I got on a roll. This is long, but I believe that those who are up to reading it will find it informative.

beardedbruce:    "ONE reason I do not believe, nor have seen any evidence that MAN_MADE efforts to STOP climate change ( short of an all-out nuclear winter, that even most here might think was excessive) will have enough effect to be worth the death and destruction that it would cause."

As I drive around the city, here and there I see houses with solar panels on the roof. These, I learn, are installed by the owners themselves. For various motives. Sometimes it's because they are concerned about the environment, but probably more often it's to reduce—or eliminate entirely—their electric bills. Solar panels are an investment that pays for itself, better than some investments. And I might mention that the city I'm referring to is Seattle, not famous for its year 'round sunshine. Yet, solar panels do the job for a lot of folks. And the more people who buy and install them, the less expensive they get.

Some years ago I worked with a fellow who lived in the south end of Seattle, near the northern border of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He installed a wind turbine in his back yard. It was not all that large, certainly smaller than the ones you see in wind farms, and height-wise, it was actually not quite as tall as the telephone poles that line the street he lives on. [This becomes important, as you will see.]   The wind turbine provided all of his electrical needs:   lights, kitchen appliances, television, phonograph, computer, the works.

But Seattle City Light noted that his meter was running backwards! This meant that he was putting more electricity into the system than he was using! And this meant that, not only could they not bill him for his electricity use, they owed him money! Randy hadn't even thought of this when he put in the system.

Seattle City Light did their damnedest to make him take the wind turbine down. Since he was near the airport, they got—I forget which, the Civil Aeronautics Board or the Federal Aviation Administration—to get on his case. They came out and surveyed the situation and concluded that any landing airplane that was approaching the runway at an altitude at which Randy's wind turbine, or, for that matter, the nearby telephone poles, would constitute a hazard was already in serious trouble. They did, however, ask Randy to put a flashing red light on the tower, which he did.

Then City Light tried to get his neighbors to complain about the wind turbine being an eyesore. That tactic backfired. Randy's neighbors dropped by to ask him all kinds of questions, and soon other wind turbines started popping up around the neighborhood!

City Light had to pay Randy for the electricity he put back into the grid—and soon, some of Randy's neighbors as well.

(Har-de-har-har!! I tend to enjoy it a bit when, for a change, The System takes it in the shorts!)

Doug Johnson was one of my guitar pupils. He was my last student in the evening, and the two of us would often adjourn to the Pizza Haven on University Way for an evening snack and a coffee or two. Doug was an engineer, and one evening we got to talking about relatively low-tech methods of utilizing solar power. I don't know if the idea was original with Doug, or if he heard it somewhere, but it sounds bloody ingenious to me.

In a desert, or in open country in general that receives a fair amount of sunshine, take a piece of insulating material and place it on or near the ground to provide shade. When the sun goes down, move the insulating material over, so it's directly adjacent to its previous position. Do this for a few twenty-four hour periods and soon you have a hot patch of ground right next to a cold—possibly even frosty—patch of ground. Got it?

Okay. Take a LARGE piece of insulating material, say as large as a football field—or even larger—put it on rails so that it's easy to move, and do the same thing. Soon you have a large patch of hot ground next to a large patch of quite cold ground. Now, run pipes carrying fluid back and forth between the two patches with turbines along the dividing line between the hot and cold patches. The hot fluid races through the turbines into the cold side where it condenses and gets pumped back into the hot side to do it all again.

The turbines produce electricity. Once installed, maintenance is minimal, and since it gets its input from the sun, it just keeps going and going and going ….

Doug said that he knew of a group of Indians in New Mexico who, with a couple of blankets, used to pull this stunt to produce sufficient cold to make ice cream in the desert. (Don't ask me how that works, but I suppose someone can work it out.)

I have a number of friends who are driving hybrids, like the Toyota Prius. And Seattle (and many other cities) has a "Flex car" or "Zip car" system. You join the system for a fee, and this entitles you to use the cars. There are cars parked in neighborhoods around the city, and all a member of the system has to do is walk (usually not more than a few blocks) to where a car is parked, open it with a special key issued to members of the system, then use the same key to start it, and off they go. When they're through with it, just park it in the same spot and lock it.

Since the Flex or Zip car is supposed to be used only around the city and not taken on long trips, many of them are hybrids or full electric (good for maybe thirty-some miles before they need recharging).

Portland, Oregon, to our south, has a similar arrangement. With bicycles. Yellow bicycles in bike stands all over the city. Take a bike, pedal it to wherever you want to go, and leave it at a bike stand there, along with the other yellow bikes. Do the bikes ever get stolen? Oh, a few, perhaps. But why steal something that you can use for free? At any time. Healthy exercise, gets you where you want to go, and uses no fossil fuels.

In the late 1980s, I worked as a technical writer and editor for the Bonneville Power Administration (the same outfit that Woody Guthrie wrote songs for the the 1930s—"Roll On, Columbia," "The Grand Coulee Dam," etc.). The Department of Energy had commissioned the BPA to find new, inexpensive, and non-polluting sources of electricity. After much research, the BPA was dragged, kicking and screaming, to the conclusion that, by far, the most promising AND least expensive AND least polluting source of new electrical power was (steady, now!) conservation! So they instituted a program in which they provided subsidies for people to participate in a home weatherization program. Have their homes insulated, double-pane windows installed, and in general, cut heat loss which would reduce their use of electricity for heating their homes.

This program went over so well that the State of Washington instituted what they called their "Oil Help Program" for people who heated their homes with oil. It, too, proved very popular.

My job was to take the stacks of reports from the staff who inspected the houses after the jobs were finished to make sure they had been done properly and to code, collate the information, and compile all the field reports into a periodic comprehensive reports on how well the total job was being accomplished. As a part of my job, I was required to take a course in residential weatherization, so although I have never actually done it myself (crawled through the InsulSafe in someone's attic with a pen in one hand, a clipboard in the other, and a flashlight in my teeth), I am a qualified and State Certified residential weatherization inspector.

It is possible to greatly reduce our use of CO2-emitting fossil fuels, while at the same time improving our lives rather than creating hardships for anyone

I fail to see, Bruce, how measures such as these to stop climate change (NOT involving anything LIKE an all-out nuclear winter) would, in any way, cause "death and destruction."

I have heard it said that "We will have solar power when, and only when, the power companies figure out a way to run a sunbeam through a meter!"

During the time I was involved with it, I knew that the BPA took a whole lot of crap from the nuclear industry, who wanted to put a string of nuclear power plants around the state, and the State of Washington was getting similar loud static from the oil companies.

Since the oil, coal, and nuclear industries are large and (obscenely) wealthy, they own some of the finest politicians that money can buy, so there is a great deal of interference with such things as getting the kind of funding and other subsidies (routinely available to the established industries) for research and development into non-polluting energy sources. And, of course, the shouting down of various concerned environmental groups, AND the overwhelming majority of scientists qualified to speak on the subject, who try to warn us of the impending dangers inherent in what we humans are doing to our environment.

There are BIG BUCKS involved, and these folks regard the next quarterly report as far more important than future generations—including, apparently, their own progeny.

Obviously, the human race needs to be toilet-trained.

By the way:    regarding nuclear power plants, especially in Grays Harbor County, where the nuclear industry wanted to put one of the biggest plants—the coast of Washington State lies on an earthquake fault; a subduction zone practically identical to the one off the north coast of Japan, where the recent major earthquake and resultant tsunami occurred, with the side effect of wrecking the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Japan is currently trying to cope with what they are now regarding as a nuclear distaster, requiring evacuation and quarantining of the entire area.

And geologists are warning people in the Pacific Northwest, especially along the coastline, that this area is long overdue for a major earthquake, most likely along this subduction zone.

Although they tend to call it a "geological event."

Don Firth