frog in the pail

Excerpt from the book Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

The Energy-Climate Era crept up on us slowly. In some ways, when it comes to climate change, human society has been like the proverbial frog in the pail on the stove, where the heat gets turned up very slightly every hour, so the frog never thinks to jump out. It just keeps adjusting until it boils to death. I hope we will write a different ending, but let's not fool ourselves: We are the frog, the pail is getting hot, flat and crowded, and we need a long-term survival plan - a ladder out of the pail. 

~~
Well, Can you feel the heat? and where is the ladder yet?


Srik

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the next billion

Excerpt from the book Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

In the next twelve years alone, the world's population is expected to swell by roughly another billion people, and many of them will become new consumers and producers. When that happens, the law of large numbers starts to kick in - everything starts to add up to huge. For instance, what if, once that newest billion are all here, we gave each of them a sixty-watt incandescent light bulb?

Each bulb doesn't weigh much - roughly 0.7 ounces with the packaging - but a billion of them together weigh around 20,000 metric tons, or about the same as 15,000 Priuses. Now let's turn them on. If they're all on at the same time, it'd be 60,000 megawatts. Luckily, [they] will only use their bulbs four hours per day, so we're down to 10,000 megawatts at any moment. Yikes! looks like we'll still need twenty or so new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants - just so the next billion people can turn a light on!

As told by David Douglas, vice president for eco-responsibility for Sun Microsystems.

~~

Yikes! and am still wondering how many such yikes! stuff awaits for the law of big numbers to take over everything!

Srik

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reSet

I know 
its pretty late 
but still 
now that we have reached 7 billion;
we were a mere 3 billion half a century ago
and marching towards 9 billion
in a couple of decades,
that we are exploiting more
and continue to do so
and perhaps
no easy solution
or less readiness 
to face bigger challenges
of warming 
or the crowd out there


I always think,
dream of that button
the same one
you are looking for
to just go and punch it
with full energy to 
reSet everything back to 
normal! 


Srik

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