From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: Re: Greens vs. Property Rights
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
	<JMC.93Jan5203830@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> <1ig863INN1rv@smurf.sti.com>
Date: 6 Jan 93 22:10:44

Alaric Tekiahyn is quite confident of many things that aren't so.

1. "standing on each others shoulders" is a mere rhetorical device.
Each country has its own population problem.  Bangladesh probably
couldn't support a six-fold increase in population.

2. Mr. Tekiahyn must have dreamed up that stuff about the Green
Revolution not making any difference.  India has multiplied its
wheat production several-fold and has had no food crises since
the 1960s.  Taiwan, one of the most densely populated countries
in the world, has asked for advice on how to persuade its farmers
to grow less rice.

3. When forests are cut down in Brazil, the wood is burned, just do
get rid of it.  If it were not burned, cutting down the forests
wouldn't put CO2 in the atmosphere.  Cutting down forests, not burning
the wood and replanting the forest is one way of getting CO2 out of
the atmosphere should this be necessary.

4. What specific pollution are you referring to?  Each kind of
pollution has its own remedies.

5. The French  built two pre-production breeder reactors, had
some troubles and are deciding what to do.  The Japanese are
building a breeder reactor.  That project is the cause of the
Greenhype flap over shipping the plutonium.  The French breeder
reactors work, and the Japanese reactor will be made to work.
Who is your UK scientist, and what did he say?  Ask a nuclear
engineer for more details.  Several post to sci.environment.

6. The energy content of granite, used as a source of uranium is
larger than the energy content of pure coal.  In fact the energy
content of coal, regarded as a source of uranium, is larger than the
chemical energy content of the coal.  The key point is that fissioning
an atom of uranium of coal produces 200 million electron volts of
energy, whereas burning an atom of carbon produces about 20 ev.
However, it will indeed be many millions of years before our
descendants have to use granite.

7. All the schemes for getting rid of fission products that have
been proposed will work well enough to make them a minor hazard
compared to other hazards of human life.  It is only fanaticism,
on the one hand, and governmental political cowardice on the
other, that have made it difficult to find a solution that suits
everybody.  However, there is no rush.

8. I don't "disagree with the subjects being discussed" on the
newsgroups to which I post.  I suppose that in using this phrase
Mr. Tekiahyn is being as careless with English as he is with
science.  I suppose he means "disagrees with the opinions of
the more politically correct posters".

9. As for contributing to newsgroups being "a foolish endeavor",
I convince some people of some things, and other people can't be
convinced of anything at all.

10. I am pleased that Mr. Tekiahyn is giving me "the benefit of
the doubt" "for the time being", and I shudder to think what will
happen to me when is patience is exhausted.

11. His quotation from Jefferson isn't quite accurate either.

Finally, I would like to know specifically where Mr. Tekiahyn got his
belief that " the Green Revolution didn't make a drop in the bucket's
worth of real difference."  I suppose he might mean, "didn't influence
the writings of the doomsters", but then even losing $600 on his bet
that the price of minerals would go up didn't influence Paul Ehrlich.

9.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

Newsgroups: alt.politics.greens