| Friday,
May 18, 2001 There was little at E3 for me. Noisy. Lots of
console games. Some of it is nifty but the overall effect isn't one I
like.
I spent a good half hour or more with the Everquest people. I am sad to
report they are making the place even more interesting. The new graphics
are nifty, and there are new cities and a new playable race. Sigh.
More time with the newsgroups yammer. There is something fundamentally
wrong about their structure. People bring up, casually, matters that look
vital; when you ask you are told "that's old news" as if that
answers the question, and then we go on to important matters like whether
former officer Gooblwotck brushes his teeth or if that's the reason for
his bad breath?
I see California, having bought Amory Lovins's "Negawatts"
notion of conserving your way to prosperity, is now unhappy that Bush
hasn't solved the problem with the stroke of a pen. The
"solution" California seeks is to make everyone else pay for the
State's imbecilities. Internally the "solution" is to make
everyone in the state pay for the damage caused by the artificially low
rates in some power districts. In fact we all have: the budget surplus is
gone, there will be no tax refunds, and the state now natters about
conspiracies and seizing power plants. The governor points to the new
power plants being built -- all of them natural gas and small, all of them
peaking and load shaving plants: there are no new baseline plants.
There aren't any because we bought the negawatt snake oil. We bought
that because we have been sold the bill of goods that there is virtue in
"not wasting energy."
Bushwah. There is no virtue in conservation. There may or may not
be economic reasons for conserving, but there is no virtue in turning off
the lights if it is inconvenient to have them off. For that matter wear
and tear on switches and light bulbs can result in more energy being used
(to build their replacements when they wear out faster) than was saved.
And still there is no virtue in leaving them on or turning them off.
It is the effects of energy generation that can be harmful if not done
carefully. Again I point out that the stack gasses from western coal go
into scrubbers cleaner than the stack gasses of eastern coal come OUT of
the scrubbers. The implication is obvious, but the government has set
things up to favor eastern coal. It would be better simply to set a stack
gas output limit and let the companies decide if they want to do that by
burning western and not scrubbing, eastern and scrubbing, or some
combination: but as it is the eastern coal users get more pollution than
the west users and by a lot.
Politics gets into everything.
At least we are now seriously considering nuclear power, which is
environmentally friendly, and reliable.
With enough baseline electrical plants in place we have resources to
allocate. We can also confine petroleum uses to automobiles, and tell the
Arabs to drink their oil at $25 a barrel.
This morning a Harvard economist said we don't need more oil. There is
plenty, this is not like the oil crisis of the 70's. Then there was a
shortage. Now there is plenty at $25 a barrel. Uh -- what else to
they teach in economics at Harvard? Cartels can maintain high prices so
long as there is high demand that only they can satisfy. Reduce the demand
for oil, and increase the supply not controlled by the cartel, and guess
what will happen? I would have thought even a Harvard economist
could figure that out, but if you have been brought up on a steady diet of
Samualson I guess there is no hope.
Anyway there is work today. I'll post a bunch of mail tomorrow or next
day: I don't think I will get to much of it today.
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