Turning and Keeping the Lights On

Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of Before the Lights Go Out, joined us at SkepTech to talk about the challenges of tranporting electricity from producers to consumers. It was an entertaining talk, but it was very sobering. Our energy infrastructure is obsolete, aging, and completely unprepared to help us move away from a carbon energy economy.

I do realize that the sound quality isn’t great for these talks. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to pull the sound directly from the room’s audio system.

If you can’t listen to this, I asked Maggie at the end what we can do to help. I asked whether there was a lobbying group that worked on this issue from a sane perspective that we could support. She said there isn’t. She also said, however, that if we can raise the political will to put a price directly on the use of carbon fuels, the economists she’s talked to have said that the changes we need to make become the economically reasonable actions. What we really need to do is stop deferring the costs of our system as it runs now.

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Turning and Keeping the Lights On
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2 thoughts on “Turning and Keeping the Lights On

  1. 1

    Do you know if there are plans on the part of SkepTech to actually post their own footage? I can’t find anything on their site more recent than exhortations to come to the conference.

    The sound quality is a huge issue for me. I can barely understand the speakers without turning up the volume so far that applause sounds like a thermonuclear device detonating in my ears. Hyperbole, obviously, but also not conducive to watching more than a minute or two.

    I appreciate you posting your own footage, but I’m a bit surprised that participant video is apparently the only way to go. This is a conference devoted to skepticism AND technology, after all.

  2. 2

    Another note, Joshua Brose’s contact email returns a DNS error. I attempted to email him based on a link from the About page.

    Please send any other questions to [email protected]

    See you there!

    Joshua Brose, Event Coordinator

    Mmm, not so much.

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