Friday, March 21, 2008

Google Causes Global Warming!

Dr. Robert Zubrin visited Authors@Google last Monday to talk about his latest book, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.

Skip to the 40-minute mark in the video below to see the controversial slide which prompts an inevitable flood of pointed questions from the audience. As the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing:



The complete, in-context quote from Dr. Zubrin is: "The same argument could be made that Google causes global warming... by your spreading of information, which contributes to economic growth... and, in fact, much more global warming than the corn ethanol program, I daresay."

I'm currently reading Fifty Degrees Below, the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson's "climate trilogy," and though I'm enjoying it, the information seems even more densely packed than in his science-packed Mars trilogy. Maybe that's because the "climate" books are set closer to the present day, and therefore all the political and social situations resonate and feel that much more real. Every detail implies a multitude of other things I'm already familiar with, instead of causing me to speculate on what a future society might be like.

~CKL

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