Meet the scientific storytellers who can make the public afraid of anything—for a price

boing
21

The claims made by NLP peddlers remain unproven and I personally think they are bunk, you’ve only described a subset of what some people claim they can achieve through its use.

Being persuasive and being deceitful have been around a lot longer than NLP which claims it can make a person do things he/she doesn’t believe in, in other words, NLP claims it can convince you without giving you reasons for believing in what you do, to claim otherwise is to claim that NLP is the same as arguing your point effectively and not a distinct practice in its own right.

The worst part is that NLP practitioners only shield themselves from actually participating in a conversation as an equal, with an equal opportunity of being proven wrong.

So I guess @Medievalist was right!

(Of course, I was only joking)

22

No, I was just being annoyingly literal, considering the words “neuro linguistic programming”. I was not referring to anybodys claims about anything.

People make claims, disciplines don’t. Anyway, I’d argue that belief and reason have little to do with each other, in any case.

But NLP functions (for better or worse) as a therapeutic discipline, not unlike psychology. As such it wouldn’t have anything to do with debating issues with your therapist as an equal, but rather getting an individual to expand from a limiting, artificial model of themselves and/or their relationships. Whatever you might think about NLP as it compares to other behavioral/cognitive/emotional/ therapies, it seems fairly well understood by many that it can be useful to have outside help when trying to modify ones own behavior, for reasons of subjectivity and unconscious biases.

As regards media spin creeps, it might be more accurate to say that they use some of the same ideas applied from cognitive science that are used in NLP. But that doesn’t make them scientists and more than being an auto mechanic makes one a Newtonian physicist.

23

I’m aware that for many years the real reason behind nuclear power was the production of plutonium, tritium and polonium (to name a few.) That’s how the UK has come to have the world’s most embarrassing stockpile of plutonium by country size. But the new proponents of nuclear energy are rather different. In assessing safety of modern reactor designs, the opportunity for diversion of waste into weapons is taken into account.

24

Perhaps, but the merchants of doubt (who are just behind the curtain, with fistfuls of dollar bills, whenever you are talking to any “new” proponents of nuclear energy in the USA) aren’t new or different. They believe in nuclear power just as religiously as they believe in American exceptionalism and military dominance. It’s a matter of faith, immune to economic realities.

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25

this romance being spun about “decentralized” power is mainly helping to kill real reform. Large green energy farms are the most efficient and cost effective way to generate fossil-free energy. We do NOT have to generate the juice where all the people live - it can be moved very efficiently with DC power lines and then distributed to ALL. Not just home and business owners.

The real reform we need is to realize that our national energy future should be handled at the national level. The Department of Energy should be busy planning, building and deploying a new 100% fossil-free energy utility system, which could and should sell the resulting juice for next to zero. Zero, because their are zero fuel costs. Zero, to encourage everyone to convert from fossil fuels. Zero, because our energy system belongs to us (it is the most socialistic sector of the economy, being about 50% publicly-owned) and, just like a homeowner who gets “free” electricity after paying off his PV panels, so can a nation.

It would cost us the dollar equivalent of 4 -7 years-worth of U.S. annual fossil fuel spending. Peanuts.

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26

I’d argue that a great deal many people compartmentalize the primary reasons for their behaviours and are only able to deal in the secondary motivations behind what they do. But I do believe that people believe they have reasons to do as they do. This is why our behaviors and attitudes can be self limiting.

Except the scientists who have tried to study it.

Agreed.

And that is one of your best qualities. :smile:

27

Except for when they start smoking, they don’t think its terribly bad then.

28

They certainly aren’t the only proponents of nuclear power. Richard Lovelock is pretty in to it, and I think it is a much better option than fossil fuels. Ideally we would have invested decades ago to be in a position to go fully renewable now, but realistically, even if we seriously push it now, it will be a quite a while before we have enough storage to go entirely to intermittent sources. In the interim, I would far rather see a new nuke plant installed than a new coal or natural gas plant.

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Do they include anti-vaxxers? How about the folks that claim GMOs cause autism?

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Not zero because you still have to maintain the production and, especially delivery infrastructure. Not zero because you have to pay the people who design and build it.

I am convinced it is possible to go fully renewable, but it would take a couple decades of going full tilt at it to move our infrastructure over, and that 4-7 years figure for the money is very optimistic. OTOH, if you include the wars we fight to control oil, it might not be too far off. We could be well on our way with the amount of money we’ve spent on wars this century.

Anyway, even though it will be much more difficult and expensive than you think, I still think we should absolutely do whatever is required to make the conversion to carbon neutral energy, because, whatever it takes, the alternative is worse.

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31

The doubt merchants strike me more as part of the conservative counter-revolution that started in the 1970s and 80s. Uber-conservatives like the Koch brothers decided that existing centrist think-tanks like RAND and Brookings were actually full of commie-pinkos socialists and started setting up their own groups like Cato, and CEI and the Marshall Institute.

One thing I find disheartening is that the “big money” behind this stuff isn’t all that big, considering. The Cato Institute has an annual budget of around $30 million. The Heartland Institute, a core climate denial group that sponsors the big annual climate denial conference, has a budget of around $5 million. That’s change under the seat cushions for the likes of the Kochs.

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32

These guys really should by rights have no credibility because they have a history of being wrong. For example, the Heartland Institute currently is notorious for it’s climate change denial. Before that it denied second-hand tobacco smoke was harmful. Before that it denied ozone depletion was a problem. Before that it denied acid rain was a problem.

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33

I forgot to mention this. A good catalog of such disinformation peddlers. personas, and campaigns.

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34

Where do you get the idea that it would be more expensive than I think? I’m going to be a gentleman and not make suggestions! :smiley:

My figures are based on the best available evidence - the series of peer-reviewed studies published by Jacobsen & Delucchi. They also say that we could be ~85% done by 2030 and 100% done by 2050, IF we wanted to, and IF we do it as I propose - with large-scale farms and as a directed government project. The opposite of what we are doing now - laissez-faie economics using the so-called free market, with next to zero subsidies for renewables.

They say to convert off of every molecule of fossil fuel would cost California $1.0 trillion. CA is 1/6th of the U.S. energy budget. $6T is 4 years worth of fossil fuel purchases. I budgeted $10T, though, to build a smart grid, pay for home and business conversion costs to go 100% electric. Probably enough money to put a new Nissan Leaf in every driveway. One trillion dollars is a TITANIC amount of money if spent wisely.

As far as maintenance costs, that is already coming out of our pockets. And renewables have lower maintenance costs than FF plants. Not a significant cost here. Nor is the “planning” - which should be done by Executive branch agencies, whose people are being paid annual salaries anyway.

My main point is AGW and our new energy utility should be done by national government, It is the only way we can get this done on time. The only egalitarian response as well. Our energy future should not be bourne by homeowners.

And if you want to see the efficacy of planned centralized government to design, build, and deploy renewable energy efficiently - just keep your eys on China. They are going to do exactly that, and will kick our asses thoroughly. And then you will see right-wingers complain about the unfair business edge China enjoys with their much cheaper energy costs, lowered medical costs, etc. Do you realize they have already reached peak coal use months ago? Coal use is already in decline there, all being replaced by renewables. They are slated to install more solar and wind in 2015 than we have done in our entire history to date.

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35

I am familiar with Jacobsen and Delucci’s articles. Peer reviewed is good, but it’s best to interpret it more as “These guys aren’t complete cranks” than “This is definitely right.” This article, for example, is also peer reviewed:


I’m posting it just to point out that Jacobsen and Delucci’s assertions do not, even remotely, represent a consensus in their field, or any of the other fields relevant to this, and not because I agree with everything Trainer says. In fact, I’m much more optimistic than Trainer, and, though all of his critiques have some merit, there are only two which I feel are really anywhere near as bad as he claims they are, and, of those two, there is only one that I personally have the expertise to address. (Though a quick google search on Jacobsen and Delucci will turn up plenty of people with the relevant expertise talking about the other one)

The only one I can really speak about is the issue of large-scale storage. Though I no longer work in the field, until about three years ago I was doing research in, specifically, the field of storing solar energy via electrolysis, but I’m at least familiar with the literature on other methods of storage (all, admittedly, from the materials science side, not the civil engineering side.) I still stay in touch with my friends in the field, and thus am aware of any serious breakthroughs.

Throughout, J&D blithely (and implicitly) assume that solving the large scale storage issue is as much a done deal as the power generation issue, and it is very much not. Wind power and both concentrated and PV solar have already been demonstrated to scale, so their assumptions are warranted in that case. They never, however, even directly include the extra inefficiency from conversion to a storage medium and back or the extra infrastructure necessary for storage in their calculations. These would be necessary even in a situation where storage scaling was a done deal, like it would be if, hypothetically, platinum and/or iridium, and hopefully indium, were as cheap and plentiful as iron.

Unfortulately that is not the case. Most of the ways people are talking about storing energy that have the potential to scale (e.g., don’t require exotic metals or enormous amounts of energy to manufacture compared to their storage capacity.) are not even near the required efficiency in the lab, much less at scale (a few are getting close, and are very promising, but are not at the point where we can be fully confident that they’ll scale).

I do believe that it is very likely possible to go entirely renewable, though I personally think that getting off carbon completely in the timeframe of a couple decades would probably require nuclear to tide us over until we complete the transition to renewables. I also think that we absolutely should do everything in our power to make the transition to renewables. I don’t think pretending it’s going to be easier than it actually will be is helping anything, though.

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36

What about integrating electric vehicles into the grid? Their batteries then can take care of the storage aspect. With smart-grid, the cars would charge when there’s surplus of energy, and could provide energy when the grid lacks power and the smart house cannot cut the consumption any further.

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I agree, but due to regulations etc, compared to other ways to generate power, it takes much longer (30 yrs?) until a new nuclear power plant would come online.

38

burlamb didn’t write that the price of energy would be zero. Zero was used there in the way another price would be. Replacing ‘zero’ with say… one Dollar would make that clear.

39

Back of the envelope:
energy usage: 25484e12Wh/yr from 2009
number of cars (assuming all replaced with electric): 254e6
take largest available Tesla battery as baseline: 85e3Wh

Assume (generously. widespread compliance, good organization, driving home from wherever it was charging during the day, driving wherever you’re going at night, leaving enough to get to where it will sit and charge tomorrow) each car can use 2/3 of it’s capacity as a battery each night.

Yields 20% of usage.

Surprisingly high, actually. I’m really surprised. The problem remains that industrial use really requires a more reliable source than you’d get this way, but this, or distributed batteries in homes, sounds like it would be enough to power the residential and commercial sectors at night. Unfortunately, those, combined, are less than 20% of our total usage.

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The industry needs its big-ass power plants.

The car numbers however sounds higher than I expected, pretty good. I think this could be a key component of short-term energy security for the residential sector, at least in the Sprawl; mid- to long-term if combined with localized, decentralized generation. Good as a contingency for the case of long-haul lines failure. Shit hits the fan, the ‘hoods islandize and the pumps keep a-pumpin’ and the fridges keep a-fridgin’.