Most environmental activists (and sadly, even many environmental policy-makers) tend to see you as standing in the way of progress if you try to get them to understand the engineering implications of what they want to do.
The key is that they understand "negative environmental externalities" (== "Destroying The Earth") in emotional rather than engineering terms, so they have no way to access concepts like "good-enough solution," "necessary evil," or "minimal impact." There are only environmental problems they know about ("Nuclear Fuel Comes From Satan's Pooper") and ones they don't ("Several of the reactants used to make solar cells are toxic enough to use as chemical weapons").
“I think a new, different kind of bowling should be ‘carpet bowling.’ It's just like regular bowling, only the lanes are carpet instead of wood. I don't know why we should do this, but my God, we've got to try something!”
As someone with a materials science/engineering background, I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that no-one knows why the whiskers grow. Usually a given material changes its state/configuration because that's the lowest thermodynamical configuration for that material to be in given the particular temperature/pressure. Maybe I'm way off base here, but I think the whiskers are growing due to elevated temperature caused by resistance heating...?
You are correct as far as you go, but what you're saying is contained in the first ten pages of any book on device reliability. There is at least one whole Ph.D. project's worth of additional research between your statement and the time when you throw up your hands in despair because your Monte Carlo models just don't seem to work.
If you really want to know, you'll have to read the papers. I'm sure there are quite a lot of them. The incentive to solve this problem is very, very high.
The "Green" agenda (or at least the one pushed by marketing departments) always seems to ignore the fact that money has an environmental cost attached to it.
That $400 "green" desk lamp? There is probably more environmental cost associated with buyers working jobs to earn an extra $400 than with just manufacturing a more traditional $20 lamp in the first place.
Somewhere there's a counter argument in favor of non-critical systems achieving planned obsolence through joint failure and the economic benefit of consumers purchasing replacements. I'm not about to make it myself, but it is available.
* Something must be done.
* This is something.
* Therefore it must be done.
Most environmental activists (and sadly, even many environmental policy-makers) tend to see you as standing in the way of progress if you try to get them to understand the engineering implications of what they want to do.
The key is that they understand "negative environmental externalities" (== "Destroying The Earth") in emotional rather than engineering terms, so they have no way to access concepts like "good-enough solution," "necessary evil," or "minimal impact." There are only environmental problems they know about ("Nuclear Fuel Comes From Satan's Pooper") and ones they don't ("Several of the reactants used to make solar cells are toxic enough to use as chemical weapons").