Energy: Friend or Enemy?

By Dilip -

Modern life would be inconceivable without the friendly side of energy.. in recent decades, energy has also become an enemy. Presidents have lamented our “addiction to oil,” we have gone to war to protect oil fields from hostile powers, and air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year... most worrisome, the accumulation of greenhouse gases threatens to change the earth’s climate in ways that are unpredictable and dangerous.

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The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

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'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
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By Dilip -
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Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
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Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'

By Dilip -
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