REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Thursday, October 31, 2024 14:25
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 24526
PAGE 14 of 19

Sunday, September 24, 2023 7:38 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Let's move on to your next bone-headed statement:

Quote:

Most people will wait until green energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy before they will switch.
This is not the crux of the argument. The question is whether or not proposed control measures WILL BE EFFECTIVE.

MANY potential control and mitigation measures have nothing to do with, and therefore would be unaffected by, fuel costs. I've already outlined more than a dozen, from reducing our military's world-straddling presence and constant foreign meddling to better forest management, better agricultural practices, urban cooling, environmental remediation, and general conservation (eg more efficient ACs, higher mandated vehicle mileage, better industrial motors etc.)

Limiting the scope to relative fuel price is unnecessarily and misleadingly restrictive. It's almost as if you're (*GASP!) leading to a pre-determined outcome.

Not that you would ever do that!


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, September 24, 2023 7:45 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


And now, to your next boneheaded argument

Quote:

One by one, climate activists supported powering buildings with zero-emission appliances running on clean electricity.
Let me start out by repeating one very important fact:

ONE BAD FOREST FIRE YEAR UNDID 18 YEARS OF CALIFORNIA DECARBONIZATION. In other words, wildifire emitted EIGHTEEN TIMES the amount of greenhouse gases that were erduced in one year.

Focusing on whether or not people are burning nat gas in their homes and businesses is like worrying about the cockroach in the room and ignoring the 600-lb gorilla.

Aside from which, there are practical considerations like -
WHERE IS THIS 'CLEAN ENERGY' GOING TO COME FROM?
And how will the grid handle the increased load?

AFAIK California is nowhere near meeting the CURRENT load with 'clean energy'. Activists need to propose something other than magical thinking and hopium.



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, September 24, 2023 8:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
FUN FACT: Wind Turbine blades are 100% non-recyclable . . .

Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

What does this have to do with your incredibly stupid statement?

Oh, NOTHING, you say??


It's as if you two are paid to be stupid by the fossil fuel industry.




Blah, blah, blah...

Try again. That's not an argument to anything I posted here, citing actual government websites that are currently up during the Biden* Administration*.

Refute any of these following truths on their own merit, or SHUT THE FUCK UP BITCH.




FUN FACT: Wind Turbine blades are 100% non-recyclable, consisting each of 35 tonnes of plastic and fiberglass which are either thrown into a landfill to be somebody else's problem another day, or are incinerated, which not only is bad news for future CO2 emissions, but as a bonus are going to end up adding to the insane amount of microplastics that you already have coating the inside of your lungs and are already found littering pretty much every cell in your body.

As of 2022, we have a recorded total of 70,800 wind turbines in the US alone, each consisting of 3 blades.

So, not including all of the blades that have already been buried or burned, we have a combined total of 14,868,000,000 lbs of non-recyclable future waste product that's mostly going to end up in your lungs and contribute to global warming once they reach the end of their life cycle.

Oh... and don't forget that every single tonne of glass fibers produced in the first place results in a carbon footprint of approximately 1.7-2.2 tonnes. So, not including the blades we've already buried or burned, the blades on the existing 70,800 wind turbines currently active in America alone required us to put 12,637,800 to 16,354,800 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere before they even made their first rotation.

Clean energy indeed!



Well boys...

Smoke if you got 'em!




Sources:

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wind-turbine
-blades-be-recycled


https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-turbines-are-contained-us-wind-turb
ine-database


https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/30003WOK.TXT?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&
amp;Client=EPA&Index=1991+Thru+1994&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A%5Czyfiles%5CIndex%20Data%5C91thru94%5CTxt%5C00000009%5C30003WOK.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h%7C-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=hpfr&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=1&SeekPage=x&ZyPURL


https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-sustainable-sustainablemodern-const
ruction-materials-okpara



--------------------------------------------------

How you do anything is how you do everything.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, September 25, 2023 4:34 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, I was merely pointing out your stupidity ("we must capture carbon dioxide at rate ten times ..blah blah blah") and your attempts to distract away from it by changing the topic. You're STILL trying to distract away from it by name-calling!


Just admit it was a boneheaded statement and move on.


And then we can start discussing your OTHER boneheaded statements!

You Trumptards are all the same, imagining you have a point when you literally know nothing at all and can't learn. By the way, all the emojis you use, Signym, show you are as dumb as Ramaswamy, the coke-snorting salesman wanting to be Trump's VP:

“The climate is always changing!” So goes a popular refrain from climate deniers who continue to claim that there’s nothing special about this particular moment. There is no climate crisis, they say, because the Earth has survived dramatic warming before.

Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently exemplified misconceptions about our planet’s climate past. When he asserted that “carbon dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere is still at a relative low through human history,” he didn’t just make a false statement (carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest they’ve been in at least 4 million years). He also showed fundamentally wrong thinking around the climate crisis.

What threatens us today isn’t the particular concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the precise temperature of the planet, alarming as those two metrics are. Instead, it’s the unprecedented rate at which we are increasing carbon pollution through fossil fuel burning, and the resulting rate at which we are heating the planet.

Consider the warming event that paleoclimatologists point to as the best natural comparison for the rapid greenhouse-driven trend we’re seeing now. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum happened 56 million years ago, roughly 10 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs, which itself was caused by climate change (a massive asteroid impact event led to a global dust storm and, in turn, rapid cooling). The PETM warming resulted from an unusually large and rapid injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions in Iceland. Global temperatures increased by approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit in as little as 10,000 years, rising from an already steamy baseline of 80 degrees Fahrenheit possibly up to a sauna-like 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

That warming rate of about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit per century is extremely rapid by geological standards. But it’s still roughly 10 times slower than the warming today.

Extinctions followed another warming period in our more recent past, when the last ice age ended about 18,000 years ago. Driven by Earth’s changing orbit relative to the sun, and boosted by a heightened greenhouse effect as warming oceans gave up their carbon dioxide in the same way an open bottle of warm soda loses carbonation, the planet warmed by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the subsequent 8,000 years.

That rate of warming — which, again, was about 10 times slower than the warming today — was rapid enough to wipe out entire species. Gone were the magnificent woolly mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats that had roamed the plains of North America. A combination of climate change and overhunting by paleo-Americans did them in. A few of them got stuck in tar pits and are preserved — some at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

In the fall of 2017, I participated in a climate change forum at the tar pits museum, which is at the center of those ancient pools of asphalt — the viscous, evaporated remains of crude oil that seeped to the surface from deep below. I couldn’t help but see further irony there: Crude oil from beneath Earth’s surface threatens us today because we’re ensnared by it politically rather than physically.

Paleo-humans survived the end of the ice age because of the resilience afforded by our big brains, which gave us the behavioral plasticity to adapt to the changing climate. But that same intelligence has gotten us into trouble today. We’ve used it to create a global energy system dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. The great Carl Sagan once commented on the absurdity of our plight: “Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.”

Our societal infrastructure — upon which more than 8 billion people now depend — was built around a global climate that was stable for thousands of years. The viability of that infrastructure depends on the climate remaining close to what it was, or at least changing slowly enough that the rates of environmental change don’t exceed our adaptive capacity as a species and a civilization. What finished off the dinosaurs and the mastodons was a climate that shifted too rapidly away from what they were adapted to, in the first case cooling and the other case warming. That’s our challenge today.

Can our big brains save us this time? They can if we make proper use of them and learn the lessons offered by Earth’s past. Paleoclimate data characterizing past episodes of natural climate change, such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and peak of the last ice age, allow us to test the models that we use to project future warming. Our models pass these tests, reproducing the paleodata from historical periods when driven by the estimated changes in greenhouse gases and sunlight during those periods. The paleodata, in turn, help us refine the models.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019RG000678

The end result is that we can trust these models to peer into our climate future. They tell us that we can avoid a catastrophic trajectory for our global climate if we reduce carbon emissions substantially over the next decade. So this fragile moment in which we find ourselves is in fact a critical juncture.

As Sagan said: “We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising.” The choice between peril and promise is ultimately still ours.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-09-24/climate-change-fossil
-fuels-global-warming-rate


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, September 25, 2023 6:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That's what I thought, bitch.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, September 26, 2023 2:55 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by second: Blah blah blah


Yes, I know.... at one time the CO2 was 10x higher than today, and temperature were far higher, and "the world" survived. BUT WE WOULDN'T.

Is today's concentration and temperature rise a "crisis"?

Well, it's not good. But even if .. no, ESPECIALLY IF... it's a crisis, this isn't the time to go frittering around with half-baked responses, "solutions" that require "people" who have no agency - many of whom are living on the edge of poverty- to give up what little that have (and which will never gain wide acceptance), a purely ideological or profit -motivated agenda, fucking around with ideas that are only acceptable to the top 0.1%

How about tackling REAL waste (like war?) What about remediating the environment? Making products that last a lifetime, or can be repaired, and stop advertising the "need" for "the latest", useless product?

Yanno, you could hand out a BILLION solar stoves, and it wouldn't mitigate one space joyride, so stop joyriding into space. Ban private jets. Stop pushing EVs (the latest fad) on people which a) won't work in extremely cold climates and b) may- or may not- be a net positive for the environment and c) would probably overload grid capacity anyway.

I noticed, SECOND, that you're all about stomping on great masses of powerless "insignificant" people but you really, really hate to cross the rich and powerful. How about empowering people so they can shape the world for THEIR needs, and their children's children's needs, and not the needs of VCs and speculators and creditors and the other PsTB that puppeteer the world?

Ya gotta be open-minded, SECOND. Consider all of your options. Tackle the big problems with big payoffs first. Be effective.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, September 26, 2023 12:17 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Majority Of Carbon Offset Projects Globally Are "Likely Junk"

Analysis found that 39, or 78%, of the 50 environmental projects were categorised as “likely junk or worthless” due to one or more “fundamental failing"

The “vast majority” of environmental projects most commonly used within the voluntary carbon market (VCM) to offset greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions seem to have “fundamental failings” and cannot be relied upon to tackle global warming, according to a joint investigation from the Guardian and non-profit climate watchdog Corporate Accountability.

The investigation analysed the top 50 emission offset projects, selected because they have sold the most carbon credits within the global VCM, and found that most of them exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate the potential harm caused by the project’s activity.

MORE AT
https://www.power-technology.com/news/report-majority-carbon-offsets-j
unk-or-useless
/.



This isn't the first, second, or third time I've posted something about the "carbon market". I knew it was bunk when I read a paper for work fifteen or more years ago that it was just a giant scam. And when I saw the technical difficulties the LA air pollution agency had in implementing their own credit trading market, with honesty and motivation, and the speculation and corruption it fostered (people trading credit futures, or buying up credits to corner the market) I knew at its core the whole "pollution credit" concept was a failure.

And you know who LIKES the 'market-based' concept?
BUSINESS and scam artists.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, September 26, 2023 11:39 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

EPA’s Illegal Power Play
The agency’s ambitious gambit to reorganize America’s electricity will almost certainly be struck down.
By Mario Loyola
September 24, 2023

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. EPA last year was a historic defeat for the Environmental Protection Agency. Not only did the Court rule that the 2015 Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature climate regulation, was unconstitutional; it also dramatically limited EPA’s power to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act (CAA) moving forward.

That left the agency with two courses of action. It could take its lumps and focus on proposing regulations with a high chance of surviving federal court review. Or it could stake everything on a final desperate attempt to decarbonize America’s power sector, and go for the win in keeping with President Biden’s commitment to net zero carbon emissions.

On May 23, 2023, EPA chose the latter, proposing carbon emissions standards for power plants far more ambitious than those struck down by the Supreme Court last year. Like other EPA climate regulations, the proposed emissions standards under Section 111 of CAA are not designed to reduce emissions from standard power plants, but rather to force a rapid transition away from reliable and affordable sources of dispatchable power—natural gas and coal—to intermittent renewables and new kinds of power plants that don’t even exist yet. Together with EPA’s electric vehicle mandates, the proposed rule would be a train wreck for the American electricity grid and society as a whole, endangering economic competitiveness and energy security while yielding no measurable climate benefit.

Those hoping for a dramatic finish to Biden’s climate action will not be disappointed: the proposal has so many legal vulnerabilities that it would be a miracle if the rule survives federal court review.

Under the proposed rule, which President Biden hopes to finalize by next summer, large new or modified natural gas plants and existing coal plants would be required to virtually eliminate carbon emissions by 2038, at the latest. Under Section 111(a) “New Source Performance Standards” (NSPS), large new or modified combined-cycle natural gas plants, which currently supply roughly 30% of the nation’s electricity, would be required to achieve close to zero carbon emissions, either by implementing carbon capture and storage (CCS) to capture 90% of carbon emissions by 2035, or by switching from natural gas to 98% “green” hydrogen co-firing by 2038. In addition, under Section 111(d) emissions guidelines, existing coal plants, which currently supply more than 20% of America’s electricity, would be required to virtually eliminate carbon emissions by implementing CCS by 2035.

Interestingly, EPA declined to promulgate NSPS for coal plants because, as it explains, there are no plans to build any new coal plants in the U.S. It declined to promulgate emissions guidelines for existing natural gas plants out of concern for feasibility. Even more interesting, when EPA sent the proposed rule to the White House for regulatory review under E.O. 12866, it contained no emissions guidelines for existing plants at all, and therefore would not have applied to coal plants at all. The White House reportedly sent it back to EPA with orders to put a Section 111(d) rule for existing coal plants in the proposal. This suggests that EPA itself is not very confident in the ability of the Section 111(d) rule to survive court review.

Section 111 of CAA, the same provision at issue in West Virginia v. EPA, authorizes EPA to mandate “the degree of emission limitation achievable through the application of the best system of emission reduction which (taking into account the cost of achieving such reduction and any nonair quality health and environmental impact and energy requirements) the Administrator determines has been adequately demonstrated.”

Section 111 sets a high bar, especially after West Virginia v. EPA. The proposed rule falls woefully short. It has at least three major legal vulnerabilities, any one of which would be sufficient for a court to strike the rule down.

First, neither CCS nor green hydrogen is anywhere near “adequately demonstrated” within the meaning of Section 111. Second, EPA has systematically ignored crucial costs and impacts that it is required to take into account in setting emissions standards under Section 111. Third, like the “best system of emission reduction” struck down in West Virginia v. EPA, the new rule would require sweeping regulatory action and infrastructure investments entirely outside the fence line of the regulated facilities, thereby raising the “major question” doctrine’s presumption against the agency’s interpretation of the law.

The Mandated Technologies Have Not Been “Adequately Demonstrated”

The linchpin of Section 111 of CAA is that the “best system of emission reduction” (BSER) must be an “adequately demonstrated” technology. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the principal venue for judicial review of agency action in the U.S., explicated the provision’s meaning. In Portland Cement v. Ruckelshaus (1973), for example, the D.C. Circuit wrote that in determining whether a technology is adequately demonstrated, “[t]he Administrator may make a projection based on existing technology, though that projection is subject to the restraints of reasonableness and cannot be based on ‘crystal ball’ inquiry.”

Subsequent decisions of the D.C. Circuit, particularly the ones that EPA relies on in the preamble to the proposed rule, have emphasized that BSER must be based on technology demonstrated at the scale and for the purpose for which it will be used by regulated entities to comply with the new standards. Unlike other provisions of CAA, Section 111 is not designed to force industry to develop new technologies. “[A] standard cannot both require adequately demonstrated technology and also be technology-forcing,” said the D.C. Circuit in NRDC v. Thomas (1986).

Contrary to the unambiguous pronouncements of the D.C. Circuit, EPA treats Section 111 as if it were a technology-forcing provision throughout the proposed rule. For example, EPA claims that CCS has been “adequately demonstrated” for natural gas plants based on small-scale demonstrations at coal plants. But the coal demonstrations cited involve only small slipstreams (carbon captured from a small percentage of the plant’s total emissions) for use in the food industry. Moreover, the coal plant demonstrations do not involve the sophisticated combined-cycle configurations of large natural gas plants—in which the exhaust from the primary combustion cycle is used to heat the steam generator of the second cycle—that the new standards focus on.

In the several hundred pages laying out the proposed rule, EPA provides just two examples of demonstrations at natural gas plants. One, at Bellingham, Massachusetts, captured only a 10% slipstream and closed in 2005 because it was not economical. That was a decade before the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, in which EPA correctly rejected CCS as inadequately demonstrated and too costly. The other, a project at Peterhead, Scotland, is still in planning and may not even be built. Neither can be used as the basis for an adequately demonstrated BSER.

Furthermore, EPA’s CCS mandate would require a massive buildout of carbon transport and storage infrastructure, which has not been adequately demonstrated and would require sweeping investments and regulatory changes by developers and government authorities unrelated to the entities subject to regulation under Section 111 of CAA. Like the measures “beyond the fence line” of regulated entities that were struck down in West Virginia v. EPA, this massive infrastructure buildout would be beyond the ability of EPA-regulated entities to implement.

Co-firing with low-carbon hydrogen is even further from being adequately demonstrated. Nearly all hydrogen today is produced using carbon-intensive methods. Indeed, electrolysis from renewable and nuclear power produces only trivial quantities, and EPA doesn’t even bother to estimate the cost, feasibility, or time it would take to build out the vast amount of new renewable and nuclear power capacity that would be needed to make the low-GHG hydrogen a practicable option for power plants.

In the meantime, no existing natural gas plant can co-fire anywhere near EPA’s proposed 96% hydrogen because hydrogen burns much hotter and faster, making current turbines unsuitable for most hydrogen feedstock. Indeed, EPA admits that hydrogen-capable turbines will require a major redesign of combined-cycle natural gas plant turbines, another way in which EPA’s BSER fails to meet the requirement of adequate demonstration. Even the intermediate standard of 30% co-firing, while tested on small industrials facilities, has not been demonstrated at utility scale.

Finally, EPA explicitly states that its hydrogen BSER is technology-forcing, but which, according to controlling precedent in the D.C. Circuit, is not “adequately demonstrated” by definition. Beyond the fence line of regulated facilities, EPA admits that hydrogen faces obstacles of infrastructure limitations, as well as inadequate storage and delivery. All this undermines the claim of adequate demonstration, not to mention the fact that such investments would be entirely beyond the competence of regulated entities.

The same D.C. Circuit cases that EPA relies on to explicate adequate demonstration clearly show that EPA has fallen well short of the minimum statutory standard. EPA alludes to “the D.C. Circuit’s view that EPA may determine a system of emission reduction to be adequately demonstrated if EPA reasonably projects that it will be available by a future date certain.” But the agency cites no case for that proposition, and a close reading of Sierra Club v. Costle(1981) shows that that is not the D.C. Circuit’s view.

In Sierra Club v. Costle, the D.C. Circuit indicated that dry scrubbing, which, at that time, was an emerging clean coal technology, was not adequately demonstrated because, as an “emerging technology,” there were “crucial issues such as … demonstration of commercial-scale systems, which may continue to limit the overall acceptability of this technology.” The court noted that “major uncertainty” existed with the technology “in the absence of experience at large-scale facilities” and that EPA could not extrapolate from smaller pilot-scale facilities. Just as in that case, EPA here admits that CCS and green hydrogen are emerging technologies. Its catalog of demonstrations at different scales, different sources, and different industries does not amount to much, since those scales, sources, and industries are not the ones it now seeks to regulate. What EPA’s own examples show is that considerable uncertainty remains with respect to the overall feasibility and acceptability of its proposed technologies.

The one case that EPA discusses in some detail is the per curiam opinion in Lignite Energy Council v. EPA. According to EPA, the court then held that technology could be “adequately demonstrated through a ‘reasonable extrapolation of performance in other industries.’ ’’ What EPA neglects to mention is the reason that the D.C. Circuit allowed such extrapolation in that case: namely, that the pollution sources in the other industry were similar in design, scale, and emissions profile to the sources that EPA had sought to regulate. By EPA’s own admission, that is not the case here.

In short, neither CCS nor “green” hydrogen co-firing meets the Section 111 legal standards of “adequately demonstrated” BSER.

EPA Has Ignored the Proposed Rule’s Costs, as well as Its Health, Environment, and Energy Impacts

In determining that a technology is “adequately demonstrated” under Section 111, EPA must take into account the costs of the rule, as well as the health, environment, and energy impacts of the rule. Courts have interpreted this as requiring that costs be reasonable. That poses a threshold problem for EPA’s proposed rule because EPA can point to no measurable environmental benefit that would result from compliance. EPA has based all its greenhouse gas regulations on the same original 2010 Endangerment Finding, which has serious problems of its own, as William Happer and Richard Lindzen note in their July 2023 comment letter to the proposed rule. It has not been demonstrated that the sources subject to the rule make a significant contribution to a condition of air pollution that endangers human health, and the finding mentions the 2021 Technical Support Document on Social Cost of Carbon only in connection with a regulatory impact analysis that is unrelated to the requirements of CAA. Under such circumstances, there is a threshold question of whether any significant costs could be reasonable.

There are other problems with EPA’s estimate of costs and impacts, too. First, its estimate of costs is highly speculative. The rule would affect a host of entities and government authorities across the whole society, the vast majority of them not subject to regulation under CAA, and EPA has little clue as to how they will adjust to the rule. If its cost estimates are off by any significant amount, regulated entities could well react by shuttering, rather than attempting to comply, which would create a situation of dangerous energy scarcity with skyrocketing prices. In parts of the country where fossil energy is restricted as a matter of policy, such as California, the electricity grid is on the verge of dangerous blackouts almost every evening in the summer. And those restrictions are modest, compared with those now contemplated by EPA.

EPA’s most egregious failure to properly account for costs is that it subtracts the amount of federal subsidies from the cost estimate, a nominal reduction of $369 billion based on CBO’s score. That figure will likely turn out to be much greater, given the subsidies’ lack of date-certain sunset.

EPA’s practice of reducing cost estimates under Section 111 by the amount of federal subsidies amounts to an accounting trick that vitiates the purpose for which cost considerations were included in the provision. To see why, consider an emissions standard that costs 10% of gross domestic product to achieve every year. Congress could pass a law subsidizing the entire cost of achieving the standard. By EPA’s logic, the cost of the standard would then be “zero,” even though the subsidy would actually cost more than $2 trillion every year, increasing the overall federal budget by half. To say that the costs of such a standard are “zero” would be tantamount to fraud on the public.

The practice certainly violates Section 111, a fact that EPA tries to cover up with what can only be described as an intentionally misleading characterization of congressional intent: “The legislative history of the [Inflation Reduction Act] makes clear that Congress was well aware that EPA may promulgate rulemaking under CAA Section 111 based on CCS and explicitly stated that EPA should consider the tax credit to reduce the costs of CCUS (i.e., CCS).” But the only “explicit statement” to that effect in the entire legislative history is a statement by a single congressman, Representative Frank Pallone (D–NJ). A statement by a single congressman simply cannot be attributed to Congress.

On the contrary, federal courts have consistently recognized that, in contrast to other provisions of CAA, “costs” in Section 111 mean all costs, direct and indirect, regardless of who ends up paying for them. EPA cites no legal basis for reducing the cost estimates under Section 111 by the amount of federal subsidies, which merely shift the costs of compliance from consumers in their guise as ratepayers to consumers in their guise as taxpayers. Given the clear statutory requirement to consider all costs, EPA’s invocation of congressional intent would be unavailing even if it were not misleading.

As for the impact on electricity prices, EPA estimates that the rule would lead to a price increase of 13%. That is almost certainly a woeful underestimate. In California, where a much milder form of renewable energy mandate has been in place for years, end-user electricity costs are twice the national average. The costs of compliance with the new rules could be far more exorbitant. As further explained below, CCS would reduce the power output of the relevant plants by at least 30%, while green hydrogen would likely be three to four times more expensive to produce and deliver as current demonstrations using natural gas.

The CCS infrastructure alone would require a massive buildout of at least 60,000 miles of pipelines and thousands of injection wells, according to the estimates in the Princeton Net Zero America study. The Congressional Research Service has noted that even small demonstrations of CCS have raised significant safety issues and triggered fierce local opposition. Similarly, the hydrogen BSER would require enormous amounts of new renewable energy capacity in order to produce the “green” hydrogen dreamed of in the rule, along with tens of thousands of miles of highly specialized pipelines for delivery to the power plants. Given the number of factors outside EPA’s expertise and jurisdiction that would determine how much time and money all that infrastructure would cost, EPA’s estimates are little more than conjecture.

While EPA discusses other proposed rules in its preamble, it curiously avoids all mention of several recently proposed vehicle emissions standards that would force two-thirds of all new vehicles produced in the U.S. to be electric by 2032. If implemented as proposed, those rules would shift most of the transportation sector’s energy requirements onto the electricity grid, at the same time as the power plant rule will almost certainly be significantly diminishing the overall capacity of the grid. If implemented simultaneously, the new vehicle and power plant rules would be a catastrophic train wreck for the nation’s electricity grid. Nonetheless, EPA appears to be totally unaware of the danger—another failure to meet the minimum requirements of a standard under Section 111.

The rule also ignores other impacts. It would force generation shifting from large baseload generators to simple-cycle intermediate and “peaker” plants, which are normally used to provide electricity during times of the day when demand is highly variable. Those plants get a pass under the proposed rule because, according to EPA, they are not compatible with CCS for engineering reasons, or with green hydrogen for cost reasons. Under the rule, it will be far cheaper for utilities to rely on intermediate and peaker generators and simply avoid the costly CCS and hydrogen co-firing requirements that will apply to baseload generators.

That is a major loophole in the rule, and one that could well result in more pollution of all kinds, including the toxic and other dangerous pollutants that CAA was originally designed to reduce. Intermediate and peaker plants are far less efficient than combined-cycle plants and, correspondingly, produce more emissions of all pollutants per unit of power output. Furthermore, carbon capture is an energy-intensive process that relies heavily on steam-generated power and reduces the electrical output of a power plant by as much 30%, which would also increase the emissions rate per unit of output. Yet EPA casually dismisses concerns about increased emissions of toxic and other dangerous pollutants.

The Power Plant Rule Raises the Same “Major Question” as in West Virginia v. EPA

In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court struck down a very similar attempt to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants under Section 111 of CAA—namely, Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The key issue there was whether EPA’s expansive definition of “best system of emission reduction” could be squared with the statute.

Section 111’s concept of BSER had always been interpreted to refer to technologies, such as scrubbers, that polluters could feasibly install within the facility to reduce emissions. But in the Clean Power Plan, EPA decided that BSER could extend “beyond the fence line” to the whole economy, encompassing utilities’ choice of power sources and other matters beyond EPA’s jurisdiction. Under this novel interpretation of Section 111, EPA was, in effect, claiming the power to reorganize a significant portion of the American economy.

The Court held that EPA’s interpretation raised a “major question” and that, in the absence of clear congressional authorization, the claimed power exceeded EPA’s statutory authority. The Court noted that EPA’s approach to BSER allowed it to set emissions standards at whatever level the agency wanted, regardless of whether any regulated entity could feasibly comply with the new standards. The Court noted that the Clean Power Plan would result “in numerical emissions ceilings so strict that no existing coal plant would have been able to achieve them without engaging in [generation-shifting].”

EPA’s new power plant rule relies on a similarly expansive definition of BSER to establish standards that can be met only by shifting generation away from fossil sources. The only way that regulated sources could comply with the rule would be if states or utilities (or other developers) would build a major interstate infrastructure for CCS and “green” hydrogen, including tens of thousands of miles of specialized pipelines, massive underground storage facilities for CO2, and large-scale facilities for the production and transport of hydrogen gas from renewable sources. Whether to develop such infrastructure is a decision totally beyond the control of regulated entities.

In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court held that EPA’s sudden discovery of a “transformative expansion” in its regulatory authority based on an obscure provision of a “long-extant statute” raised a “major question” about the agency’s authority, requiring Congress to speak with far greater clarity than it had in the statute. EPA’s expansive definition of BSER entailed impacts of great political significance and sought to regulate a significant portion of the American economy.

Just so, EPA’s new interpretation of its authority under Section 111 of CAA—departing from an almost infinitely elastic concept of both BSER and “adequately demonstrated”—presents a major question. The claimed power would regulate a significant portion of the American economy, entails political impact of great significance, and intrudes on matters that are the traditional domain of the states.

EPA’s Persistent Usurpation of Congressional Authority

EPA’s efforts to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other sources represent a dangerous overreach of executive power. Congress never authorized EPA to regulate greenhouse gases in this expansive manner. By trying to reorganize the country’s electricity-sector limits through executive fiat, rather than the legislative process, EPA is abusing its authority and circumventing democracy. Net zero climate policy raises novel issues that affect every American citizen in almost every aspect of modern life. Policy requiring such transformative change should be left to Congress.



https://realclearwire.com/articles/2023/09/24/epas_illegal_power_play_
981165.html



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, September 28, 2023 1:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


An update to a major climate report is a reality check on unproven carbon capture and hydrogen technologies.

By Justine Calma, Sep 26, 2023, 12:00 AM CDT

The biggest difference in this new report is that emerging technologies that have gotten a lot of hype as high-tech fixes to climate change now play a significantly smaller role than expected in 2021. Those technologies, which include hydrogen fuel cells for heavy vehicles and devices that filter CO2 emissions from smokestacks or ambient air, now account for 35 percent of emissions reductions rather than nearly 50 percent.

Why? They just haven’t lived up to the hype, the report says pretty plainly.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23889066/climate-change-internation
al-energy-agency-roadmap-hydrogen-carbon-capture


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, September 28, 2023 1:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Sea ice levels around Antarctica just registered a record low — and by a wide margin — as winter comes to a close, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

This year, Antarctica reached its annual maximum coverage on Sept. 10, about 13 days earlier than average. At that time, the annual ice coverage was at a record low of 6.55 million square miles — a whopping 398,000 square miles lower than the previous record low set in 1986.

“It is surprisingly low,” said Twila Moon, an ice scientist at NSIDC. “We have this extreme low minimum and there hasn’t been any ability to recover towards previous higher extents during the Antarctic fall and Antarctic winter. … We’re starting to see this year round influence.”

In a separate announcement on Monday, the NSIDC stated that Arctic sea ice extent at the end of this summer was at its sixth lowest in nearly 45 years of satellite records — extending the worrying trend that the last 17 years have had the lowest Arctic summer sea ice extents on record.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/09/25/antarcti
ca-record-low-ice-arctic-climate
/

National Snow and Ice Data Center
https://nsidc.org/home

Antarctic sets a record low maximum by wide margin
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2023/09/antarctic-sets-a-record-low
-maximum-by-wide-margin
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, September 28, 2023 3:17 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
An update to a major climate report is a reality check on unproven carbon capture and hydrogen technologies.

By Justine Calma, Sep 26, 2023, 12:00 AM CDT

The biggest difference in this new report is that emerging technologies that have gotten a lot of hype as high-tech fixes to climate change now play a significantly smaller role than expected in 2021. Those technologies, which include hydrogen fuel cells for heavy vehicles and devices that filter CO2 emissions from smokestacks or ambient air, now account for 35 percent of emissions reductions rather than nearly 50 percent.

Why? They just haven’t lived up to the hype, the report says pretty plainly.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23889066/climate-change-internation
al-energy-agency-roadmap-hydrogen-carbon-capture

Jeez, no shit, Sherlock.

That bar (percent of emissions reductions) is pretty low, and they can't even meet that.

A new technology has to go thru proof of concept to bench scale to pilot plant scale to mayber bigger pilot plant scale to industrial scale. It's like putting all your money on fusion when they haven't even gotten past the teeny-tiny smidgen of extra energy SO small that they're still calculating (a month later) to make sure they didn't screw up the measurements or calculations and to determine HOW much energy they produced.

I shake my head in wonderment at the great fuckup/ slush fund that this has become.

Do you want to reduce CO2 emissions right away, proveably? Then switch elecricty production from coal and oil/gasoline to natgas. Et voila! Instant reduction!

Cut the DoD budget. Instant reduction!

How about repairing our rail lines so freight can move quickly, safely, and energy-efficiently. Can do with today's technology!

Solar, but only in the sunshine states. Instant reduction!

Rehabbing homes to be more energy efficient, hazard resistant, and easier to repair or remodel?

Designing and manufacturung products to last longer ane be more repairable?

Stop joyriding in space. Can do right away. Instant reduction!

Impose a 45 mpg highway mileage (or CO2 per mile, if comparing fuels) on all new vehicles, except utility vehicles. Can do right away, and a lot cheaper than EV. Instant reduction!

Cement from fly ash. Can do right away. Instant reduction!

As for the rest (storing carbon in soil, better ranching practices, reforestation, urban cooling, and new technologies)... well, you have to set up test plots and measurements or bench scale and pilot plants. You have to do pretty good estimation of life-cycle saving, making sure you're not emitting more CO2 during the mfr and recycling of this new product v the old. (For example Lego just did the calculation and realized they would be emitting more CO2 using recycled plastic than virgin.)

For example, cover cropping and green manure show the biggest capacity to store carbon on carbon-poor soils. You would have to show that better forestry practices (hand thinning, in-situ black soil creation etc) does meaningfully reduces emissions from forest fires. That EV and carbon capture technologies don't emit more than their current counterparts.

It's a technical problem as well as an economic one, and won't be solved with magical thinking and ideology.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, September 28, 2023 3:55 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Sweden’s Northvolt picks Quebec for new multibillion-dollar EV battery factory
Nicolas Van Praet, Jeffrey Jones

Northvolt AB, a supplier of electric-vehicle batteries to Volkswagen and BMW, has picked Quebec to host a new multibillion-dollar factory as the Swedish manufacturer pushes into North America.

Executives with the Stockholm-based company will join political leaders from the Quebec and federal governments for a formal announcement Thursday in Montreal to detail their plans, according to two sources briefed on the event. The Globe and Mail is not naming the people because they were not authorized to discuss the information.

Northvolt has been scouting sites in North America for an EV battery cell production facility, and chose Saint-Basile-le-Grand in the Richelieu Valley for its project, which is valued at an estimated $7-billion. The factory’s main site would be on land formerly occupied by Canadian Industries Ltd., a maker of chemicals and explosives.

Quebec is trying to make the province a hub for EV battery development, and it is luring companies with its low-carbon hydroelectricity and financial backing in tandem with the federal government. Premier François Legault and his cabinet colleagues have characterized the effort as a new industrial revolution, with capital investment sums the province hasn’t seen since Hydro-Québec undertook major dam projects in the 1950s and 1960s.

“This is big,” Quebec Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon told Radio-Canada earlier this month. Northvolt’s project would be the largest private-sector investment ever made in Quebec, he said. He did not specify the sum being invested.

Quebec has been vying for the plant as Canada seeks to compete with a U.S. clean-tech industry that has been turbocharged over the past year by incentives that are part of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. That legislation includes US$369-billion in funding for green energy and related technology, as well as EVs and energy efficiency measures. Ottawa and provincial governments have responded with billions of dollars in public funding to lure battery makers and suppliers into building plants in Quebec and Ontario.

The federal and Ontario governments announced a deal in April to provide Volkswagen with up to $13.2-billion in subsidies for production support after the company builds a battery plant in St. Thomas, Ont. In June, Stellantis NV and LG Energy Solution Ltd. reached a deal with those governments for as much as $15-billion in subsidies to restart construction on their EV battery factory in Windsor, Ont.

In Quebec, General Motors Co. is partnering with South Korean battery material maker Posco Chemical Co. Ltd. on a new cathode factory in Bécancour, Que. And Ford Motor Co. announced last month that it’s working with South Korea’s EcoProBM and SK On Co. Ltd. on a $1.2-billion plant that would produce EV battery materials in that same city, backed by $644-million in public funding.

Quebec’s decision to open the taps for battery companies is not universally supported. At a lunch event last week with the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, National Bank chief executive Laurent Ferreira said he’s “not a big fan” of using subsidies to attract foreign enterprise to Canada when the country could prioritize support for local business instead.

“When we give subsidies to foreign companies, they go directly into the pockets of foreign shareholders who are mainly not Canadian,” Mr. Ferreira told Radio-Canada when asked to expand on his earlier comments. “I have my doubts about this model over the long run in terms of wealth creation.”

Northvolt currently produces batteries for transport and energy storage at a gigafactory in northern Sweden. It emphasizes sustainable production, with the plant powered by emissions-free electricity. It has set a goal to achieve 150 gigawatt hours of annual production capacity by 2030, with a focus on keeping a small carbon footprint through regional sourcing of materials and recycling.

The company secured new investments from three Canadian pension funds last month, which joined U.S. asset manager BlackRock Inc. in a US$1.2-billion financing. The transaction saw the Investment Management Corp. of Ontario (IMCO), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, along with BlackRock, enlarge a convertible debt program to US$2.3-billion.

Northvolt’s ownership group includes Volkswagen AG, BMW and Goldman Sachs, and the company is reportedly considering an initial public offering. It has signed US$55-billion in supply deals with such European companies as Volkswagen, BMW, Fluence Energy, Scania AB, Volvo Cars and Polestar.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-swedens-northvolt-pic
ks-quebec-for-new-multi-billion-dollar-ev-battery
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, September 28, 2023 4:16 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Yep, there's a lot of $$$ to be made in EV. China has gone big in EV production. Half of Tesla's cars are made in a gigafactory in China, and China has a lot of other makes/models being built, from EV Smart-car-like models for $3000 to luxury models.

It's just The Next Big Investment to replace that real estate/ stock bubble, infrastructure and Road and Belt initiative bubble, and the Walmart market but it may - or may not - save the environment.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, September 30, 2023 2:51 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yep, there's a lot of $$$ to be made in EV. China has gone big in EV production. Half of Tesla's cars are made in a gigafactory in China, and China has a lot of other makes/models being built, from EV Smart-car-like models for $3000 to luxury models.

It's just The Next Big Investment to replace that real estate/ stock bubble, infrastructure and Road and Belt initiative bubble, and the Walmart market but it may - or may not - save the environment.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

$$$ to be made, yes. But EV is very dirty, pollution-wise. China is the world's largest coal burning engine, no?

eFuel really does sound like the solution - if you care about the environment. Mass transit busses, the legacy type, all with zero emissions, can lead the way. And it is actually possible, and proven so, unlike all of these Libtard ideas.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, September 30, 2023 4:10 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yep, there's a lot of $$$ to be made in EV. China has gone big in EV production. Half of Tesla's cars are made in a gigafactory in China, and China has a lot of other makes/models being built, from EV Smart-car-like models for $3000 to luxury models.
It's just The Next Big Investment to replace that real estate/ stock bubble, infrastructure and Road and Belt initiative bubble, and the Walmart market but it may - or may not - save the environment.

JSF: $$$ to be made, yes. But EV is very dirty, pollution-wise. China is the world's largest coal burning engine, no?

And rare earth mining and extraction is a horror show.

Quote:

From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge.

Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.


(follow the link)
https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p02n9y28.webp

Quote:

JSF: eFuel really does sound like the solution - if you care about the environment. Mass transit busses, the legacy type, all with zero emissions, can lead the way. And it is actually possible, and proven so, unlike all of these Libtard ideas.


JSF, as you know I looked into eFuel, and the problem with it is there are only a few places on earth where it can be made from windpower. Production will be limited. There won't be enough to power the whole world.

*****

I've come to think that there are two fundamental flaws how people think about solving climate change, somewhat related

1) A breakthrough technology will save us, and
2) There will be a single, brilliant fix.

So some people ride the EV hobby-horse. Or the carbon-capture hobby-horse. Some people thump fusion or thorium reactors. Other people pin their hopes on eFuel, or wind power, or solar, or tidal power.

Looking for that breakthrough technology to invest in/ save us is venture-capitalist thinking, but it's not focused on solving the problem.

Many of these technologies don't even exist yet. Of those that do, their lifetime benefit may not have been demonstrated.

So, while I'm all for continued research... after all, our family personally benefits from high-efficiency 20% conversion solar panels (which finally got the the point of generating more electricity than consumed during manufacture) it took decades- literally- to get to that point. (I once field-tested an early Arco pilot plant for test-mfring solar panels, and that was all the way back in 1970. We had our solar panels installed almost 50 years later.)

In other words, don't expect a Big Breakthrough any time soon.

There are a number of things we can do with the technology that we have today, and conservation is one of them. So here are some facts:

Once space joyride emits more GHGs that the poorest billion people emit in a whole year.

The DoD is that largest single institutional user of fuel in the whole world, and that doesn't even count emissions from its manufacturing

Air travel is wasteful, and private jets are PARTICULARLY wasteful. It's been estimated that private jets emit almost FIVE TIMES as much GHGs per passenger than commercial jets.
https://www.bbc.com/news/59135899

One bad fire year in CA undid eighteen years of CA decarbonzation.

*****

Instead of expecting some brilliant new technology to save us, or expecting all of the burden of lowering living standards to fall on Typical America, why don't we start with the largest and most wasteful sectors/ people? (Yanno, that whole "eat bugs" thing? TPTB... they're not about to eat bugs, are they?)

I can think of -literally- hundreds of things we should be doing, right now, from restoring our rail lines and cutting DoD spending to banning private jets, better forestry and agricultural practices, cool roof/solar installations, and better mileage from our new vehicles.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, September 30, 2023 4:36 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yep, there's a lot of $$$ to be made in EV. China has gone big in EV production. Half of Tesla's cars are made in a gigafactory in China, and China has a lot of other makes/models being built, from EV Smart-car-like models for $3000 to luxury models.
It's just The Next Big Investment to replace that real estate/ stock bubble, infrastructure and Road and Belt initiative bubble, and the Walmart market but it may - or may not - save the environment.

JSF: $$$ to be made, yes. But EV is very dirty, pollution-wise. China is the world's largest coal burning engine, no?

And rare earth mining and extraction is a horror show.
Quote:

From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge.

Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.


(follow the link)
https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p02n9y28.webp
Quote:

JSF: eFuel really does sound like the solution - if you care about the environment. Mass transit busses, the legacy type, all with zero emissions, can lead the way. And it is actually possible, and proven so, unlike all of these Libtard ideas.


JSF, as you know I looked into eFuel, and the problem with it is there are only a few places on earth where it can be made from windpower. Production will be limited. There won't be enough to power the whole world.

Production IS limited.
This is proof of concept, and practice.
Once any new technology, or breakthrough, occurs, many efforts are focused upon greater efficiency of that process. Greater productivity, greater production. If there is no shortage of wind there, we can use more of it to make more.
With government regulations and goals to eliminate emissions, gobs of government $$ can be thrown at this avenue, with known and proven results, instead of wasting on Libtard dreams.
Single solution? No.
Using the blending which can be done, eFuel can be used in every nation on earth, right away.
Do I care if Chile gets all of the money, just for the land to build the processing plants? No. More power to them.
Unless, of course, they run out of CO2 around there.

While China and India are racing to pollute the environment as quickly as possible, eFuel could be the premier solution for the nations which pretend to be climate-conscious.

EV as environmentally friendly is a fallacy.

eFuel is not a fallacy, despite it's current limitations.

Solar taking 50 years to break even might be a pipe dream, for current demands. Solar really should have had greater gains in efficiency by now.

Concepts like having a nuke facility in some remote location, just to produce eFuel, might be worth looking into - better than coal burning in metro areas.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, September 30, 2023 5:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


My guess is that poduction will ALWAYS be limited.

eFuel is very energy- -intensive, and its benefit comes from the fact that it is produced using "green" energy. In this case, wind power from the winds that relentlessly circle the globe in the belt from the southern tip of S America to the Antarctic.

There are very few places ON EARTH where you can squeeze out so many KW per hour from the wind, or equivalent green energy. Probably hydroelectric power, but that has its own set of problems.

Eventually they might reduce the energy required to react these compounds into fuel, but the thermodynamics is that the amount of energy that needed to create a compound is ALWAYS greater than the amount of energy that you eventually release by burning it. It's just physics and arithmetic.

I accept that eFuel is one approach, but given the energy required to make it, I still think it'll be limited. If there's research reveals sufficient locations with suitable energy density and capacity, then ... great!



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, September 30, 2023 11:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Let's just say it. Everybody who put solar panels on their roofs in the last 25 years has some serious regrets.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, September 30, 2023 11:21 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Let's just say it. Everybody who put solar panels on their roofs in the last 25 years has some serious regrets.
--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

We did, and no, we don't.

We get a "pass thru" bill each month from SCE for taxes, fees, grid maintenance etc (but not electricity generation) of about $12-$17/mo depending on usage. Our generation bill is totaled up at the end of our contract year... net electricity drawn from the grid... and our bill has averaged close to $0 over the past 5 years.

At the time we purchased our panels, I calculated the payback period to be somewhere in the realm of 6.5 years; after that, it's all gravy. Since rates have gone up hugely since installation, the payback period is probably in the realm of 5 years; in other words, the system has paid for itself by now.

I can understand regretting if you haven't done your financial homework, intend to install in an area without enough sunshine, haven't sized your system properly, don't understand the contract, don't choose the right panels etc but for us it's worked out fabulously. I recommend it to all my neighbors because they could all benefit.

And,while you're a smart guy, SIX, you sometimes reach incredibly boneheaded conclusions based on feelings and ideology instead of reality.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, October 1, 2023 1:11 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You're in California. I meant in America.

How much is it per kWh there again?


How much was the install?


No leaky roof yet? No big panel repair bills yet?

The semi-regular hail storms we get in these parts would thrash those panels, not to mention the 45" of snow that turned into ice that was on everybody's roof about 3 winters ago.

Plus there's trees everywhere. Even with the two I cut down I have 300 foot tall sycamores all along the houses across the street blocking the light from hitting my roof.


They say it costs about $15,000 to $25,000 to install a solar panel roof. It would take about 22 to 30 years for me to break even on that, long after the panels were busted and jacked my roof up more than it already is... assuming that we don't all end up paying $3 per kWh after EVs are all over the road.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, October 1, 2023 1:29 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're in California. I meant in America.


Oh, yeah, cute SIX.
Fuck off.

Quote:

How much is it per kWh there again?
Frankly, I don't know. I'm not paying anymore, so it doesn't concern me.


Quote:

How much was the install?

Cheap enough at the then-prevailing rates to make sense.

Quote:

No leaky roof yet? No big panel repair bills yet?

No. I went with a long-established company with a good rep that (BTW) hires veterans. And no panel repairs... these panels are physically more durable than most, solid copper across the back, wired in parallel so a leaf falling across a cell doesn't bonk the entire panel, and each panel with its own inverter.

There's only one problem with them: They won't operate off-grid. You need a voltage across them in order to create electricity, and if the grid fails, there goes the solar panel! We're looking into a backup. Battery is way too expensive to make sense, but a small generator is all we'd need to get the solar panels up and running again in the AM.

Quote:

The semi-regular hail storms we get in these parts would thrash those panels, not to mention the 45" of snow that turned into ice that was on everybody's roof about 3 winters ago.


Oh, jeez, give me a fucking break, SUX. I wouldn't recommend solar panels for anyone under those conditions.

You know how I posted there was no one, single, magical technology? That a variety of approaches are necessary? Well, solar panels are one solution for one area, but not for everyone. I think you're just jealous that we can make electricity from sunshine and you can't.


For people in your situation I'd recommend great insulation and efficient heating and AC. My sis's furnace heat exchanger is SO efficient, the exhaust gas is too cold to make it all the way to the roof. They have to vent thru a hole on the first floor, and their gas bills are SUPER cheap.



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, October 1, 2023 3:46 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I looked it up. It's still under 20 cents per kWh in California. That's not too much more than mine at 13.75 cents per kWh.

How much power are you using in a month to break even in less than 6 years?

My highest month this year with A/C running nearly 24/7 was only 580 kWh, and I always have 8 LED lights on 24/7. I'm not exactly sparing with my electricity usage like I am with my gas usage. That was $79.75, not including the BS service charges that are around $30-$35 per month even if you didn't use any electricity and that they'd still charge if I had solar power.

It creeps up a bit during winter when the blower for the furnace is on, but nothing like summer time. 6 months out of the year I'm using less than 250-300 kWh.

You must be 1,500 to 2,000 kWh per month or more or something.


I'm not jealous that solar doesn't work out here. Even if my neighbors cut all their trees down and global warming made it so that it never snowed here again, I probably wouldn't even live long enough to break even if I installed solar panels.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, October 1, 2023 6:24 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I looked it up. It's still under 20 cents per kWh in California. That's not too much more than mine at 13.75 cents per kWh.

I think it depends. We don't have a flat rate. We don't even have tiered rates (i.e. over a certain KWh your rate goes up.) We have what is called Time of Use... the highest rates are between 1600 and 2000, right when solar panels basically stop working and home use goes up as people get home, turn on the AC, start cooking etc. So SCE has got it figured how to collect the most $$, even from people with solar panels.

Quote:

How much power are you using in a month to break even in less than 6 years?

Again, I don't know. I'd have to look it up bc right.mow it's gotten to a certain "lifestyle". I could more easily tell you our water use over 2 months (12-25 CCF) thsn electricity.

Quote:

My highest month this year with A/C running nearly 24/7 was only 580 kWh, and I always have 8 LED lights on 24/7. I'm not exactly sparing with my electricity usage like I am with my gas usage. That was $79.75, not including the BS service charges that are around $30-$35 per month even if you didn't use any electricity and that they'd still charge if I had solar power.

It creeps up a bit during winter when the blower for the furnace is on, but nothing like summer time. 6 months out of the year I'm using less than 250-300 kWh.

You must be 1,500 to 2,000 kWh per month or more or something.

Like I said, I'd have to check. We keep our A/C about 77 during the day but drop it to 73@ night. But we cool it down only in the back bedrooms, bc even tho we have central AC, our house is "zoned" that allows us to control temp in 3 different areeas. One zone we almost never turn on.

Also, we have elecric range and oven, that's the way the house came. But when our oven died in a shower of sparks, I replaced it with a more- efficient convection oven, and when our range started zapping me when I touched it, we replaced it with an induction range.

Quote:

I'm not jealous that solar doesn't work out here. Even if my neighbors cut all their trees down and global warming made it so that it never snowed here again, I probably wouldn't even live long enough to break even if I installed solar panels.
You might not. Everybody's use, rate, climate, solar roof space etc is different. But here, where summers are hot and sunshine is bright, I can't understand why anyone would NOT go solar.

Apparently there are horror stories about people getting $2000 bills at the end of the contract year for which they're not prepared bc their systems are small. OTOH they've probably saved $200-300/ month and if they had set some of that savings aside instead of hemorrhaging every single $ from their account, they would recognize that they had actually saved money.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, October 2, 2023 1:41 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I just can't imagine the phrase "saving $200-$300 per month" on electricity.

I went for years without any A/C, but now that I have one that cools my whole house until it's almost uncomfortably chilly unless it's been in the mid to high 90's for more than 4 or 5 days straight, I've never had a power bill during the summer that was more than $175... and that includes my gas.

My typical electric portion of the bill 6 months out of the year is less than $70-$80. I can't imagine I've ever even had a single month where the electric portion was over $130, and if it even got that high it's only a once in every 3 or 4 year occurrence.



Plus you get a bunch of dipshits installing them half the time. Your roof is not made for harvesting solar power. It's made for keeping the house dry and mold-free. Unless things are different in California (which they may be), this isn't union work with well-paid people who are headed by veterans. They cut corners and do shoddy jobs, damaging your roof in the process and then doing whatever they can to not take the blame after the fact.

The only way I'd ever consider solar power on my property is in my back yard, on the ground. And the price would have to come down a LOT before I'd think about it. As it stands now, even if I were to set the entire system up myself and avoid paying somebody else to hook up the system it is just prohibitively expensive and wouldn't ever pay for itself before the panels were damaged or just stopped working right.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, October 2, 2023 1:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SIX, you seem determined to argue against putting solar panels on your roof, and I've posted over and over again that I would never recommend them for anyone in your climate.

So can you please drop that argument, and accept the fact that it's worked out very well for us, but it wouldn't for you?


*****

FWIW I looked at our usage. Unfortunately the bill only shows NET usage, not solar-generated + SCE generated. I'd have to calculate the average panel KWh and add it back in, but FWIW we used a net 450 KWh during mid-Aug to mid-Sept, which happens to be the hottest time of the year. During the winter, our "usage" is negative - i.e. we generate more than we use. That's where we make our $$.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, October 5, 2023 7:53 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Pope Francis lambasts climate change skeptics and ‘irresponsible’ Western lifestyles | October 4, 2023

Pope Francis has made his strongest statement yet on the accelerating climate crisis, pinning blame on big industries and world leaders as well as “irresponsible” Western lifestyles, in a blistering statement on Wednesday.

“Our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” the pontiff wrote in a 7,000 word encyclical called Laudate Deum (“Praise God”). https://www.humandevelopment.va/en/news/2023/laudate-deum-apostolic-ex
hortation-of-pope-francis.html


“Some effects of the climate crisis are already irreversible, at least for several hundred years, such as the increase in the global temperature of the oceans, their acidification and the decrease of oxygen,” he wrote.

The pope leveled heavy criticism at climate change deniers and delayers.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident.
No one can ignore the fact that in recent years we have witnessed extreme weather phenomena, frequent periods of unusual heat, drought and other cries of protest,” he wrote.

Climate change will likely only get worse and ignoring it will heighten “the probability of extreme phenomena that are increasingly frequent and intense,” he wrote.

The pope paid particular attention to the disproportionate responsibility of rich countries for climate change.

“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he wrote.

He also leveled blame at leaders and businesses which he said prioritize short-term profits and gains over climate action. “Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time.”

He even directed criticism at his own church, referring to “certain dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions that I encounter, even within the Catholic Church.”

The pope’s statement is a follow-up to his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si (“Praised Be To You”), which was the first ever ponitifcal writing completely dedicated to ecological issues, which have been a cornerstone of his papacy.

It comes ahead of the UN COP28 climate conference, which starts at the end of November in Dubai, where countries will undergo “global stocktake” to assess how quickly they are progressing towards climate goals.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/04/world/pope-francis-climate-change-encyc
lical-intl/index.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, October 5, 2023 9:12 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Pope Francis lambasts climate change skeptics and ‘irresponsible’ Western lifestyles
Does that include private jets, mega-mansions, ginormous yachts, joyrides in space, and war?

Bc if it doesn't, he's a hypocrite.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, October 5, 2023 10:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Pope Francis.

Unless you're an altar boy. He'd enjoy that.



Quote:

Pope Francis has made his strongest statement yet on the accelerating climate crisis, pinning blame on big industries and world leaders as well as “irresponsible” Western lifestyles, in a blistering statement on Wednesday.


Meanwhile, in reality...

Here's the Pope's house:


https://i.ibb.co/dJNTj9H/Interior-Sistine-Chapel-Vatican-City.webp


What was your heating bill last year, huh Frank?

I don't want to hear one more fucking word out of you about irresponsible lifestyles.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, October 5, 2023 11:29 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Pope Francis.

I don't want to hear one more fucking word out of you about irresponsible lifestyles.

6ix, your words reveal your inner self as do the Pope's words:

23. It is chilling to realize that the capacities expanded by technology have given those with the knowledge and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used. In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it.

Rethinking our use of power

24. Not every increase in power represents progress for humanity. We need only think of the “admirable” technologies that were employed to decimate populations, drop atomic bombs and annihilate ethnic groups. There were historical moments where our admiration at progress blinded us to the horror of its consequences. But that risk is always present because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience. We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and a spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint. It is not strange that so great a power in such hands is capable of destroying life, while the mentality proper to the technocratic paradigm blinds us and does not permit us to see this extremely grave problem of present-day humanity.

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documen
ts/20231004-laudate-deum.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, October 6, 2023 12:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Pope Francis.

I don't want to hear one more fucking word out of you about irresponsible lifestyles.

6ix, your words reveal your inner self as do the Pope's words:

23. It is chilling to realize that the capacities expanded by technology have given those with the knowledge and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used. In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it.

Rethinking our use of power

24. Not every increase in power represents progress for humanity. We need only think of the “admirable” technologies that were employed to decimate populations, drop atomic bombs and annihilate ethnic groups. There were historical moments where our admiration at progress blinded us to the horror of its consequences. But that risk is always present because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience. We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and a spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint. It is not strange that so great a power in such hands is capable of destroying life, while the mentality proper to the technocratic paradigm blinds us and does not permit us to see this extremely grave problem of present-day humanity.

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documen
ts/20231004-laudate-deum.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




Oh! Are you offended that I would dare talk about the Pope like that?

Go tell tell him your thoughts on abortion and see what your new savior thinks about you.


Fuck Pope Frank and fuck you too.


Here's some revealing words for you, cunt.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65116

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, October 6, 2023 7:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh! Are you offended that I would dare talk about the Pope like that?

Go tell tell him your thoughts on abortion and see what your new savior thinks about you.


Fuck Pope Frank and fuck you too.

You also called the Pope a pedophile.

6ix, you have always been a dirtbag, but every Trumptard I know is the same, although some hide what they are, unlike you. But when I dig, the filthiness of their souls are there, even for the most ostentatiously religious Trumptard. Your people are blind to the powerful connection between what they are inside their heads and the troubles they have in the outside world. And so they turn to Trump as Mein Führer, the man who will set right their life. "Trump will be fine. And he will be your next President." Put on that bumper sticker so the world will know you are a Nazi.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, October 8, 2023 7:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Al Gore Doesn’t Say I Told You So

The former Vice-President revisits his early advocacy for the environment and explains his optimism about two existential crises.

By David Remnick, October 6, 2023

Gore: The climate crisis is really a fossil-fuel crisis. There are other components of it, for sure, but eighty per cent of it is the burning of fossil fuels. And scientists now know—and this is a relatively new finding, a very firm understanding—that, once we stop net additions to the overburden of greenhouse gases, once we reach so-called net zero, then temperatures on Earth will stop going up almost immediately. The lag time is as little as three to five years. They used to think that temperatures would keep on worsening because of positive-feedback loops—and some things, tragically, will. The melting of the ice, for example, will continue, though we can moderate the pace of that; the extinction crisis will continue without other major changes. But we can stop temperatures from going up almost immediately, and that’s the switch we need to flip. And then, if we can stay at true net zero, half of all human-caused greenhouse-gas pollution will fall out of the atmosphere in twenty-five to thirty years. So we can start the long and slow healing process almost immediately, if we act.

Q: What’s required?

We have to find a way to shift out of our dependence on fossil fuels: coal, oil, and gas. And, of course, the fossil-fuel industry, and the financial institutions that have grown codependent on them—

Q: The banks—

The banks and the other large lenders, and associated industries, have, for more than a hundred years, built up a legacy network of political and economic influence. Shockingly, they have managed to convert their economic power into political power with lobbying, and campaign contributions, and the revolving-door phenomenon—where fossil-fuel executives go into the government.

I mean, the last President of the United States made the C.E.O. of ExxonMobil the Secretary of State. It’s almost hard to believe, but that is a symbol of how fossil-fuel companies have penetrated governments around the world. When ExxonMobil or Chevron puts its ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, “Oh, let’s go down to the store and buy some motor oil.” The purpose is to condition the political space so that they have a continued license to keep producing and selling more and more fossil fuels.

Q: Well, you’re not only an evangelist for climate change; you also are a politician, a seasoned politician.

I’m a recovering politician.

Q: You’re looking better already. Tell me, why is it impossible for politicians to run on this successfully? What are the barriers preventing a day-to-day politician, on the state or national level, from making this an effective electoral cause?

The polluters have gained a high degree of control over the processes of self-government. I’ve often said that, in order to solve the crisis, we have to pay a lot of attention to the democracy crisis. Our representative democracy is not working very well. We have a dual hegemonic ideology called democratic capitalism, and the democracy part of our ideology has been cannibalized, to some extent, by economic actors, who have found ways to convert wealth into political influence. Wealth has always had its usefulness in the political sphere, but much more so in an era in which the candidate who raises the most money, and can buy the most media presence, almost always wins the election. And there’s been kind of evolutionary pressure as to people who go into politics: people who don’t want to put up with that kind of routine shy away from it now. Those who like it are more likely to run and get elected.

Q: Yet another climate summit is coming up, this time in the Middle East. It seems odd who is leading it. How do you feel about that?

Yeah, it’s absurd. This year, the annual United Nations Climate Conference is in the United Arab Emirates, and they have named the head of their national oil company, Sultan al-Jaber, as the president of the conference. I think it’s—

Q: [Laughs.] What does that portend?

Well, I think that it takes off a disguise that has masked the reality for quite some time. It’s absurd to put the C.E.O. of one of the largest and, by many measures, least responsible oil and gas companies in the world in charge of the climate conference. At last year’s conference, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the delegates from oil and gas companies outnumbered the combined delegations of the ten most climate-affected nations. The year before, in Glasgow, the fossil-fuel delegates outnumbered the largest national delegation. They have dominated this U.N. process the same way they’ve dominated so many state governments in the U.S., and the national government much of the time.

It goes back to the weakness of the United Nations as an institution. It has been that way since its creation. It’s the best we’ve got, so we have to make the best of it. COP1, the first of these annual conferences, took place three years after the Earth Summit, in Berlin. The young environment minister of Germany, Angela Merkel, was the president of COP1. The first order of business was to adopt the rules, including for how the world was going to make decisions. The default procedure was something called consensus, which is the same as unanimity, unless the president of the COP recognizes someone who is trying to object.

And so the petrostates—and in effect the fossil-fuel industry—have had a veto over anything the world community tried to do on fossil fuels.


Well, the old cliché “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt” should be joined by “Despair ain’t just a tire in the trunk.” Despair is just another form of climate denial. We don’t have time for it. The stakes are so high. . . .

Just look at the climate migrants. There are many examples of this already. People from Central America coming through Mexico to the southern border of the U.S.—that’s driven by climate. You’ve got Viktor Orbán, and you’ve got ultranationalism rising in so many places. The Lancet Commission, which is widely respected, says that in this century we may have one billion climate migrants crossing international borders. That could threaten our capacity for self-governance.

So we have to act. We have no choice, really. There are obstacles to move out of the way. It’s not fair, perhaps, to ask the fossil-fuel companies to solve this crisis. They’re incentivized to keep on burning more fossil fuels. But it is fair to ask them to stop disrupting and blocking the efforts of everyone else to solve it.

More at https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/al-gore-doesnt-say-i-told-you-s
o


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, October 8, 2023 10:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck off, Al.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, October 9, 2023 3:55 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


The reason why politicians haven't been able to sell "net zero" is because there is no practical substitute for fossil fuels. Yeah, we can cut waste and substitute green energy for a portion. But in order to get to net zero, the elites want to cut everyone else's living standard drastically. And nobody wants some fat cat to be telling THEM to suck it up and do without ... not while the fat cat gets all the cream.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, October 20, 2023 7:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The reason why politicians haven't been able to sell "net zero" is because there is no practical substitute for fossil fuels. Yeah, we can cut waste and substitute green energy for a portion. But in order to get to net zero, the elites want to cut everyone else's living standard drastically. And nobody wants some fat cat to be telling THEM to suck it up and do without ... not while the fat cat gets all the cream.

There are plenty of substitutes for fossil fuels, but people want cheap fuel, not green energy. The reality is that fossil fuels are far cheaper to make than Green energy. To make it really easy to understand, imagine a world powered only by burning wood -- the perfect Green fuel. No petroleum. No natural gas. And no coal because it was buried too deep. The Fat Cats that own all the forests become fabulously rich selling firewood. Assume that the Fat Cats can think ahead and realize that they need to replant the trees sold for firewood. That is kind of a big assumption because so many rich people don't actually think more than a decade ahead, but trees take decades longer to grow.

Suddenly this world fueled by the perfect renewable green fuel, firewood, is totally turned upside down by strip-mined coal. There will be no more waiting for trees to slowly grow. Instead, as much coal as the world wants is being dug out of the ground and sold. Going from Firewood World to Coal World will make a totally different group of rich people. It is also guaranteed to ruin the world once enough coal has been burnt. We are now living in something very much like Coal World because coal is cheaper than wood in Firewood World. Other fossil fuels even cheaper than coal are now available. In every imaginable world, coal will always be cheaper than wood, the perfect renewable green fuel.

The Science of a Wood-Burning Locomotive



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, October 20, 2023 7:53 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


October 19, 2023 - The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced the snow crab harvest season was canceled for the second year in a row.

Billions of snow crabs have disappeared from the ocean around Alaska in recent years, and scientists know why: Warmer ocean temperatures caused them to starve to death.

Snow crabs are cold-water species and found overwhelmingly in areas where water temperatures are below 2 degrees Celsius, though they can function in waters up to 12 degrees Celsius, according to the study. Warmer ocean water likely wreaked havoc on the crabs’ metabolism and increased their caloric needs.

The amount of energy crabs needed from food in 2018 — the first year of a two-year marine heat wave in the region — may have been as much as quadrupled compared to the previous year, researchers found. But with the heat disrupting much of the Bering Sea’s food web, snow crabs had a hard time foraging for food and weren’t able to keep up with the caloric demand.

Normally, there is a temperature barrier in the ocean that prevents species like Pacific cod from reaching the crabs’ extremely cold habitat. But during the heat wave, the Pacific cod were able to go to these warmer-than-usual waters and ate a portion of what was left of the crab population.

“2018 and 2019 were an extreme anomaly in sea ice in the Bering Sea, something that we’d never seen before,” Szuwalski said. “There was maybe 4% of the coverage of ice that we’ve historically seen, and to know whether or not that’s going to continue going forward is hard to say.”

What’s happening with Alaska’s crabs is proof the climate crisis is rapidly accelerating and impacting livelihoods, Szuwalski said. He knew this was going to happen at some point, but he “didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/us/alaska-crabs-ocean-heat-climate/inde
x.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, October 20, 2023 10:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The reason why politicians haven't been able to sell "net zero" is because there is no practical substitute for fossil fuels. Yeah, we can cut waste and substitute green energy for a portion. But in order to get to net zero, the elites want to cut everyone else's living standard drastically. And nobody wants some fat cat to be telling THEM to suck it up and do without ... not while the fat cat gets all the cream.



You can't even bother trying to talk reason with a simpleminded cultist.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, October 24, 2023 6:13 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Airlines say they’ve found a route to climate-friendly flying

Aviation produces about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. If you add in the heat-trapping effects of water vapor in contrails and other pollutants, air travel accounts for about 4 percent of the warming across the planet induced by humans to date. It may seem like a small slice of the climate change problem, but if left unchecked, aviation’s carbon dioxide emissions are poised to double by 2050. “The biggest problem is that demand is rising,” said Gökçin Çinar, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. Even as aircraft grow more fuel-efficient per passenger, more flyers will lead to more greenhouse gases.

However, decarbonizing aircraft is a huge technical challenge. To get a 400,000-pound airliner off the ground, up to 35,000 feet, and across an ocean, you need to squeeze an enormous amount of energy into a tiny space at the lowest weight possible. This trait is called specific energy, which is measured in watt-hours per kilogram or megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion batteries top out around 300 watt-hours per kilogram. Jet fuel has a specific energy around 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. And as an airplane burns fuel, it gets lighter, increasing its efficiency and range, whereas a dead battery weighs just as much as a live one. Swapping a gasoline engine for an electric motor in a car is trivial in comparison.

More at https://www.vox.com/climate/23922939/airline-united-climate-change-sus
tainable-fuel-emissions-offset-saf


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, October 24, 2023 8:49 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Airlines say they’ve found a route to climate-friendly flying


NO, NOT REALLY. The article continues...

Quote:

However, demand [for air travel] is high and supplies are minuscule, making SAF [sustainable aviation fuel] upward of four times as expensive as conventional fuel. For most airlines, fuel is already their biggest or second-biggest expense.

So airlines are stuck in a holding pattern where their cheapest and easiest option for decarbonization doesn’t really work while their best bet is still wildly expensive. The consulting firm McKinsey estimated that decarbonizing aviation would require $175 billion in investments each year until 2050, almost $5 trillion in total. At the same time, demand for flights is poised to climb, and the window for keeping warming in check across the planet is sliding shut. Companies are also bracing for more emissions regulations as governments turn their attention to the climate impacts of aviation.

Air travel is thus one of the most difficult climate change problems, and some airlines are candid that they don’t quite know how to land at net zero. “We do not have the solutions we need at scale in a commercial capacity to really change the way we fly without focused, concerted engagement by the industry to demand a different way of flying,” said Lauren Riley, United’s chief sustainability officer. “Our emissions will go up before they go down.”

At the same time, the DoD is also looking at SAF, leading to increased demand for a scarce fuel. Flying will NEVER be net zero. The DoD won't be either.
Just eliminate private jets, make flying way more expensive, and cut the DoD budget.

Quote:

That’s why they’re trying out a suite of tactics across both incremental and breakthrough advances. But technology alone won’t clean up the skies; it will also take pressure from policymakers and passengers to get to the destination of net-zero.

...

There are some important caveats to SAF. “It is not ‘zero emissions’ but ‘net-zero emissions’ when you look at the life cycle,” Çinar said. “It’s still the same combustion process.” Burning SAF produces carbon dioxide, as well many of the same pollutants as conventional fuels like nitrogen oxides and soot.

The carbon accounting can also get tricky. It takes energy to refine, process, and transport SAF. If that energy comes from burning fossil fuels, SAF will lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. And if you clear wilderness to plant BIOFUEL CROPS* to make SAF, that also increases its carbon footprint. Nevertheless, the overall climate impact is still far smaller than conventional fuels.


* They've already tried this trick with gasoline-ethanol blend, and all it did was lead to more corn growing in overfertilized fields and nitrogen runoff (and algae blooms). And if 'they' (in the EU) think that manure-spreading causes too much N2O emissions, just wait until people start throwing fertilizer everywhere on everything.

Quote:

Greenhouse gas emissions from global production and use of nitrogen synthetic fertilisers in agriculture

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18773-w

This article is what I call it 'greenwashing'. There's no way to make air travel (or war-making) climate friendly, and they're both unnecessary expenses. Yeah, I know the airlines and the MIC just want to keep on making money, but these are two sectors that should shrivel. The associated companies should find another way to make $$.



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, October 24, 2023 9:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

This article is what I call it 'greenwashing'. There's no way to make air travel (or war-making) climate friendly, and they're both unnecessary expenses. Yeah, I know the airlines and the MIC just want to keep on making money, but these are two sectors that should shrivel. The associated companies should find another way to make $$.

Why not just ban all flights, except on dirigibles with solar-powered motors? Even hot air balloons are banned because of propane-fueled flame.

While we're banning, no more engines on ships. Instead, only sailboats. One exception: wood-burning paddle boats are allowed, but not coal-burning. And bring back the steam engine locomotive burning wood, not coal.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, October 24, 2023 9:32 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Second's just fine with wasting energy if you're rich or it's in the name of war.

It's candles for you though, and you'll eat bugs and like it.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, October 24, 2023 11:00 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Second's just fine with wasting energy if you're rich or it's in the name of war.

It's candles for you though, and you'll eat bugs and like it.

Speaking to the cause of war: Confederate slave owners worried about not having slaves to pick cotton, but somehow the descendants of Confederates got along without slaves. Now they feel threatened enough to start another war because of their worries about not having gasoline for their cars, but somehow the descendants of the descendants will get along without gasoline (the kind of gasoline made from crude oil).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, October 30, 2023 5:57 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics

By Christopher Ketcham | Oct 29, 2023
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/

William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people. This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting — is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.

His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”

Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”

In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,” with consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen, a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his colleagues that 2 C was a critical marker. At 2 C warming, we could “activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.

But the path to hothouse Earth will be long and tortured. When I interviewed him in 2021, Steffen, who died last January at age 75, was concerned about “near-term collapse” of the global food system. Drought and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10 percent in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5 C of global heating. … Such shocks pose grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation, and death.”

In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” 11 leading Earth systems and climate scientists, Steffen among them, concluded there is “ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic … at even modest levels of warming.” According to the report:

Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. … It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this article.

According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 C and 3.9 C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3 C to 4 C warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight decades or less.

Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say. Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.

By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”

In an email to The Intercept, Nordhaus characterized his colleagues’ critiques as “a distorted and inaccurate description of the work and my views. I have long supported carbon pricing and climate-focused [research and development], which are key to slowing climate change. The proposals in my writings have pointed to targets that are FAR more ambitious than current policies.” He declined to elaborate on any distortions or inaccuracies.

To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth. The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”

Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows “households” and “firms” exchanging money and goods. This is called the market. Households are the owners of land, labor, and capital, which they sell to firms for the manufacture of goods. Households then buy the goods, enriching firms, which allows the firms to buy more land, labor, and capital, enriching households. The quantity in the flow diagram, in ideal circumstances, is ever expanding: The profits of firms grow and so does the income of households.

A simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous, fantastical, a fairy tale. In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, or natural gas, no minerals and metals, no water, soil, or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, no pollution, no greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, there is no ecosphere, no environment. The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

“I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years,” the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year. “I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm.”

In the 1970s, working at the University of Maryland, Daly pioneered the field of ecological economics, which models the biophysical reality that delimits all economies. “The human economy,” wrote Daly, “is a fully contained wholly dependent growing subsystem of the non-growing ecosphere” — a commonsense observation that amounted to heresy in mainstream economics. Daly emphasized that the economy depends on nonrenewable resources that are always subject to depletion and a functioning biosphere whose limits need to be respected. His most important contribution to the literature of this renegade economics was his famous (in some circles, infamous) “steady state” model that accounts for biophysical limits to growth. Daly paid the price of heterodoxy. His fellow economists declared him an apostate.

E.F. Schumacher arrived at similar conclusions about mainstream economics in his 1973 book “Small Is Beautiful,” which became a bestseller. “It is inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on the natural world,” Schumacher wrote, the emphasis his. Economics, said Schumacher, only touches the “surface of society.” It has no capacity to probe the depths of the systemic interactions between civilization and the planet. Faced with the “pressing problems of the times” — the negative environmental effects of growth — economics acts “as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things.”

Purely quantitative analysis is the amphetamine of the mainstream economist. The steady dosing keeps his pencil sharp and his eyes blind. It has not gone unnoticed that graduate schools produce a kind of ingenious hollowness in economists who race to the finish on the schools’ assembly line. As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.

By what mathemagical sorcery has Nordhaus, celebrated member of the Ivy League elite, arrived at projections that are so out of line with those of climate scientists?

The answer is in something called DICE, the mother of integrated assessment models for climate costing. It stands for dynamic integrated climate-economy. Nordhaus formulated DICE for the first time in 1992 and updated it most recently last year.

In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss (or gain) in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be “exogenously determined,” in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks. Earth systems scientists will tell you that to assume exogenously determined growth is the height of hubristic arrogance. By contrast, Nordhaus assures us in his DICE model that growth continues like a cruising Cadillac on the California coast with an occasional pothole. But the reality is rainstorms, mudslides, earthquakes, and other drivers on the road.

This blithe presumption of constant growth in a climate-damaged future is the first of Nordhaus’s errors, as Stern and Stiglitz point out. “Nordhaus’s model doesn’t fully take into account the fact that if we don’t do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth rates,” they told me in an email. “We will have to spend more and more repairing damage, leaving us less and less to spend on growth-enhancing investments.” And, they add, some outcomes arising from weak climate action could profoundly alter what is possible in terms of economic activity. Extreme heat, submergence, desertification, hurricanes, and so on: Such weather events and broad climatic shifts could render large areas of the world low productivity, unproductive, or uninhabitable.

The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes. Among the properties of a quadratic is that it permits no discontinuities; there are no points at which the relationship implied by the function breaks down. But smooth functions chart smooth progressions, and climate change will be anything but smooth. Such calculations do not account for extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration, international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality, biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages. There’s no measurement of amplifying feedbacks and tipping points such as Arctic sea ice loss, shutdown of vital ocean currents, collapse of the Amazon, and the like.

The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023 it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same as London’s today. Make of this what you will — it’s foolishness on a grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model.

The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate. Nordhaus’s list of the indoor activities free of any effects from climate disruption include manufacturing, mining, transportation, communication, finance, insurance, real estate, trade, private sector services, and government services. Nordhaus appears to be conflating weather with climate. The one can make trouble for outdoor dining plans on your yacht. The other sinks the yacht.

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.

This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “It shows how little quality control goes into selecting a winner in economics that he was even nominated for the prize,” Steve Keen, a research fellow at University College London and self-described renegade economist, told me. Keen has authored numerous books that question the orthodoxy of mainstream economics. He was an early critic of the integrated assessment models at the IPCC that owe their optimistic sheen to Nordhaus’s methodology. His caustic 2021 essay, “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change,” delved into the problems of Nordhausian models.

“When it comes to climate, the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

“Any investigative journalist who overcame a fear of equations and simply read Nordhaus’s texts would have known that his work was nonsense,” Keen told me. “Assuming that 87 percent of the economy would be ‘negligibly affected by climate change’ because it takes place in ‘carefully controlled environments’?”

“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

And it’s not just Nordhaus. Climate economists have followed dutifully in his footsteps and come up with cost models that appear to have no relationship with known laws of physics, the dynamics of climate, or the complexities of Earth systems.

A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff of University of California, Berkeley; Francisco Estrada of the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam; and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer of the paper.) The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy.

Over the last several thousand years, the AMOC, also known as the thermohaline circulation, has functioned to keep Europe relatively warm in winter because of the warm water it draws northward from the equator. The slowing and eventual shutdown of this system could plunge Europe and broad parts of the Northern Hemisphere into extreme cold. Such a shutdown is a growing likelihood as glacial melt pours into the North Atlantic and alters the delicate balance of salt water and fresh water that drives the looping current.

For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level.

Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes, coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic, especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”

It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.

“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in terrible trouble.

An uncharitable view of the work of climate economists in the Nordhaus school is that they offer a kind of sociopathy as policy prescription. Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the world into a nexus of unknowns.

Nothing to worry about, assures Nordhaus: The violent extinction of low-GDP nations will hardly affect the outlook for economic growth because things will improve in the cold Global North. This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

Do governments, policymakers, and the public have any clue that the message from climate economist elites is unhinged? So far, we have followed along in the belief that all is well. One of the better indicators of this lemming-like fealty to a narrative of delusory optimism is in the financial sector.

Keen authored a report for investors this year in which he noted that pension funds have swallowed whole the Nordhausian projections of our sunny future as the climate system collapses. “Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3 C will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios,” Keen wrote. “This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.” Keen does not expect things to end well for investors.

When I asked him what needed to be done to alter policy at the IPCC, Keen replied, “We need everyone to be as angry as I am.” Negligence by economists like Nordhaus, he said, “will end up killing billions of people.”

Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul then, and it has not gotten better since.

“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius, climate-idiot models.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, October 30, 2023 4:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Second's just fine with wasting energy if you're rich or it's in the name of war.

It's candles for you though, and you'll eat bugs and like it.

Speaking to the cause of war: Confederate slave owners worried about not having slaves to pick cotton, but somehow the descendants of Confederates got along without slaves. Now they feel threatened enough to start another war because of their worries about not having gasoline for their cars, but somehow the descendants of the descendants will get along without gasoline (the kind of gasoline made from crude oil).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly



God, that's your THIRD favorite topic, innit??? Can you POSSIBLY stick to the topic w/o mentioning Russia, Trump, or the Confederacy???


UNLIKE YOU, I happen to think climate change- and environmental degradation in general- is a REAL issue, not to be muddied with pointless virtue-sigalling, fundamentally conflicted rhetoric, and emotional hobby-horses.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, November 12, 2023 7:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Climate Change Policy Contradictions

Countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things. A report released by the United Nations and several climate organizations this week found that governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned.
https://productiongap.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PGR2023_web.pdf

In total, countries that hold the world’s oil, gas, and coal deposits still plan to produce 69 percent more fossil fuels than is compatible with keeping warming under 2 degrees Celsius, the riskier cousin to the 1.5-degree-Celsius goal each of those countries pledged to aim for. Many experts now consider that goal impossible, because of global reluctance to phase out fossil fuels. One expert who worked on the UN report called this “insanity,” a “climate disaster of our own making.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/08/insanity-petrostat
es-planning-huge-expansion-of-fossil-fuels-says-un-report


The scientist James Hansen, famous for his early warnings about climate change, suggested in a paper released last week with a suite of high-level colleagues that warming is accelerating more rapidly than is presently understood: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree-Celsius in the 2020s.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgad008

The report sets out starkly the fundamental conflict driving the climate crisis: fossil fuel burning must rapidly be cut down to zero, yet petrostates and companies intend to keep on making trillions of dollars a year by increasing production.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/revealed-oil-secto
rs-staggering-profits-last-50-years


In the places still extracting and using the most fossil fuels, like the U.S., leaders aren't yet paying a political price for promoting clean energy and pursuing climate action while simultaneously promoting and pursuing policies that have the exact opposite ends. But at some point, that internal contradiction must become so obvious to the average citizen, or so untenable in the face of the damage it has done, that one way or another it collapses. And only when it does will the world have a real chance at closing off the widening gyre of loss that is coming for us.

Oddly enough, the difference between the world we have and the one we could have is buried in two contrasting modeling reports by two of the world’s most important energy-information organizations. Whereas the International Energy Agency projected that we’d hit peak fossil-fuel use in 2030, the U.S. Energy Information Administration came to a very different conclusion: It saw demand for fossil fuels rising through at least 2050.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/narrative/index.php?=all-open

The difference between the two agency’s models is how they treat government policy. “It’s important to understand we are modeling exactly what’s on the books as it is written,” Michelle Bowman, a senior renewables analyst at the U.S. EIA, told me. If a policy is set to expire, the U.S. EIA treats it as expiring. It doesn’t take into account policies that countries have talked about but have had yet to implement. The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/11/climate-change-pol
icies-contradictions/675967
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, November 12, 2023 10:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Climate Change Policy Contradictions

Countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things. A report released by the United Nations and several climate organizations this week found that governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned.
https://productiongap.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/PGR2023_web.pdf



It turns out that we don't have any viable alternatives to the sources we've been using and people are only willing to pay much higher prices for things like these when the economy is good.

Who could have seen any of this coming?



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, November 12, 2023 10:41 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

It turns out that we don't have any viable alternatives to the sources we've been using and people are only willing to pay much higher prices for things like these when the economy is good.

Who could have seen any of this coming?

People like you base everything on price. They would only stop burning fossil fuels if stopping is cheaper than continuing to burn. Burning up the World? They don't care because it is all a hoax as they have been told many times by the people who sell fossil fuel and by Trump. They don't care about anything beyond price and that is why, ironically, they struggle and strain to have enough money. From my decades of experience with such people, they will never be able to make the connection between their enduring difficulties in life and their self-sabotaging ideas about how to live.

It is the "nothing matters" attitude of Trumptards. To them, global warming and the rising tide of authoritarianism are nothing. Loss and misery are just inevitable parts of existence, so why do anything? Instead, buy the cheapest energy since nothing matters.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 8:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Texas Board of Education opposes depiction of climate change, evolution in new science textbooks

By Edward McKinley, Austin Bureau | Nov. 14, 2023 6:42 p.m.

The Republican-led State Board of Education preliminarily rejected several new science textbooks on Tuesday over their presentation of climate change and evolution, a sign the books may be watered down before a final vote later this week.

Publishers were allowed until Wednesday to make changes that address criticism from board members, such as altering the depiction of the oil and gas industry.

“(The book) emphasizes the negative effect of fossil fuels. If that's what's presented to our children, that would have a negative effect on our state’s GDP,” board member Julie Pickren, R-Pearland, said about one of the textbooks. “It is factually inaccurate to the way that the negative effects of fossil fuels are presented because it is stated as fact and it is theory.”

Pickren said the book should include information about the harms of Chinese lithium mines, which are part of the supply chain for electric vehicles, to balance out the information highlighting fossil fuels' impact on global warming.

In discussions over another book by the publisher Edusmart, Member Aaron Kinsey, R-Midland, said he felt its photos “are encouraging a negative view” of the oil and gas industry.

“The selection of certain images can make things appear worse than they are and I believe there was bias,” said Kinsey, whose district encompasses the state’s most active oil and gas fields. He declined to answer when asked several times by another member what changes he would suggest to address his concerns.

“You want to see children smiling in oil fields?,” said Aicha Davis, D-Dallas. “I don’t know what you want.”

More at https://www.expressnews.com/politics/article/climate-change-textbooks-
18491484.php


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, November 17, 2023 6:34 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory

This report is part of our series of concise and easily accessible yearly updates on the state of the climate crisis.

Climate-related all-time records

In 2023, we witnessed an extraordinary series of climate-related records being broken around the world. The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected (Armstrong McKay et al. 2022, Ripple et al. 2023). This year, exceptional heat waves have swept across the world, leading to record high temperatures. The oceans have been historically warm, with global and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures both breaking records and unprecedented low levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica (figure 1a–1d). In addition, June through August of this year was the warmest period ever recorded, and in early July, we witnessed Earth's highest global daily average surface temperature ever measured, possibly the warmest temperature on Earth over the past 100,000 years (figure 1e). It is a sign that we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.

. . .

Conclusions

The effects of global warming are progressively more severe, and possibilities such as a worldwide societal breakdown are feasible and dangerously underexplored (Kemp et al. 2022). By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change (Lenton et al. 2023). Big problems need big solutions. . . .

More at https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci
/biad080/7319571?login=false


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, November 17, 2023 6:51 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

It turns out that we don't have any viable alternatives to the sources we've been using and people are only willing to pay much higher prices for things like these when the economy is good.

Who could have seen any of this coming?

People like you base everything on price. They would only stop burning fossil fuels if stopping is cheaper than continuing to burn. Burning up the World? They don't care because it is all a hoax as they have been told many times by the people who sell fossil fuel and by Trump. They don't care about anything beyond price and that is why, ironically, they struggle and strain to have enough money. From my decades of experience with such people, they will never be able to make the connection between their enduring difficulties in life and their self-sabotaging ideas about how to live.

It is the "nothing matters" attitude of Trumptards. To them, global warming and the rising tide of authoritarianism are nothing. Loss and misery are just inevitable parts of existence, so why do anything? Instead, buy the cheapest energy since nothing matters.



Do you have a brain defect or something, son?

I'm going to be working on my house again today. I haven't had a job since summer of 2019 and even in Biden*'s economy I'm not worried about money.

Have fun at work today so you can pay off all your interest, honey.



--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

YOUR OPTIONS

NEW POSTS TODAY

USERPOST DATE
SECOND 10.31 14:25

OTHER TOPICS

DISCUSSIONS
A.I Artificial Intelligence AI
Thu, October 31, 2024 19:16 - 237 posts
Kamala Harris for President
Thu, October 31, 2024 19:06 - 592 posts
How do you like my garbage truck?
Thu, October 31, 2024 18:49 - 2 posts
Trump on Joe Rogan: Full Podcast
Thu, October 31, 2024 18:05 - 7 posts
Israeli War
Thu, October 31, 2024 18:04 - 62 posts
In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Thu, October 31, 2024 17:58 - 4657 posts
Elections; 2024
Thu, October 31, 2024 17:45 - 4425 posts
Spooky Music Weird Horror Songs...Tis ...the Season...... to be---CREEPY !
Thu, October 31, 2024 16:19 - 56 posts
Sentencing Thread
Thu, October 31, 2024 15:11 - 381 posts
human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
Thu, October 31, 2024 14:25 - 921 posts
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Thu, October 31, 2024 13:46 - 7408 posts
No matter what happens...
Wed, October 30, 2024 23:43 - 21 posts

FFF.NET SOCIAL