launch and project completion. A few of those projects were actually launched before the reunification, to give you an idea of the time scales. It actually produces enough energy for the town, the surrounding villages, and a part of the landkreis (district, I would guess).
I can choose to get gouged by the local utility and get service in the same day or switch to an alternate supplier and be stuck in the middle of the blame ping-pong when there is an issue (while only saving 10% tops with no warranty they won't raise the price without warning). The physical infra is all managed by the local utility and their technical teams are busy enough with their own customers so they don't rush when you're from an alternative supplier. The same problem exists for DSL with T-Online and all the various 3rd party suppliers... I can get the service relatively fast by sticking with T-Online or switch to a 3rd party and lose connectivity for days at end until the blame ping-pong match is settled. German companies are extremely efficient at the blame ping-pong match, if one could harness the energy generated by that... Germany would be able to supply electricity to the rest of the world.
Who are these people? Not Greenpeace, unless you can provide citations to the contrary. Greenpeace isn't really interested in that sort of thing anyway, that is Friends of the Earth territory.
You have built a straw man. I'm sure you can cite a few nutters to support any position you choose, but they don't represent any mainstream point of view.
One example of such nutters who created a 3500 pages of complaint titles.
I'll try to find the list of renewable-related projects that were blocked by the German Green party in the last few years. It is common enough that the Chancellor had to publicly ask the Green party to stop blocking renewable projects after announcing the nuclear phase out... but I'm sure the German Green party doesn't represent any mainstream point of view.
I was actually in Japan when the earthquake hit, so I am quite familiar with what happened and the impact it is continuing to have. The opposition to chemical agriculture is that not only have they proven dangerous in the past (e.g. DDT) but there are viable, if somewhat less efficient, alternatives. EU farm subsidies are being reformed to encourage responsible and minimal use of pesticides etc. where possible, and the mainstream view (at least in the UK) of society is that "organic" foods are better for the environment and human beings. The E Coli outbreak has nothing to do with that though, and MRSA existed for a de
Correlation is not causation. The cost of gas, coal and nuclear refinement/processing has gone up. Even in the UK there have been massive rises, despite only 1.8% of our generation requirements being met by renewables. Petrol prices in the UK have rocketed too, but no-one blames hybrid cars.
Germany is trying to reduce the cost of energy by reducing reliance on expensive fuels.
Technically it's very hard to blame the cost of non-renewable for a price hike when the provider proudly proclaims it's almost at its target of 100% renewable thanks to 3 hydro stations, large wind farms, even larger solar PV farms and a lot of solar thermal installations... the vast majority of which were actually paid from local and state tax revenues (socialize the costs, privatize the profits). In the same time frame, they also bumped up the community transport prices so much that it makes no sense to take the city bus any more. A return ticket to the city center now costs more than the fuel and a whole day of parking, and only marginally less than a return ticket to another country (different operator). The same company is managing the utilities and the bus, so maybe there's a sort of thread there
That still makes no sense.
Maybe the greenies on your side of the channel aren't the same as the greenies on this side of the channel. Here they protest to get us to phase out nuclear in favor of renewable energy, then protest to block the installation of renewable energy sources and when the installation gets rammed through they do everything in their power to stop the grid extension required to bring said renewable energy to the places where it will be used. The summary of the complaints for the proposed grid from the offshore wind farm (just the title of each complaint) is a 3500 pages document. The same kind of greenies who can't wrap their head around the fact that coal thermal plants don't use renewable charcoal, that wood by itself can't supply the heating/material needs of the current population or that the majority of the population has no interest in going back to full-time subsistence farming.
To go back to my train of thought, replace "bio" agriculture by "chemical" agriculture in the events of the last 30 days and you'd have mass of greenies protesting in the streets to ban "chemical" agriculture because it is dangerous. Heck, you see them protesting for that a couple of times a year even without a single death. But the only reaction from the green movement I have seen in the last month was trying to pin the E Coli outbreak and the new MRSA strain on Fukushima. I really heard that in the last 24 hours, no kidding. I have also heard a lot of extremely racist stuff that made me feel like kicking their teeth in since the start of the Fukushima story... maybe because I actually have relatives living close to Fukushima, other relatives that may end up declaring bankruptcy because of it (very bad year to be a Japanese farmer, even on a different island) and friends who lost all in the tsunami. Next on the greenimbies news channel: How Fukushima ate my homework, killed my sister, raped my dog all caused by slanty's treachery.
That is a fair comment, everyone wants cheap electricity. I don't see how nuclear can deliver that though. It isn't cheap when you factor in the cost of clean-up and so on, so even if your bills go down a bit you are paying for it through general taxation that subsidises nuclear anyway. The cost is only going to go up now as safety requirements get tighter and upgrades are forced. In the medium to long term renewables are cheaper, it is just the initial R&D costs that are keeping it a bit high at the moment. Even so solar thermal and wind are already quite competitive.
I'm sorry, but reality tends to disagree with the statement... the prices have been shooting up ever since we started migrating to a larger portion of renewable. I fail to see how the R&D costs of a wind turbine can increase the prices every year for more than a decade. We're not talking about "a bit", ever since I moved to Germany I have been disconnecting more and more devices while my electricity bill kept going up. I am now paying 4 times what I was paying before moving here... while using far less electricity. I'm paying way too much in "paying more for electricity than for food every month" or "paying more for electricity than for gasoline even tho I commute 50000 km a year for work".
Sorry, what does E Coli have to go with Greenpeace? If anything they are against the widespread movement of food as trucks pollute, and limiting that would have made the outbreak easier to trace and more contained. Personally I don't agree with that, but I still fail to see what environmental policy has to do with improper handling of food.
What does it have to do with Greenpeace? The green movement, which I was targeting really, has been protesting very vehemently against industries that have caused far less deaths in the course of history.
[/rant]
We know how to build advanced renewable plants today. If fully committed, they could come online in less than a decade, and be one order of magnitude cheaper than any nuclear. What's preventing them is:
a. NIMBY-types and fear-mongers
b. Intermittent power concerns
c. Increasingly, nuclear industry lobby, anti-greens and denialists, and a lack of economic vision
My point still stands. If we put equal amounts of effort into both nuclear and renewable we would end up with two workable solutions in about the same timescale, except that one would be riskier, need fuel, produce radioactive waste and require expensive clean-up. While it would be awesome if we did have safer thorium reactors the economics of the situation make it preferable to secure the system we have as best as possible while replacing as much of it as possible with renewables.
Germany is taking that bet, we will see in a decade if they managed to do it or if they will have to restart idled coal/gas generators. If I was to bet, I'd wager that they will succeed *but* that it may very well be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back. "We" also have our own NIMBY crowd over here that is trying to block any attempt at improving the grid or putting a smart grid in place (putting the we in quotes as I am not German, only living there).
I don't have anything against solar and wind farms, I can see quite a few turbines through my window and they don't spoil the view as much as coal/gas generators would. What I don't like is getting gouged on the utilities price... and that's what has been happening for the last 6 years (since I moved to Germany, incidentally). My family has now moved into damage control mode, disconnecting as many devices as possible as our utilities supplier warned us that the prices were expected to climb 35% this year (on top of the 15% increase in January)... that was a week before they announced the plan to shut down the reactors.
Meanwhile, an industrial incident killed 43 people, infected thousands (a few hundred with long term damage as a result) and pushed a whole sector of the economy on the brink of bankruptcy in the last month. As the "industry" was the "bio" agriculture business, the usual NIMBY crowd (Greenpeace and friends) have been utterly silent about it. The funniest/scariest bit of spin I have heard so far from that crows was trying to pin the new E Coli strain and the new MRSA on the Fukushima incident...
Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy.
Actually hydroelectric doesn't need to be augmented (assuming it's built in an area with enough rainfall). The problems with hydro though are that it typically occupies a lot of land with those reservoirs, often has a problem with silting up of the reservoirs, and requires both geographically and geologically suitable locations, which aren't as common as all that.
Well, this area normally has enough rainfall to feed 3 hydro stations... the place is usually known as a "agreeably moist". This year we had a bit of a drought during the spring, the river levels dropped about 4 feet and still haven't recovered. That means that hydro is out of the equation as a reliable source for us this year. To be honest, the drought has also impacted the nuclear reactors across the border as they have to be idled during droughts. The drought also impacted the farming sector with several crops ending up stunted or not growing.
Luckily, we also have large solar arrays and wind farms... the 2011 utilities bill promises to be the most expensive in my lifetime even tho we disconnected anything not strictly necessary.
Where I currently work, if a department comes with a complete detailled project plan we can approve it in less than a week or even the same day if we don't need to go back and forth clarifying important points. The problem is that once we approved the project plan, it must spend about 90 days in the "purchasing" labyrinth. Then the purchase order has to cross the "call for tender" quicksand area (throw in a couple of weeks at least) to finish in the "supplier administration" swamp. We can't purchase anything without an approved detailled project plan, which initially requires a "steering committee" and loads of meetings on the client department side.
What happens most of the time is that the client comes to us with a few notes on a napkin, lacking most useful information and with a target date a few weeks in the past. Of course, they then blame us for failing to deliver on time just after leaving said napkin at our door.
You cherry picked one, and even that one can apply to many films that aren't on the level of "Jackass". Try watching other movies that don't appeal to the lowest common denominator. There are plenty of them out there, many of them commercially successful.
I'm not a fan of opera, and some of the singers on American Idol are very good. I don't even watch or like the show, but I can admit quality when I see it. As soon as you start thinking that everything that is either commercial or popular is trash, you have blinded and prejudiced yourself to potential quality.
Yeah, with literally thousands of legally acquired DVDs on my shelves, hundreds of channels available at my fingertips and VOD being bundled with my internet connection, my opinion on popular entertainment must be based on a lack of access to quality content. It's not like I was a heavy consumer of said entertainment for most of my life.
I do agree that there is quality content out there, it's just statistical noise in the diarrhea of lowest common denominator stuff. In the last 12 months, my TV sets have been turned on for about 4 hours... 2 hours were on xmas day to watch a show with friends and 2 hours were for a very interesting documentary. A couple of years ago, I noticed that the vast majority of the entertainment I really enjoyed was either produced more than a decade ago, a remake of something originally produced more than a decade ago or a documentary... with the exception of maybe a couple hours a week on TV. Then I realized that actually I didn't care enough about those few hours to watch them live so I started recording them with MythTV to watch later. Then I realized that I didn't even care enough about those to watch them time-shifted... so I turned off my MythTV backend and haven't started it since.
TL;DR: Out of hundreds of channels available to me, broadcasting content 24/7, there isn't much remotely interesting enough to get me in front of the tube.
Noun: The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.
Would you classify Hamlet with Jackass 3D, an opera singer with the current wave of auto-tuned "singers", Mary Shelley with Stephanie Meyer? If you answer yes to those, please keep calling me snooty while I weep for our species... and check how I landed on "News for entertainment buffs, find out who is on the next round of American idol... after the break" when I clicked on "News for nerds". To each his own, I guess, but I would rather do something productive with my free time instead of paying for the privilege of watching drivel.
Every time they offer something for X$, there's someone who comes along and says "If only it was available for X/2$ I'd buy it. But if you actually lowered it, most of them would now say X/4$. Or X/8$. Reality is that we know the truth, those who really liked it already bought it at the high price and those who don't will find some other excuse not to buy it.
You see, a few years back, there was a huge price difference between the country where I was living (Luxembourg) and the country where I currently live (Germany). The content was identical, only the packaging differed (slightly)... I actually MD5'd discs to check. Now, how can the content industry justify an up to 300% markup on identical product between two neighboring countries? A TV series boxed set was 35 in Germany and 100+ in Luxembourg. In my first year in Germany, I bought way more content than the decade before. Then I lost all interest in the crap that passes for entertainment nowadays... I do have far better things to do than sitting in front of a screen for untold hours at home after spending untold hours in front of a screen in the office.
Of course you might say I should become a cultural hermit and just reject all commercial TV, movies etc. but I'd rather just take it while I wait for them to clue in and provide a service equal to the torrent sites - at any cost.
Commercial TV and movies is entertainment, not culture... seriously.
(and yes, I even had to program a single program on punchcard because the professor thought it necessary to teach the old ways).
An ex-colleague had to use punch cards daily on his first job... the guy is younger than me and punch cards were already off the curriculum when I studied CS. One shouldn't assume that a technology will never be encountered and thus shouldn't be taught just because it has been deemed out of fashion.
Funny how it applies both ways: Fusion misses that intangible orgasmic factor which seems to cause ecologists to jizz in their pants "it's what's coming from the stars you know..." "we're so close, we just need a material that doesn't exist and it will be economically feasible" "free clean power forever! never mind the pollution caused by the mining of the required rare earth minerals or the energy storage problems".
For what it is worth, in this little German town that switched to 100% renewable a few years ago we now have a big problem... this season has way more sunshine that usual (not complaining about it) but far less wind and precipitations than usual for the season. The river is actually 4' lower than it normally is, so the 3 hydro stations are producing far less than they should. A lot of wind turbines have also been mostly idle this season, not by planning. We now have to import energy. Which is why having all your energy coming from a single local basket is begging for trouble.
It would be nice if we could have a smart grid where the overproduction from one locality can be used in another locality. However, this is not going to happen as far as the German green party and the NIMBY lot are concerned. They don't want a new grid, they don't want extensions of the current grid... last month, the government received the summary of all the complaints collected for the construction of the grid that would connect the planned off-shore wind farm to the rest of Germany: just the title of each complaint made the report 3500 pages long. They may have to do the same thing they did for the farm itself, give one entity the power to rubber-stamp the project against any opposition.
PS: I'm all for renewable energy where and when it makes sense... solar thermal for hot water is available, actually works and pays for itself in the first couple of years.
They will actually be able to replace those 23% of the energy production in the meantime without increasing the energy costs too much... difficulty: the price for 2011 will already be about 50% higher than 2010 according to my energy supplier (announced a few weeks ago, before this decision).
Write to your corrupt representative? Totally useless, it's a bit like politely asking the bully to please stop abusing you.
Vote a new corrupt representative to replace the current corrupt representative? I fail to see how it would change anything... meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Vote a non-corrupt representative ready to take the hard, massively unpopular choices required (raise taxes *and* cut spending)? Good luck convincing the rest of the population to vote for him. Remember that the current serving president is seen as "hardcore totalitarian socialist" by a sizable portion of the (R) voters simply because he's got (D) next to his name and is not on the right of the extreme right.
Vote for the Corporate Party red color branch when the Corporate Party blue color branch is in power, and vice versa? Welcome to the status quo, citizen.
As mentioned before it can do 720p xvid/mpeg4, but I don't think that content has to be 1080p for it to be of worth - I still enjoy watching dvds, and not everyone has a hdtv + £200 htpc in every room:).
Quoted for truth!
Thanks for this release, I will try it this weekend
There should simply be multiple grades of claim that you can make on your packaging, with one being official and anything else being just some blather on the package. Using the official logo inappropriately is a crime.
Like selling tested medication as medication and the non-tested stuff as "dietary supplement", and making it a crime to sell untested medication as medication? Hmm, congratulations, you just described that law you keep calling "stupid" even tho you obviously have no clue about it.
So do you admit that your original point was total bullshit? Good, we're making some progress but you just moved the goalposts. Said law already has exceptions for known effective traditional medications... even for a few that are nothing but snake oil (oscillococcinum, homeopathy in general).
Also, calling other people "stupid" when they point out your ignorance of the point at hand is ironic.
The EU is trying to do shit like stop people from being able to grow their own medicinal herbs.
Bullshit. Please point me to the exact law, with page and line number to support that claim.
What they are doing is trying to stop people from selling snake oil as medication. If it is sold as medication, it has to go through the same testing as any other medication... which shouldn't be a problem for the sellers if it works. Why do you think they are up in arms against that concept? Said legislation has sadly become necessary thanks to the (in)famous Dr Matthias Rath and his ilk. You will find that the very vocal anti "Codex Alimentarius" is considering him to be the best thing since slice bread and the return of Jeebus all wrapped into one. Never mind the blood he has on his hands, never mind that his claims don't survive any investigation.
According to friends and ex-colleagues, on the low end of the scale you'd start at about E4500/month after taxes + perks. Now if you're married, you get extra money... if you have kids you get extra money... if you never resided in the country where they send you, you get extra money and days off (the further away from your place of origin, the more you get)... did I mention automatic salary index, extra days off?
The salary and perks scale is available on the EPSO website, interpreters somehow get an AST (assistant level) job paid as an ADM (administrator) job. Unlike IT people who end up earning (about 1/3) less than in the private sector for quite a good part of their career.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when the national grid was first built they just went ahead and did it. Compulsory purchase orders on the land, pick the best route (with some consideration given) and get on with it. We need that sort of thing to get us into the 21st century.
Yup, it's exactly what has happened for the future off-shore wind farm... the German government had to create a super entity to rubber stamp the project without consultation.
Either that or someone figures out a really cheap way to bury cables.
The problem is that buried high tension cables render the land above useless, so nobody wants them buried either...
You are right about UKIP. We had an interesting, or rather I should say unfortunate dose of reality when the Liberal Democrats got into power recently. They promised not to raise student tuition fees, even signed a contract to that effect at universities around the country. A few months after getting in they tripled them £9,000 which is close to â9,000. At least this time they may actually pay for their lies at the next election.
Actually we were discussing that with Brits colleagues yesterday. I wouldn't put too much hopes on the average voter tho... most are one issue voters and have the proverbial long-term memory of a goldfish. What can I say, originally coming from a fictional country that has been government-less for more than a year now (and where people would still vote for the same guys today if a vote was called for).
Are you saying people wouldn't object to having a nuclear facility in their back yard, or new power lines to connect those up? This is hardly a problem unique to renewables. Some people actual like wind turbines, but no-one likes nuclear or fossil fuel stacks.
Thank you for seeing it as well ;) It's "we don't want nuclear" so we spend money to implement on renewable energies. Then it's "oh but we don't want to see that either, move them out of our sight". Once you build them further to accommodate their requests, it becomes "oh but we don't want to see any cable". From what I read today there is the same problem in the UK, especially in Wales. No objections whatsoever to open sky coal mining on one part of the coast but screaming bloody murder when there's talks of on-land wind farms and pylons to bring the power to the cities. I wonder if they considered what regular power blackouts would do to the real estate value of their property.
Switching to renewable would have been a wonderful opportunity to have a mostly decentralized generation with a smart grid to level the load when required. However, I wouldn't hold my breath while waiting for it to happen...
Okay, in practice people still do some very dodgy things as you point out, but no-one in the mainstream green movements is arguing for that. It is simply a failing of regulation and of the market to provide responsible solutions.
I did some reading about the Green Party in Germany. I think they have altered their stance a lot due to politics rather than what is best for the environment.
Political power corrupts... I have seen its effects first hand when I worked in the EP. Sort of reminds me of the UKIP (or was it the Brit Independence Party?) that ran on a platform all about "slashing the large MEP salaries and perks" and promptly forgetting about that once they became beneficiaries. As the French say "electoral promises only bind those who believe in them".
I think it is important to separate the two - even if we disagree about how to go about being greener I think at least we can agree that the basic idea is a good one.
Oh absolutely, the goal is worthy of praise and I'm all for it! Unfortunately, the most vocal part of the movement is more about "talking the talk" than "walking the walk"... especially now that it is so heavily politicized and subsidized. There are some guys doing amazing work the bootstrappy way, trying to rethink our way of living in order to reach a sustainable society without giving up the perks... they're almost invisible to the media even tho they have been active since the 70s.
I think this quote from the article you mentioned pretty much sums it up:
The tactics of the power-line opponents are simple and perfectly understandable. The more arguments that can be presented against the project, the more likely it is that the future route will run further away from one's own community and closer to the neighboring village instead.
They will say anything, but that doesn't mean they actually believe it. It is just your standard NUMBYism, people worried about house prices and so forth.
In the meantime, that tactic does cast a serious doubt on the ability to phase out nuclear in the announced time frame, don't you think? How do you expect to bring the power from the large offshore wind farms in the announced time frame if it takes 10 years to build 100km of power lines?
I don't know how you got from "use less chemicals" to subsistence farming though. I'm not singling you out but I have noticed that a lot of anti-greens do this, especially on Slashdot. You say to them "might be nice if we didn't pollute so much and used more renewable energy" and they take it to mean you advocate an Amish way of life and dragging everyone back to the 1600s. The great thing is we don't even have to choose any more, we can both be green and measurably improve quality of life.
Funny how having serious doubts about the sanity of the green movement does get you painted as "anti-green"... even tho you yourself practice greener gardening that what is currently required for the "organic" label.
How do people get to that is quite easy... what the green movement seems to conveniently forget is that the "less chemical" method is actually the production method we have been using until the late 40s with large pinches of mysticism thrown in. They do recognize that it is the "old way" method but somehow they don't remember or try to minimize the effects it had on society the last time.
The "less chemical" is a bit disingenuous as well... in reality they are shifting from one chemical (man made) to another chemical that just happens to be readily available in nature. For example, instead of using one chemical for pest control that is safe for mammals if used in the correct doses they use concentrated pyrethrin that is natural but toxic to fish and mammals in concentrated forms. Or they use a nicotine tea if it is a small scale operation... nicotine's LD50 is a fraction of DDT but the argument seems to be lost on them. Also quite funny is the fact that man made nitrogen is perfectly acceptable in organic fertilizer but don't you dare try pointing that to them or suggest using organico-mineral fertilizer. Also don't try to point out to them that whatever the source of the nitrogen, the water pollution remains the same. If you can read French, I can point you to a forum thread where ardent proponents of organic agriculture demonstrate their total ignorance of the nitrogen cycle, LD50 of the thing the promote as green alternatives to common pesticides and so on.
Jetting off to work, more later if you are still interested in the discussion. Or we can even take it off slashdot as this thread is probably going to get closed soon.
Germany doesn't have any solar thermal power stations. You are probably thinking of small scale heating for individual buildings, not large scale power generation. What power company is it, BTW? Last year 17% of power in Germany was from renewables. No power company is 100% renewable because even if all its own generators are it would still have to buy in power from fossil and nuclear sources to meet demand.
Isn't the energy market deregulated anyway? I can choose which power company supplies me, can't you? It seems unlikely that the government would allow a monopoly supplier to put bills up by such massive amounts.
Germany globally doesn't have... here we have widely rolled out solar thermal co-generation for new developments and for the administrations. You are right that it isn't electricity co-generation tho, it is communal hot water and heating. The local utility is the supplier of pretty much all infra services (roadworks, bus, natural gas, compost, swimming pools, water, sewers...), it used to be a branch of the local government until it got bought by RWE (one of the biggest suppliers in Germany). The prices have gone up, the service has gone down. The installations were booked/paid before the privatization of the sector, due to the long delays between project launch and project completion. A few of those projects were actually launched before the reunification, to give you an idea of the time scales. It actually produces enough energy for the town, the surrounding villages, and a part of the landkreis (district, I would guess).
I can choose to get gouged by the local utility and get service in the same day or switch to an alternate supplier and be stuck in the middle of the blame ping-pong when there is an issue (while only saving 10% tops with no warranty they won't raise the price without warning). The physical infra is all managed by the local utility and their technical teams are busy enough with their own customers so they don't rush when you're from an alternative supplier. The same problem exists for DSL with T-Online and all the various 3rd party suppliers... I can get the service relatively fast by sticking with T-Online or switch to a 3rd party and lose connectivity for days at end until the blame ping-pong match is settled. German companies are extremely efficient at the blame ping-pong match, if one could harness the energy generated by that... Germany would be able to supply electricity to the rest of the world.
Who are these people? Not Greenpeace, unless you can provide citations to the contrary. Greenpeace isn't really interested in that sort of thing anyway, that is Friends of the Earth territory.
You have built a straw man. I'm sure you can cite a few nutters to support any position you choose, but they don't represent any mainstream point of view.
One example of such nutters who created a 3500 pages of complaint titles.
I'll try to find the list of renewable-related projects that were blocked by the German Green party in the last few years. It is common enough that the Chancellor had to publicly ask the Green party to stop blocking renewable projects after announcing the nuclear phase out... but I'm sure the German Green party doesn't represent any mainstream point of view.
I was actually in Japan when the earthquake hit, so I am quite familiar with what happened and the impact it is continuing to have. The opposition to chemical agriculture is that not only have they proven dangerous in the past (e.g. DDT) but there are viable, if somewhat less efficient, alternatives. EU farm subsidies are being reformed to encourage responsible and minimal use of pesticides etc. where possible, and the mainstream view (at least in the UK) of society is that "organic" foods are better for the environment and human beings. The E Coli outbreak has nothing to do with that though, and MRSA existed for a de
Correlation is not causation. The cost of gas, coal and nuclear refinement/processing has gone up. Even in the UK there have been massive rises, despite only 1.8% of our generation requirements being met by renewables. Petrol prices in the UK have rocketed too, but no-one blames hybrid cars.
Germany is trying to reduce the cost of energy by reducing reliance on expensive fuels.
Technically it's very hard to blame the cost of non-renewable for a price hike when the provider proudly proclaims it's almost at its target of 100% renewable thanks to 3 hydro stations, large wind farms, even larger solar PV farms and a lot of solar thermal installations... the vast majority of which were actually paid from local and state tax revenues (socialize the costs, privatize the profits). In the same time frame, they also bumped up the community transport prices so much that it makes no sense to take the city bus any more. A return ticket to the city center now costs more than the fuel and a whole day of parking, and only marginally less than a return ticket to another country (different operator). The same company is managing the utilities and the bus, so maybe there's a sort of thread there
That still makes no sense.
Maybe the greenies on your side of the channel aren't the same as the greenies on this side of the channel. Here they protest to get us to phase out nuclear in favor of renewable energy, then protest to block the installation of renewable energy sources and when the installation gets rammed through they do everything in their power to stop the grid extension required to bring said renewable energy to the places where it will be used. The summary of the complaints for the proposed grid from the offshore wind farm (just the title of each complaint) is a 3500 pages document. The same kind of greenies who can't wrap their head around the fact that coal thermal plants don't use renewable charcoal, that wood by itself can't supply the heating/material needs of the current population or that the majority of the population has no interest in going back to full-time subsistence farming.
To go back to my train of thought, replace "bio" agriculture by "chemical" agriculture in the events of the last 30 days and you'd have mass of greenies protesting in the streets to ban "chemical" agriculture because it is dangerous. Heck, you see them protesting for that a couple of times a year even without a single death. But the only reaction from the green movement I have seen in the last month was trying to pin the E Coli outbreak and the new MRSA strain on Fukushima. I really heard that in the last 24 hours, no kidding. I have also heard a lot of extremely racist stuff that made me feel like kicking their teeth in since the start of the Fukushima story... maybe because I actually have relatives living close to Fukushima, other relatives that may end up declaring bankruptcy because of it (very bad year to be a Japanese farmer, even on a different island) and friends who lost all in the tsunami. Next on the greenimbies news channel: How Fukushima ate my homework, killed my sister, raped my dog all caused by slanty's treachery.
That is a fair comment, everyone wants cheap electricity. I don't see how nuclear can deliver that though. It isn't cheap when you factor in the cost of clean-up and so on, so even if your bills go down a bit you are paying for it through general taxation that subsidises nuclear anyway. The cost is only going to go up now as safety requirements get tighter and upgrades are forced. In the medium to long term renewables are cheaper, it is just the initial R&D costs that are keeping it a bit high at the moment. Even so solar thermal and wind are already quite competitive.
I'm sorry, but reality tends to disagree with the statement... the prices have been shooting up ever since we started migrating to a larger portion of renewable. I fail to see how the R&D costs of a wind turbine can increase the prices every year for more than a decade. We're not talking about "a bit", ever since I moved to Germany I have been disconnecting more and more devices while my electricity bill kept going up. I am now paying 4 times what I was paying before moving here... while using far less electricity. I'm paying way too much in "paying more for electricity than for food every month" or "paying more for electricity than for gasoline even tho I commute 50000 km a year for work".
Sorry, what does E Coli have to go with Greenpeace? If anything they are against the widespread movement of food as trucks pollute, and limiting that would have made the outbreak easier to trace and more contained. Personally I don't agree with that, but I still fail to see what environmental policy has to do with improper handling of food.
What does it have to do with Greenpeace? The green movement, which I was targeting really, has been protesting very vehemently against industries that have caused far less deaths in the course of history. [/rant]
We know how to build advanced renewable plants today. If fully committed, they could come online in less than a decade, and be one order of magnitude cheaper than any nuclear. What's preventing them is:
a. NIMBY-types and fear-mongers b. Intermittent power concerns c. Increasingly, nuclear industry lobby, anti-greens and denialists, and a lack of economic vision
My point still stands. If we put equal amounts of effort into both nuclear and renewable we would end up with two workable solutions in about the same timescale, except that one would be riskier, need fuel, produce radioactive waste and require expensive clean-up. While it would be awesome if we did have safer thorium reactors the economics of the situation make it preferable to secure the system we have as best as possible while replacing as much of it as possible with renewables.
Germany is taking that bet, we will see in a decade if they managed to do it or if they will have to restart idled coal/gas generators. If I was to bet, I'd wager that they will succeed *but* that it may very well be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back. "We" also have our own NIMBY crowd over here that is trying to block any attempt at improving the grid or putting a smart grid in place (putting the we in quotes as I am not German, only living there).
I don't have anything against solar and wind farms, I can see quite a few turbines through my window and they don't spoil the view as much as coal/gas generators would. What I don't like is getting gouged on the utilities price... and that's what has been happening for the last 6 years (since I moved to Germany, incidentally). My family has now moved into damage control mode, disconnecting as many devices as possible as our utilities supplier warned us that the prices were expected to climb 35% this year (on top of the 15% increase in January)... that was a week before they announced the plan to shut down the reactors.
Meanwhile, an industrial incident killed 43 people, infected thousands (a few hundred with long term damage as a result) and pushed a whole sector of the economy on the brink of bankruptcy in the last month. As the "industry" was the "bio" agriculture business, the usual NIMBY crowd (Greenpeace and friends) have been utterly silent about it. The funniest/scariest bit of spin I have heard so far from that crows was trying to pin the new E Coli strain and the new MRSA on the Fukushima incident...
Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy.
Actually hydroelectric doesn't need to be augmented (assuming it's built in an area with enough rainfall). The problems with hydro though are that it typically occupies a lot of land with those reservoirs, often has a problem with silting up of the reservoirs, and requires both geographically and geologically suitable locations, which aren't as common as all that.
Well, this area normally has enough rainfall to feed 3 hydro stations... the place is usually known as a "agreeably moist". This year we had a bit of a drought during the spring, the river levels dropped about 4 feet and still haven't recovered. That means that hydro is out of the equation as a reliable source for us this year. To be honest, the drought has also impacted the nuclear reactors across the border as they have to be idled during droughts. The drought also impacted the farming sector with several crops ending up stunted or not growing.
Luckily, we also have large solar arrays and wind farms... the 2011 utilities bill promises to be the most expensive in my lifetime even tho we disconnected anything not strictly necessary.
Where I currently work, if a department comes with a complete detailled project plan we can approve it in less than a week or even the same day if we don't need to go back and forth clarifying important points. The problem is that once we approved the project plan, it must spend about 90 days in the "purchasing" labyrinth. Then the purchase order has to cross the "call for tender" quicksand area (throw in a couple of weeks at least) to finish in the "supplier administration" swamp. We can't purchase anything without an approved detailled project plan, which initially requires a "steering committee" and loads of meetings on the client department side. What happens most of the time is that the client comes to us with a few notes on a napkin, lacking most useful information and with a target date a few weeks in the past. Of course, they then blame us for failing to deliver on time just after leaving said napkin at our door.
You cherry picked one, and even that one can apply to many films that aren't on the level of "Jackass". Try watching other movies that don't appeal to the lowest common denominator. There are plenty of them out there, many of them commercially successful.
I'm not a fan of opera, and some of the singers on American Idol are very good. I don't even watch or like the show, but I can admit quality when I see it. As soon as you start thinking that everything that is either commercial or popular is trash, you have blinded and prejudiced yourself to potential quality.
Yeah, with literally thousands of legally acquired DVDs on my shelves, hundreds of channels available at my fingertips and VOD being bundled with my internet connection, my opinion on popular entertainment must be based on a lack of access to quality content. It's not like I was a heavy consumer of said entertainment for most of my life.
I do agree that there is quality content out there, it's just statistical noise in the diarrhea of lowest common denominator stuff. In the last 12 months, my TV sets have been turned on for about 4 hours... 2 hours were on xmas day to watch a show with friends and 2 hours were for a very interesting documentary. A couple of years ago, I noticed that the vast majority of the entertainment I really enjoyed was either produced more than a decade ago, a remake of something originally produced more than a decade ago or a documentary... with the exception of maybe a couple hours a week on TV. Then I realized that actually I didn't care enough about those few hours to watch them live so I started recording them with MythTV to watch later. Then I realized that I didn't even care enough about those to watch them time-shifted... so I turned off my MythTV backend and haven't started it since.
TL;DR: Out of hundreds of channels available to me, broadcasting content 24/7, there isn't much remotely interesting enough to get me in front of the tube.
culture /klCHr/
Noun: The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.
Would you classify Hamlet with Jackass 3D, an opera singer with the current wave of auto-tuned "singers", Mary Shelley with Stephanie Meyer? If you answer yes to those, please keep calling me snooty while I weep for our species... and check how I landed on "News for entertainment buffs, find out who is on the next round of American idol... after the break" when I clicked on "News for nerds". To each his own, I guess, but I would rather do something productive with my free time instead of paying for the privilege of watching drivel.
Every time they offer something for X$, there's someone who comes along and says "If only it was available for X/2$ I'd buy it. But if you actually lowered it, most of them would now say X/4$. Or X/8$. Reality is that we know the truth, those who really liked it already bought it at the high price and those who don't will find some other excuse not to buy it.
You see, a few years back, there was a huge price difference between the country where I was living (Luxembourg) and the country where I currently live (Germany). The content was identical, only the packaging differed (slightly)... I actually MD5'd discs to check. Now, how can the content industry justify an up to 300% markup on identical product between two neighboring countries? A TV series boxed set was 35 in Germany and 100+ in Luxembourg. In my first year in Germany, I bought way more content than the decade before. Then I lost all interest in the crap that passes for entertainment nowadays... I do have far better things to do than sitting in front of a screen for untold hours at home after spending untold hours in front of a screen in the office.
Of course you might say I should become a cultural hermit and just reject all commercial TV, movies etc. but I'd rather just take it while I wait for them to clue in and provide a service equal to the torrent sites - at any cost.
Commercial TV and movies is entertainment, not culture... seriously.
You mean the lightbulbs I can still buy in any shop in Germany?
Your entire post is wrong.
(and yes, I even had to program a single program on punchcard because the professor thought it necessary to teach the old ways).
An ex-colleague had to use punch cards daily on his first job... the guy is younger than me and punch cards were already off the curriculum when I studied CS. One shouldn't assume that a technology will never be encountered and thus shouldn't be taught just because it has been deemed out of fashion.
Funny how it applies both ways: Fusion misses that intangible orgasmic factor which seems to cause ecologists to jizz in their pants "it's what's coming from the stars you know..." "we're so close, we just need a material that doesn't exist and it will be economically feasible" "free clean power forever! never mind the pollution caused by the mining of the required rare earth minerals or the energy storage problems".
For what it is worth, in this little German town that switched to 100% renewable a few years ago we now have a big problem... this season has way more sunshine that usual (not complaining about it) but far less wind and precipitations than usual for the season. The river is actually 4' lower than it normally is, so the 3 hydro stations are producing far less than they should. A lot of wind turbines have also been mostly idle this season, not by planning. We now have to import energy. Which is why having all your energy coming from a single local basket is begging for trouble.
It would be nice if we could have a smart grid where the overproduction from one locality can be used in another locality. However, this is not going to happen as far as the German green party and the NIMBY lot are concerned. They don't want a new grid, they don't want extensions of the current grid... last month, the government received the summary of all the complaints collected for the construction of the grid that would connect the planned off-shore wind farm to the rest of Germany: just the title of each complaint made the report 3500 pages long. They may have to do the same thing they did for the farm itself, give one entity the power to rubber-stamp the project against any opposition.
PS: I'm all for renewable energy where and when it makes sense... solar thermal for hot water is available, actually works and pays for itself in the first couple of years.
They will actually be able to replace those 23% of the energy production in the meantime without increasing the energy costs too much... difficulty: the price for 2011 will already be about 50% higher than 2010 according to my energy supplier (announced a few weeks ago, before this decision).
What more could you possibly be expected to do?!?
A wee bit more than 200 miles actually, except if you are talking nautical miles
Switzerland? And there I was, thinking it was based in Luxembourg City almost across the street from my office
As mentioned before it can do 720p xvid/mpeg4, but I don't think that content has to be 1080p for it to be of worth - I still enjoy watching dvds, and not everyone has a hdtv + £200 htpc in every room :) .
Quoted for truth! Thanks for this release, I will try it this weekend
There should simply be multiple grades of claim that you can make on your packaging, with one being official and anything else being just some blather on the package. Using the official logo inappropriately is a crime.
Like selling tested medication as medication and the non-tested stuff as "dietary supplement", and making it a crime to sell untested medication as medication? Hmm, congratulations, you just described that law you keep calling "stupid" even tho you obviously have no clue about it.
So do you admit that your original point was total bullshit? Good, we're making some progress but you just moved the goalposts. Said law already has exceptions for known effective traditional medications... even for a few that are nothing but snake oil (oscillococcinum, homeopathy in general).
Also, calling other people "stupid" when they point out your ignorance of the point at hand is ironic.
The EU is trying to do shit like stop people from being able to grow their own medicinal herbs.
Bullshit. Please point me to the exact law, with page and line number to support that claim.
What they are doing is trying to stop people from selling snake oil as medication. If it is sold as medication, it has to go through the same testing as any other medication... which shouldn't be a problem for the sellers if it works. Why do you think they are up in arms against that concept? Said legislation has sadly become necessary thanks to the (in)famous Dr Matthias Rath and his ilk. You will find that the very vocal anti "Codex Alimentarius" is considering him to be the best thing since slice bread and the return of Jeebus all wrapped into one. Never mind the blood he has on his hands, never mind that his claims don't survive any investigation.
According to friends and ex-colleagues, on the low end of the scale you'd start at about E4500/month after taxes + perks. Now if you're married, you get extra money... if you have kids you get extra money... if you never resided in the country where they send you, you get extra money and days off (the further away from your place of origin, the more you get)... did I mention automatic salary index, extra days off? The salary and perks scale is available on the EPSO website, interpreters somehow get an AST (assistant level) job paid as an ADM (administrator) job. Unlike IT people who end up earning (about 1/3) less than in the private sector for quite a good part of their career.