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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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You're splitting hairs. There are three possible outcomes. Technological development and energy use keep going up and we become an interstellar civilization. They stagnate and we get stuck somewhere below where we are now. Or we are wiped out. He clearly dismisses 1 and 3. Therefore he agrees with 2. It's as simple as that.

Wrong. He has said, over and over, that it isn't stagnation that awaits, and the future that he's describing lies outside the limited options you have presented. The future that he describes falls very much outside those options.

The future we’re facing is not the one that gets shoved at us daily by the corporate mass media. All that pretentious drivel about humanity’s destiny in space passed its pull date a long time ago. Nor are we facing the flipside of those same fantasies, the overnight apocalypse that wipes us all out or plunges us all back to the stone age by next Thursday at the latest. What we’re facing instead might best be called history as usual: the long slow unraveling of a civilization that drew too heavily on its resource base. It’s an old story and, for the historically literate, a familiar one.

That doesn’t mean that the societies of the future will have to get by on the same technological basis as the societies of the past—again, the England of George I had technologies and options that the Egypt of Ramses I didn’t have. In the same way, the societies of the deindustrial age ahead of us will very likely have useful things invented in our age: shortwave radio, ultralight aircraft, and a good solid grasp of basic sanitation are among the candidates that come immediately to mind. Further out, as new civilizations rise on our ruins, technologies well suited to function within the long-term energy budget of our planet will doubtless blossom in turn.

This is from an article that I have already linked! Why do you continue to speak so authoritatively about the content of his work if you aren't going to read it? You do not even have an accurate picture of the most basic and central elements to his worldview and positions yet feel comfortable dismissing his work wholesale on the basis that the tiny sliver of it you read does not contain the type of analysis you're looking for.

There's no need to look at his 'work', which is free from any basis in fact or scholarly convention.

You have set up a standard which no scientific journal article ever published would pass - you read some of the excerpts and writing, don't see any of the numbers or calculations that were done elsewhere, and then assume that they do not exist and the paper is thus worthless and not worth reading. Yes, he hasn't included the calculations done on EROEI on nuclear plants in his most recent essays, and that is because he has been participating in this discussion for longer than I have been alive, and he doesn't feel the need to re-establish the foundations of his work in every single paragraph of his output afterwards (and given that you haven't even read the articles I linked, I doubt you went back and read his earlier work).

Again, I'm not asking you to go read his entire output if you don't find it engaging - but at the very least you should stop making authoritative claims about work that you have not actually read. If you're going to say that his work is entirely free of fact and scholarly convention then you can totally do that and make a case for it - but only after actually reading and engaging with it! You continue to make basic misunderstandings and mistakes of his position that he was tired of repeatedly resolving a decade ago, and I am not going to continue to reply to this conversation unless you actually read his work before dismissing it: pointing out errors that only exist because you just do not bother to read the articles linked is not a worthwhile use of my time.

This is from an article that I have already linked

Yes and it backs up my point. 'technologies well suited to function within the long-term energy budget of our planet will doubtless blossom in turn' = non-industrial lifestyle, no space travel, no exploitation of the enormous resources of space. What is so hard to understand about this? He is describing stagnation in a preindustrial world with some trinkets.

Yes, he hasn't included the calculations done on EROEI on nuclear plants in his most recent essays,

Because he hasn't done them, because they show that nuclear power is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, as is obvious from reading the papers I linked (which actually provide figures to back up their claims and some analysis of what's actually going on).

You have set up a standard which no scientific journal article ever published would pass

Scientific journals demand citations and references from credible sources. Undergraduate level essays demand references. Greer's work would not pass muster at a third-rate university.

because you just do not bother to read the articles linked is not a worthwhile use of my time.

Tu quoque.

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