An Inconvenient Conversation

An Inconvenient Conversation

Lynn Le

4/5/11

First off, we talked about how appropriately named this project was. Inconvenient is right, and because of inconvenience, I talked to a separate person for this assignment, and not my parents. Not only that, because I don’t care enough to do more than necessary for lack of my own time, I will honestly say here that I simply got the questions answered in interview format. There was no requirement that said this had to be in sentence format, so I am presenting this raw.

What forms of energy are available?

Wind, Tidal, Solar, Nuclear, Coal, Natural Gas…

What are the benefits and drawbacks of current energy sources?

Turbines of all sorts are expensive to build, Nuclear can have environmental drawbacks and can be dangerous, Solar panels take up a lot of space, Coal is bad for the environment, and Natural gas is limited.

Nuclear doesn’t have any immediate effect to the environment and is efficient, Wind takes up little space and has no effect on the environment, same with tidal. Solar is cheap, doesn’t hurt the environment and can be efficient. Coal is cheap and convenient, and natural gas is environmentally safe.

How can we provide the energy we need while maintaining ecological balance?

We can do away with harmful sources of energy and instead put in environmentally friendly means of energy.

How does climate change?

The change in climate is mostly natural. It’s natural for climates to change every once and a while on earth, as seen with the changes that the earth has already gone through. That is not to say that pollution is not a factor as well, it’s just that climate changes because it simply does.

How do we study global climate?

We take data about rainfall, temperature, snowfall, and etcetera.

Why is there a disconnect between what science is telling us and what the public and politicians are doing about climate change?

This is because the politicians are using climate change to further their careers. They don’t care for the facts, so they don’t pay attention to them. The public is similar. They listen to the politicians and the media and not what scientific journals are saying. Both are under a sort of state of hysteria where they only believe one thing and won’t look at the facts, even if they are presented to them.

What role, if any, do morality, ethics, and spirituality play in addressing climate change?

There is only a role when it comes to solving climate change. There are the issues of deforestation to create places for cleaner energy, there’s cost issues… and of course, there’s always the one crazy person who thinks global warming is a sign from God.

What leads some people to commit themselves deeply to addressing climate change -- and not others?

Some people commit themselves to the problem—creating less greenhouse gasses, dealing with cleaner energy, etcetera. Others are looking to repair the damage done to the earth. This is probably because some think prevention is more important than dealing with the damage already done, while others want to focus on repairing what we have then preventing it from happening again.

What is the hardest thing about addressing climate change?

The fact that the effects of anything we do can barely be seen. Every change we make, every tree we plant, there is no tangible evidence of the good we have done, so it can be difficult to motivate change. 

Back to 1983

Back to 1983
Wednesday, March 29, 2011

So it’s spring break, and there really is a lot and nothing to do. After getting back from a convention this weekend, I was tired and I honestly didn’t feel like doing anything at all.
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday cleaning up the stuff from the convention—freebies, uploading photos, putting away my costumes, fixing the props that got broken, and contacting the friends I had made there by finding them in places online.
There wasn’t much to do after that.
So on Wednesday, I slept in. I didn’t even hear my alarm go off, so I guess that counted as not using it. I woke up at some ten or eleven o’clock, had my breakfast—or rather, brunch, since it was pretty late…—and waited for lunch by talking with my sister in our room.
That’s what we always do in the mornings—it’s what gets our mind going and thinking, so when we have time, we usually talk for hours.
So then it was lunch time, and when we got out there, our mom had prepared us a Vietnamese dish that really required no oven. It was washed cold white noodles with the eggrolls and barbeque meat we had leftovers of from the previous day, with some herbs and covered in fish sauce, which was really just lemonade with some garlic and stuff in it. We mixed it all together and ate it—it’s not as unpleasant as it seems, it’s actually one of my favorite dishes.
After lunch, which I had seconds of because I loved it so much, I went and read some Japanese comics from my brother’s shared shelf—since I was bored and I had nothing better to do and I had been meaning to get around to reading them.
So most of my week in general was reading through one series called Chrono Crusade, which I finished that day. But so long of reading kind of hurts my body since I’m stretching out on the bed so much. So I went to the living room and played chess with my brother and sister, which I won once against my sister but lost all the other times. We had set up the chess board before for one of Dave’s math homeworks, and hadn’t bothered to put it away, so we might as well have used it.
The rest of the night was pretty much just reading manga and playing chess and talking to my sister.
Now onto answering those questions on the blog, I didn’t feel much need to communicate with anyone since I was being lazy that day. News about Japan came to me when my parents were talking about how outrageous the media was about this radiation thing, since it really was being blown out of proportion, but other than that I don’t listen to the news on a regular basis anyway so I didn’t change much there.
Obviously, since I’m on the computer so much, giving up the computer was the hardest, but I like reading comics too so it wasn’t that bad. The least hardest was probably TV since there wasn’t anything good on during the weekdays anyway. I wasn’t really surprised with how easy or hard it was to live a day without electronics, since I’ve done it before and it’s not that big a deal. The only thing I missed was talking to my friend who I usually talk to every day, but I didn’t talk to her during the convention either so she understood since I do get pretty busy. I’m surprised I didn’t do any drawing though, I thought I would have when I got this assignment.
So now onto the next assignment from the only teacher who really assigned us any homework over the break.