Demand side management helps make our power grid more cost-effective and aids in the transition towards renewable energy. It can also be considered as a very green policy on its own, as it reduces the amount of power we need to produce, and thus our impact on the environment.
Tag: Society
How trolls and extremists are damaging our public discourse
Trolls and extremists contaminate our public discourse with falsehoods, logical fallacies, irrational argument, poisoning the well, false expertise, and the creation of de-facto knowledge. Individuals must learn to resist the onslaught of ideas driven by these sections of society.
Power system performance metrics
Everything has its price. Every form of power production has costs in dollars, time, land, materials, pollutants, greenhouse gas emissions, and human deaths. We look at the most important factors for analyzing the feasibility of a proposed power project. Considering only some of these factors will lead to an incomplete picture of power system costs.
Lindsey Simpson of TEDxMcGill on volunteerism and planning major events
Lindsey Simpson, one of the organizers of TEDxMcGill, talks in this interview about why she likes to volunteer and work hard to plan such big events. TEDxMcGill is an externally organized TED event in the city of Montreal, Canada on November 20th, 2010.
Interview with wind power guru Paul Gipe
Wind power expert Paul Gipe advocates that we deliberately create our green energy future rather than wait around for it to happen. He says that we should aim to democratize our energy production for a more prosperous future.
Lifestyle brands: Selling people a constructed dream
Lifestyle brands are designed to create the impression that their product is part of a way of life that is desirable. They do this through connection to people’s employment, ethnicity, religion, class, region, etc. Lifestyle brands are artificially created value design to allow inferior or average products masquerade as superior ones.
Helpful tools for understanding nuclear fusion
These are the concepts I found to be very useful during my fusion research. Here we define ignition state, Lawson criterion, fusion performance parameter, and energy gain factor Q.
Science denial: Vaccines, vitamins and GMOs
Michael Specter delivered a clear and powerful message in his talk at TED in 2010. Vaccines save lives, yet people fear them. GMOs are primarily opposed for reasons unrelated to the method of their construction.
How can you deliberately change your society?
How do people try to chance society? Why do these methods work? How can they be resisted? Progressive and regressive change can depend on many of the same basic techniques.
How the common explanations for poverty are incorrect
The common ideas that purport to explain the fact of poverty are in fact not the primary causal factors of poverty.
National and cultural issues that contribute to poverty and hamper development
Now we are going to discuss the issues that shape the development of extremely poor nations and cultures.
What keeps communities locked in the extreme poverty trap?
Extreme poverty is a state of subsistence living in which most, if not all, efforts are directed towards survival. Extreme poverty has many direct consequences. What we are discussing here are the direct feedback effects that tend to cause cycles of deepening poverty on a community level.
Our global human tribe: How we must extend empathy beyond our religion and nation
Jeremy Rifkin implores us: “to begin rethinking human nature. To bring out our empathic sociability, so that we can rethink the institutions and society and prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilisation.”
Jim Elliott shares his thoughts on sustainability, community, and living green
Jim Elliott is a notable figure in the sustainability movement in Regina and Saskatchewan. He is involved with many environmental action groups, poverty-reduction groups, and the Citizen’s Public Transit Coalition for Regina.
The foundations of personal change
How do we change as people? Why do we change as people? This work is intended to be an earnest discussion of the realities of personal change.
Laura Pfeifer on urban ecology and community leadership
Laura Pfeifer is the founder and editor of Regina Urban Ecology, and is the Regina organizer of Jane’s Walk.
Fixing our media hypnosis
We have an ever-accelerating journalism cycle that is making mistakes, shortening our attention spans, presenting opinion as news, and trivializing our political debates. We are learning that even though we have an unimaginable wealth of information at our fingertips, our trust can be easily misplaced.
Hans Rosling: Health, wealth, and progress of the world
While demonstrating the changes on his graphs, Rosling delivers a rapid-fire description of the major political choices and world forces that are driving the change.
Media speed’s negative effect on politics
The advent of intense media speed and opinion masquerading as news have had some damaging effects on our political system. This is especially evident in the coverage leading up to and during elections.
The dangers of news media speed
We have an ever-accelerating journalism cycle that is making mistakes, shortening our attention spans, presenting opinion as news, and trivializing our political debates. Media literacy is the only reliable cure, and we all need to learn it. Fast.