[StarvingLion]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... le/407881/

"Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels and mitigating climate change"

Silly Gates is like all of the tech fraudsters: CLUELESS. Read the interview. Its bullshit piled on top of bullshit.

I am the only person in the world who understands the problem and here is the horrible TRUTH:

The problem with fossil fuels, I'm becoming convinced, is more than just carbon pricing, but the lack of replacement pricing. The cost of coal, oil, and gas is based on extraction, and excludes not only the CO2 impacts, but the fact that we're rapidly depleting a one-time energy windfall accumulated over 500 million years. At the rate of millions of years of accrual per present year.

Factoring in the cost of our best fossil fuel alternatives seems the only sane approach. And yes, that would result in tremendously higher prices for energy and everything made available by energy. Which is precisely the point. We live at a time where everything is phenomenally less expensive than at any time in human history (or prehistory), on the basis of costs -- that is, investments of present resources to obtain future ones.

Waking up to and recovering from this temporary anomaly will be nothing short of catastrophic.

[Lore]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '&')quot;we're rapidly depleting a one-time energy windfall accumulated over 500 million years."

HOLY BEJEEZUS! WHAT TO DO? Starve, you need to start a web site to alert everybody so they can crap their pants also!

[frankthetank]

You don't have to be 60!

Bill Gates must have some idea for when the turds really start to hit the fan.

"What’s amazing is how our intense energy usage is one and the same as modern civilization. That is, for all the great things that happened in terms of human lifestyle, life span, and growing food before 1800, civilization didn’t change dramatically until we started using coal in the U.K. in the 1800s. Coal replaced wood. But the wave of wood to coal is about a 50- or 60-year wave."

We'll start heading the other direction...back to coal and then finally wood.

I have no hope. We are a nation of war loving morons with way too many guns.

[GHung]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he problem with fossil fuels, I'm becoming convinced, is more than just carbon pricing, but the lack of replacement pricing. The cost of coal, oil, and gas is based on extraction, and excludes not only the CO2 impacts, but the fact that we're rapidly depleting a one-time energy windfall accumulated over 500 million years. At the rate of millions of years of accrual per present year.

Factoring in the cost of our best fossil fuel alternatives seems the only sane approach. And yes, that would result in tremendously higher prices for energy and everything made available by energy. Which is precisely the point. We live at a time where everything is phenomenally less expensive than at any time in human history (or prehistory), on the basis of costs -- that is, investments of present resources to obtain future ones.

Waking up to and recovering from this temporary anomaly will be nothing short of catastrophic.

[Ibon]

We all know the amount of philanthropic money him and his wife have spent trying to wipe out one of the Overshoot Predators important arsenals, malaria..... and now he wants his cake and eat it too. He wants to save humanity from disease and poverty and find a replacement for fossil fuels.....Good luck Billy

[SeaGypsy]

Intelligence & delusion are far from mutually exclusive. Some people think Stephen Hawking is utterly brilliant, but to me he sounds like a total whacker. Elon Musk is nutso fantasist too, Steve Jobs an utter narcissist. Our society is reaping the rewards of 30 odd years of post modernism, we have lost the ability to generally reason together, our heroes can mostly barely string 3 sentences together, all are utterly specialized- implying some form of social retardation to start with.

[StarvingLion]

Billy needs to add an 's' to the word 'Miracle'. Instead of Galaxy Class Warp Cores we get reduced to a bunch of Tribal Recyclers.

We are not just facing a run of the mill recession here, but a triple crisis scheduled to hit in the 2015-2030 interval:

– A general resource crisis, as we have run out of the cheap easy to obtain resources and are moving fast towards the expensive hard to obtain resources due to our explosive population growth. Paradoxically this is manifesting as an affordability problem so resources are becoming not only more expensive to obtain, but less demanded, and thus are facing a double hit from increasing costs and decreasing prices. This is going to manifest as the next recession-depression headed by commodity countries.

– A general debt crisis as the model of increasing indebtedness started in the 80’s has run its course and now comes to the realization that the debt cannot be neither paid, nor rolled, nor serviced, in the zero growth environment we are achieving. The resulting deflationary environment will bring a day of reckoning as essentially most of the world countries are unable to pay their debts. Debts can be written off, but not without another major upset to the world economy and hopefully not another global war.

– A general monetary crisis as the folly of the central banks cannot be unwind without sending the world economy into a terminal tail spin in a debt saturated world. Sooner rather than later people will awake to the true value of currencies in a world of crashing global commerce, debt repudiation and economic malaise, and the deflation will instantly turn into a vicious inflation and run for hard assets. A new monetary system will be required once the world middle class is thoroughly destroyed.

Each an everyone of these problems is unavoidable and will come to haunt us in due course. We are going to have plenty of entertainment as we watch CO2 emissions dwindle and climate cool. The Greens are going to be ecstatic and will claim victory in the climate wars against fossil fuel capitalism. Global thermaggedon, never a possibility, will be “avoided”, they will say, due to their efforts.

Thankfully we, and our close descendants, will all be dead before the next glacial inception reduces mankind to a bunch of tribal recyclers, less than one tenth our present numbers.

[Cog]

There are top men working on this.

[StarvingLion]

I am going to destroy the Great Satan (Silicon Valley) with large nuclear powered SUV's and analogue computers.

[StarvingLion]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'T')here are top men working on this.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'T')here are top men working on this.

[Newfie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'I')ntelligence & delusion are far from mutually exclusive. Some people think Stephen Hawking is utterly brilliant, but to me he sounds like a total whacker. Elon Musk is nutso fantasist too, Steve Jobs an utter narcissist. Our society is reaping the rewards of 30 odd years of post modernism, we have lost the ability to generally reason together, our heroes can mostly barely string 3 sentences together, all are utterly specialized- implying some form of social retardation to start with.

[Newfie]

Why is no one mentioning overshoot?

Are we here being delusional and in denial on that matter?

Lack of energy is part of the solution not part of the problem.

[ROCKMAN]

Wow! The pissed off kitty had a lucid moment. LOL. The whole looking for a "miracle" attitude is so counter productive IMHO. We don't need waste time or money looking for a miracle that doesn't exist. We need to use what we understand AND begin making those hard choices. Nothing else will change the pass we're on. Reminds me of line when a mentally unstable fellow with a God complex was asked why God didn't answer prayers. He said God did answer all prayers. But sometimes the answer is no.

So Bill: No.

[dinopello]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'W')ill it be nanosupercapacitors? Will it be Unobtainium? The SuperDumperCollider? Whole brain emulation (WBE) or mind uploading?

[Keith_McClary]

Gates is also investing in this scheme:





$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;It's now possible to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and use it as a feed stock, with hydrogen, to produce net zero emission fuels."

The benefit of those synthesized fuels, Corless told AFP, is they can be tailor-made for use in existing systems, from petrol pumps to automobiles and airplanes.

"You don't have to re-tool the $30 trillion in (global) infrastructure now used to deliver fossil fuels," Corless said.

[ROCKMAN]

Being affordable is a vital component of any potential solution. Not a secondary consideration.