REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

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Sunday, November 24, 2024 4:58 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
SIX:
One to three years to get the energy payback. A lifetime to get any financial payback. And you fucked up your roof with an expensive system that needs a lot of regular maintenance. Good luck in hail storms. You'll need it.


I would never advocate that YOU get solar. You don't get enough sunshine, your electricity rates are too low, and you're subject to damaging storms.

But I did my homework, pencil- whipped the numbers, and went solar. Why? Because I estimated our payback period - the time it takes to recoup the cost, after which it's all gravy - as 6.5 years. And since our rates went up about four years after install, the payback period got even shorter. Over the past 7 years since installation, we paid a grand total of about $1000 for electricity generation. $12 a month. I advocate solar to ALL my neighbors, and I'm no dummy.

AFA "expensive maintenance" .... that's the one thing in this older home that HASN'T cost us a crapton of $$$. I paid $150 for panel washing. And there's no roof damage.

You're just being a Karen now.


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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Sunday, November 24, 2024 5:06 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Just to make sure my point doesn't get lost.
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you'll never convince people that there's a problem if the "solutions" you advocate are too expensive for the average family, and always seem to mean the poor get poorer and the rich, richer.


If people see the wealthy sacrificing, they're more likely to credit the idea of climate change. But as long as they see "prescriptions" coming from on high, from conferences where the fabulously wealthy take their private jets, and tell everyone else how the vast majority must sacrifice... well, that's not gonna get very far.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Sunday, November 24, 2024 6:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SIX:
One to three years to get the energy payback. A lifetime to get any financial payback. And you fucked up your roof with an expensive system that needs a lot of regular maintenance. Good luck in hail storms. You'll need it.


I would never advocate that YOU get solar. You don't get enough sunshine, your electricity rates are too low, and you're subject to damaging storms.

But I did my homework, pencil- whipped the numbers, and went solar. Why? Because I estimated our payback period - the time it takes to recoup the cost, after which it's all gravy - as 6.5 years. And since our rates went up about four years after install, the payback period got even shorter. Over the past 7 years since installation, we paid a grand total of about $1000 for electricity generation. $12 a month. I advocate solar to ALL my neighbors, and I'm no dummy.

AFA "expensive maintenance" .... that's the one thing in this older home that HASN'T cost us a crapton of $$$. I paid $150 for panel washing. And there's no roof damage.

You're just being a Karen now.




I'm not being a Karen. This house already has tons of problems I've had to deal with that most homeowners have never had to think about in their lives. The last thing I need is to make a bunch of holes to bolt a bunch of glass panels into my roof where we get hail at least 4 times per year. Sometimes the size of golf balls.


How much did your setup cost? How much do you figure you're saving every month?

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

Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.

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Monday, November 25, 2024 4:35 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


IIRC about $19,000. But since there was a $3,000 tax rebate, $16,000. Since our AVERAGE bill was about $190/month (and no, we aren't profligate energy- wasters. But we do have electric range and convection oven, which is what the house came with.) Since we had it sized to generate our average KWH, we're saving our entire electric bill. So our payback period was estimated to be $190/mo * 12 mo/yr * 7 years = $15,960.

Since then rates have gone up, so, in a sense, we're saving more $ than I originallyb estimated. And, yanno, we did all those energy saving things too, ahead of time. When our house needed a new roof, lo these many years ago, I picked a "cool roof" and made sure they put enuf insulation in the attic. When we had to replace the central A/C I got a zoned system with the best SEER availavle at the time. Over the years, we replaced our single pane, steel frame windows with high efficiency double pane. When it came to replacing our range I picked an induction range

Solar turned out to be the best home improvement I ever made.

Now, just to give you an idea where I personally draw the line ... I wasn't so interested in window replacement. It's a lot of $ for very little return. I would never, ever, spring $52,000 for a heat pump/ AC, which is recommended for our climate. But when it comes to re-roofing, I'd pick a cool roof all over again, since the extra cost is marginal but it saves $$.

It has to make household financial sense and have a reasonably short payback period.


*****

Before anyone thinks of solar, the first thing the solar engineers look at is your AVERAGE BILL. And before plunking $ down, people should check to see if doing something less expendive will save significant $.


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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, November 25, 2024 4:45 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


That's why I get irritated when the uber-elites, swanning around the world from conference to conference in their private jets, start making pronouncements that "we" need to sacrifice.

When I see those m-fuckers SERIOUSLY cut back on their privileged lifestyles, THEN I'll know they're serious about climate change/ poverty/ democracy, or whatever cause they're wringing their hands over.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, November 25, 2024 6:25 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:
SECOND, you'll never convince people that there's a problem if the "solutions" you advocate are too expensive for the average family, and always seem to mean the poor get poorer and the rich, richer.
Firemen put out fires. Even if you are poor. Now imagine if it was an optional service, where each person could decide not to pay. Poorer people decide that having fire department is too expensive for them so when their house burns, it burns to the ground because the poor didn't pay the subscription fire department.

We going to have a whole world burning because almost everybody decided it was too expensive to have a fire department. Oh well. Too bad. But think of all the money saved, at least until the fire consumes your house with you burning inside, too! Most likely, you will deny that is a possible future so that you don't have to pay in all the years before the fire starts. And, Signym, you can virtuously complain about those greedy firemen being highly paid to do a job that you will never need because fire can't burn you since you are a special person.

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

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Monday, November 25, 2024 8:58 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


You make the stupidest analogies, SECOND. Is it really like that inside your head?

Imagine that you have a group of people who go around talking about fires, and then telling other people they have to pay the firestarters not to set fires.

That's not a firefighting service. It's not even fire insurance. It's a protection racket.





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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, November 26, 2024 5:23 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Climate change mitigation.

California may ultimately get more rainfall due to climate change, but climate change may cause infrequent but severe rainfall and melt the snowpack - long term water storage- earlier.

Hence, the mighty beaver!
SNIP!
Quote:
California to Reintroduce Beavers to Help Manage Water Resources.
"Beavers expand and even form a wealth of water-rich habitats including wetlands, riparian areas, and meadows. Their contributions to the natural world range from recharging groundwater and reconnecting streams with floodplains to providing fire breaks and refuges for species during drought"

https://mavensnotebook.com/2023/05/03/feature-california-taps-beavers-
to-restore-watersheds/

So, a creative low-cost action that both mitigates climate change effects (better long term water management) and helps prevent it (limiting the range of forest fires).

Also, a demonstration that biodiversity is like a game of Jenga ... start removing species and you may initiate changes, for good or ill.



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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, December 3, 2024 6:09 AM

SECOND

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


We need reality-based energy policy

By Matthew Yglesias | Dec 2, 2024

https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-need-reality-based-energy-policy

Climate issues have, to an extent, fallen out of the post-election discourse, probably because they didn’t play a large explicit role in the 2024 presidential campaign.

That’s fair enough. But they did play an extremely large role in Joe Biden’s presidency.

The Democratic Party trifecta of 2021-2022 put a lot of money into a lot of different things. But most of that was either deliberately structured as temporary pandemic relief or else written with built-in sunsets to reduce the cost (like the health insurance subsidies that are scheduled to expire next year) because it’s easier to extend a temporary program than to create one from scratch. But the easiest task of all is to avert the repeal of a permanent program, and the big thing that the trifecta made permanent was climate-related spending in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Which is just to say that climate was at the center of Democrats’ policy agenda, and it’s worth discussing both the decision to center it and also, given its centrality, whether the policy is being pursued in a reasonable way.

This receives less discussion than I think it deserves, because climate issues are less controversial among left-of-center intellectuals than things like trans rights or anti-Israel protests on campus. But way more people are directly, and tangibly impacted by energy policy than by Title IX rules governing school sports.

And I’m dwelling on the importance of this topic because while I think the adjustment Democrats need to make is relatively modest, I don’t want to suggest that the adjustment is unimportant. Small errors on a huge topic are a big deal, and even though the Biden-Harris administration mostly landed in a sensible place on this, they flirted with a lot of bad ideas along the way.

The guiding principle I included in my manifesto was, “Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.”

This is to say, we should take environmental problems seriously. A real fact of the modern economy is that individuals and companies will, if we let them, generate more pollution than is socially desirable. This is bad. We need rules and policies to prevent it from happening. But we should prioritize anti-pollution measures that do, in fact, actually make people better off, rather than an arbitrary grab-bag of measures.

I found out last week that over on BlueSky (follow me!), I’m on a prominent blocklist for climate “deniers and trolls.”

I will cop to trolling on occasion. But this is not the first time I’ve been called a climate denier, so I really do want to say clearly:

• Carbon dioxide emissions are causing a wanning effect on our planet.
• The consequences of this are negative—to the extent possible, we should push for less climate change rather than more.

The only reason denialism ends up entering the picture is that a significant group of people have described climate change as posing an extinction-level threat to humanity or, at a minimum, likely causing the collapse of civilization. And these aren’t just fringe actors. In 2023, Joe Biden said, “I’ve seen firsthand what the reports made clear: the devastating toll of climate change and its existential threat to all of us. And it is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change.”

This is not true, it’s pretty clearly not consistent with the Biden administration’s actual policies, and I don’t think Democrats should run around saying it.

Of course, the fact that something won’t result in the extinction of our species does not mean that it isn’t a serious problem. But the distinction here is important. If the planet were in the path of an asteroid that stood a large chance of wiping out civilization, you'd be willing to do crazy, extreme things — even if your actions got hundreds of millions of people killed — to stop it. If the asteroid were smaller and risked wiping out a whole city, that would still be catastrophic, but the range of tradeoffs under reasonable consideration would be quite different. You're not an “asteroid denialist” if you insist on estimating the harms correctly; it's actually very important to distinguish between different degrees of badness to make policy decisions that make sense.

Reducing global warming at the margin could be an especially big win for low-income tropical countries like Nigeria and Bangladesh. But the status quo in these countries isn’t great, and I don’t think we should tackle climate change in a way that makes them much poorer. And we shouldn’t rule out opportunities for these countries to get dramatically richer.

The whole climate problem would be much easier to solve if China didn’t have so much economic growth over the past generation.

But the world would not be better off on the whole if that were the case. And it would be good if Benin could become as rich as China, even at the cost of higher carbon dioxide emissions. Climate change is bad. But it’s not the only bad thing in the world. We should mitigate it with measures that make things better, not “by any means necessary.”

The upshot of this is that it’s important to identify policy measures that have relatively low costs associated with their adoption and implementation, and relatively large benefits in the form of emissions reduction.

In a kind of idealized wonk technocrat space, we’d have a global estimate of the social cost of carbon, and then every country would simultaneously set a carbon price exactly equal to the global social cost of carbon. That new pricing framework could then become the baseline for climate policy, and the revenue raised by the carbon price could be used for things like high-value investments in research and innovation. And then you’re off to the races.

The real world is obviously a lot messier than that.

There will always be plenty of room to disagree about the exact impact of policies and the exact value of emissions reductions. But the idealized technocratic solution is still something to keep in mind. Even actions that are purely regulatory, like tailpipe emissions standards or regulations on power plants, still require cost-benefit analysis.

Where things get tricky is that because climate change is a global problem, the benefits to the world of Americans switching to electric cars are quite a bit larger than the benefits to Americans of Americans switching to electric cars. It would be great if every single American took a totally beneficent attitude toward the world and was happy to make large economic sacrifices on behalf of people in other countries. We give to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund and do an annual fundraiser for Give Directly (more on this tomorrow!) precisely because we believe the interests of the poorest people in the world count. But one reason we do that with our personal charity is that in political terms, it’s hard to convince a democracy to prioritize the interests of foreigners.

A politically viable regulatory framework will inevitably fall far short of the idealized approach. This means there’s probably more value than Democrats generally realize in ideas like carbon tariffs that could alter the international bargaining environment.

But most of all, it means that by far the biggest levers available are those that operate through the innovation channel. If US public policy leads to breakthroughs in areas like small modular reactors, geothermal power, battery technology, carbon removal, or low-carbon manufacturing processes, that has a large impact on the long-term global picture because those technologies would be widely adopted if they existed. By contrast, trying to slightly speed up the pace at which Americans replace gas furnaces with electric heat pumps is a relatively weak lever. In fact, the purely local benefits of emissions reduction are so small compared to the global benefits that any kind of halfway rigorous thinking suggests not acting that dramatically on purely domestic deployment issues.

Except the good news is that there is a lot we can do to promote clean energy that doesn’t have economic costs. This is why things like permitting reform are so valuable and important. Reducing regulatory barriers to clean energy has economic benefits, not costs, so we can realistically push quite hard here.

A big problem here, one that Democrats need to confront and address, is that the big brand name environmental organizations predate public concern about climate change. They are fundamentally grounded in an ideology that is at best indifferent to economic growth and that fundamentally dislikes the idea of taking a global perspective.

Every six months or so, some smart climate person will do a big round of chest-pumping about all the great stuff that’s happened in clean tech and how the movement now needs to focus on unshackling deployment rather than toward trying to stop fossil fuel projects. But the environmentalist organizations are like the supervillain that wants to use its powers to turn people into dinosaurs rather than curing cancer — blocking fossil fuel projects is what they want to do, it’s what they’re built to do, and they fundamentally don’t care about anything else.

There’s a place in life for people who care more about hypothetical harms to whales than deploying offshore wind or protecting tortoises and “arid landscapes” from solar panels. But when those people also oppose geothermal drilling and also oppose nuclear power, then they are clearly fundamentally unserious about finding an economically tractable way to limit climate change. Elected officials should tune them out, and we should encourage donors who care about climate change to redirect their funds in more pragmatic directions. What these people wildly over-index on instead is the idea that if you somehow kneecap domestic fossil fuel production, you’ll crush the nefarious political power of dirty energy and solutions will flow from there.

This just doesn’t make sense. People who live in countries that don’t produce fossil fuels nonetheless use them, because people like to have heat in the winter and light at night and steel to build stuff. They like to drive cars. As cleaner alternatives are developed, people will use them. But you need to actually develop the alternatives and make them cheap to deploy and use.

So many Biden-era missteps stem from flirting with this over-indexing on domestic production. That starts with Chuck Schumer blocking the refilling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the final year of Trump’s presidency when oil was super-cheap. Then, Sarah Bloom Raskin and a coalition of progressive groups argued that the Fed should use the pandemic as a pretext to force the entire fossil fuel industry into bankruptcy. Then, when Biden took office, he tried to end all new oil and gas leases on public lands (he lost in court) and to put Raskin in charge of financial regulation at the Fed (the Senate said no). Oil demand came roaring back post-pandemic, and investors were reluctant to put more into expanding production to match. This led to a big spike in gas prices that was exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at which point the Biden administration pivoted in a more constructive direction.

Still, to this day, it is genuinely true that the administration is reluctant to go too hard on sanctions enforcement against Russia, Iran, or Venezuela, because they’re worried about global oil prices, even as they raise drilling costs at home. This is dumb, but the people making the policies aren’t. They’re making these policies because environmentalists care about domestic fossil fuel production, but not about sanctions enforcement. And if your policymaking is responsive to the demands of interest groups whose ideas don’t make sense, you end up making bad policies.

This all comes down to the fact that Democrats need to stop thinking of climate policy as separate from economic policy.

The landscape is littered with takes about abstract ideas like populism and neoliberalism and pre-distribution versus redistribution and a million other things. And I notice that Democrats participating in these discourses rarely bring up energy policy at all. They instead treat climate like a purely post-material cultural concern, like fighting about the 1619 Project. It does play that way to a certain extent. But if you want to appeal to the material interests of working-class Americans, you also have to think about energy. Not purely as a source of jobs, where you need to reassure people that oil and gas jobs could be replaced by “green jobs,” but as an actual cornerstone of economic well-being.

Everyone knows the problem with a carbon tax is that making energy more expensive is unpopular. But if you’re trying to reduce emissions by blocking pipelines or forcing divestment from fossil fuels or debanking oil and gas companies, the causal pathway still runs through higher prices — the same downside as a carbon tax but without the upside of revenue.

I think a very underrated aspect of class dealignment in politics is the extent to which a particular (and somewhat misguided) take on climate policy has moved closer to the heart of Democratic Party politics. Energy policy, more than anything else, makes the idea of a GOP that is simultaneously working class and pro-business seem plausible, because abundant energy really is good for workers and business alike. Coming back to earth on this topic doesn’t mean giving up on climate change or any other important public health concerns. But it does mean saying a firm “no” to degrowth and embracing real cost-benefit analysis and maybe even (in the right macroeconomic environment) returning to carbon pricing. It means taking the national interest seriously. And it means actually doing the thing that climate hawks keep saying they’re going to do and prioritizing clean energy buildout over other considerations.

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

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Tuesday, December 3, 2024 5:21 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Well, gee. Whooda thunk that if all of "your" plans to combat global warming involve making the poor poorer they would meet serious resistance?


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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, December 3, 2024 7:57 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


When I see TPTB flying here and there in the cheap seats, eating beans instead of Wagyu steak, staying in youth hostels instead of exclusive resorts, and donating 90% of their wealth to things like sustainable farming... then I'll know they're serious about climate change. Failing that, they're just trying to extract more resources from 99.9999999% of everyone else.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, December 3, 2024 8:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, gee. Whooda thunk that if all of "your" plans to combat global warming involve making the poor poorer they would meet serious resistance?


This.


Remember... People like Stephen Colbert said he would be happy and proud to be paying $15/gal for gasoline 3.5 years ago and his idiot audience clapped like seals.

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

Trump is fine.
He is also your current President.

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Tuesday, December 10, 2024 5:08 PM

SECOND

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


Wildfires have turned the Arctic into a net carbon emitter. That’s bad news.

By Umair Irfan | Dec 10, 2024, 3:00 PM CST

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual Arctic Report Card this week, pooling research from the planet’s north. As what is likely the hottest year on record draws to a close, researchers have found the Arctic region is warming four times faster than the global rate.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/2024-arcti
c-report-card-documents-rapid-dramatic-change

While it doesn’t have the dense, fast-growing biomass of a tropical rainforest, its vegetation does breathe in about a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, about a fifth of humanity’s total annual output. Beneath the tundra, permafrost, a layer of soil that remains frozen year-round, keeps microbes at bay that would ordinarily decompose vegetation. The net result is that Arctic soils store enormous amounts of carbon, upward of 1.6 trillion metric tons across the region. That’s about double the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere.

But now that the climate is warming in the Arctic, that 1.6 trillion tons is being released back into the atmosphere, faster and faster as the climate gets warmer and warmer.

More at https://www.vox.com/climate/390530/arctic-tundra-carbon-sink-emitter-c
limate-change

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

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024 8:47 AM

SECOND

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


NOAA Arctic Report Card: Update for 2024 - Tracking recent environmental changes, with 12 essays prepared by an international team of 97 researchers from 11 different countries and an independent peer review organized by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme of the Arctic Council. https://arctic.noaa.gov/report-card/report-card-2024/



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

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024 9:04 AM

SECOND

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


13 Misconceptions About Global Warming



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

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024 10:11 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


All very true and very disturbing.

Now. How about backing something besides high-tech get-rich-quick VC projects, and instead things that might actually improve people's lives?

Addressing rapid population growth with education for women..
Urban forests everywhere to cool down cities.
Replacing inefficient electrical grids with efficent ones.
Building renovation to improve energy efficiency
Solar panel rebates in sunny areas
Sustainable farming grants (cover crop, no till) with maximum per-farm amounts to benefit small and medium sized farms more.
Replacing coal burning power plants with natgas.
Better forestry practices including black-earth firebreaks and reintroducing the beaver
Capturing methane that's being flared off, and using that to generate electricity.
Strict CAFE standards.
Banning or makjng very expensive private jet flights.
Cutting the military budget 90%.
Strict CAFE standards

I even heard a proposal that I've been noodling on ever since: levying a hefty carbon tax, the proceeds of which are returned to the people in the form of a progressive rebate. (Instaed of using it to fund various government-to-corporation get rich quick schemes). This has two benefits: it skews consumption away from energy or carbon heavy items and reduces wealth/income inequality.

Dealing with global climate change isnt going to be about One Big Thing, but lots of medium-sized things.




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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, December 11, 2024 10:35 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:
All very true and very disturbing.

Now. How about backing something besides high-tech get-rich-quick VC projects, and instead things that might actually improve people's lives?

Addressing rapid population growth with education for women..
Urban forests everywhere to cool down cities.
Replacing inefficient electrical grids with efficent ones.
Building renovation to improve energy efficiency
Solar panel rebates in sunny areas
Sustainable farming grants (cover crop, no till) with maximum per-farm amounts to benefit small and medium sized farms more.
Replacing coal burning power plants with natgas.
Better forestry practices including black-earth firebreaks and reintroducing the beaver
Capturing methane that's being flared off, and using that to generate electricity.
Strict CAFE standards.
Banning or makjng very expensive private jet flights.
Cutting the military budget 90%.
Strict CAFE standards

I even heard a proposal that I've been noodling on ever since: levying a hefty carbon tax, the proceeds of which are returned to the people in the form of a progressive rebate. (Instaed of using it to fund various government-to-corporation get rich quick schemes). This has two benefits: it skews consumption away from energy or carbon heavy items and reduces wealth/income inequality.

Dealing with global climate change isnt going to be about One Big Thing, but lots of medium-sized things.




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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, if you google "What is Trump's energy policy?", none of those things are imaginable. https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+Trump%27s+energy+policy

What would Trump 2.0 mean for coal?
https://www.eenews.net/articles/what-would-trump-2-0-mean-for-coal/
Trump's campaign insists the former president is poised to revive the sagging coal industry.

Alternatively, google "What is the Democrats' energy policy?" and nearly all of those things are possible.

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

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024 12:41 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Who said I agree with Trump's energy policy???

You're such a turd.


Yanno, if you care so much about climate change, you would have advocated for something besides the globalist power-and-money-grab approach. Instead, you couldn't break from that mold and got the big fat rejection you deserve.

In future, advocate for something pro-human. You might actually have some success.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Saturday, December 14, 2024 1:30 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:
Who said I agree with Trump's energy policy???

In future, advocate for something pro-human. You might actually have some success.
Pro-human? I'm no mind-reader but that doesn't mean anything more than no carbon energy has to be cheaper for these unspecified human consumers than fossil fuel energy. Cost more? That is anti-human!

How much cheaper before your pro-human solution is acceptable to them? Ten percent cheaper? Fifty percent? Free energy? Once you pick a price, the pro-human solution has to pass their widely varying esthetics. Does everything (cars, buildings, landscapes) have to appear precisely the same as the fossil fuel versions? Can there be a slight amount of change? What if new power lines horrify them? What if they insist that only gasoline and diesel vehicles are what they understand, while battery power is incomprehensible to them? Do they hate solar power? Hate wind power? Fear fission and fusion power?

Then there are the people who stubbornly refuse to believe there is such a thing as climate change, and are psychologically indifferent to the consequences of their actions on other people, etc.

Why not wait until Star Trek technology is reality before choosing a pro-human solution, the best one? Surely the Earth can wait a few hundred years for the political process to settle on something? What is the hurry?

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

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Saturday, December 14, 2024 1:30 PM

SECOND

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


Model predictions of global geologic hydrogen resources

Science Advances | 13 Dec 2024 | Vol 10, Issue 50

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado0955

Abstract
Geologic hydrogen could be a low-carbon primary energy resource; however, the magnitude of Earth’s subsurface endowment has not yet been assessed. Knowledge of the occurrence and behavior of natural hydrogen on Earth has been combined with information from geologic analogs to construct a mass balance model to predict the resource potential. Given the associated uncertainty, stochastic model results predict a wide range of values for the potential in-place hydrogen resource . . .

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

Massive new energy source discovered hiding under Earth’s surface

Experts are divided over how useful it could be.

By Noa Leach | December 13, 2024 at 1:00 pm

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/geologic-hydrogen-reserves

Experts are unsure, however, if we should dedicate resources to extracting this. “To suck up hydrogen at a scale required to make a contribution to bringing down emissions and tackling the climate emergency would require an enormous global initiative, for which we simply don't have time,” Prof Bill McGuire, Earth scientist at University College London (UCL) who was not involved in the study, told BBC Science Focus.

“It would also need a massive amount of supporting infrastructure in terms of rigs, access roads, storage, transport and more. Furthermore, it seems to me that we might now know how much hydrogen there is, but that is not the same as knowing where it is.

“There is more than enough free energy available from wind and the Sun alone, and the technologies are straightforward, well-tested and well-established, so I really don't see the need for exploiting what is, ultimately, another finite resource.”

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

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Saturday, December 14, 2024 2:45 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND, what is tbe purpose, the reason, for trying to limit climate change?

Is it to "save the planet"? Save the whales? Save the coral reefs, the nematodes, the birds, bees, the trees, and all of the creatures of the world?

Or is it to save the planet TO KEEP IT LIVABLE FOR HUMANS?

That's a critical difference in POV.

Now, personally, I'm of the second persuasion.

I believe we need to preserve our planet as a form of ENLIGHTENED SELF INTEREST. I'm convinced that we need to preserve biodiversity - instead of PRESIDING OVER ANOTHER EXTINCTION EVENT AS WE ARE CURRENTLY DOING- because biodiversity and redundancy (many species occupying similar but not exactly the same niche) keeps our environment humming along, robust and able to absorb various local, regional, and global shocks.

So, how do we best preserve our environment?

Well, first of all, REDUCE WASTE, starting with the biggest resource wasters: the extremely wealthy, war, and built-in obsolescence. AFA population growth, the most effective way to reduce population growth is to educate girls and women, give them legal rights, options besides making babies, and access to birth control.

I've posted dozens and dozens of EFFECTIVE actions, and pencil-whipped their potential carbon dioxide savings, leading to a 30% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and increased carbon dioxide storage. (Close coal fired power plants and convert to nat gas, sustainable farming, better forest management, reducing the DOD budget by 90%, outlawing private jets, pushing rooftop solar panels for sunny states etc etc)

There is no technological barrier to any of those.

Their biggest problem is, they step on the toes of the rich and powerful.

Well, let's get going. Instead of these carbon capture/storage schemes that are going nowhere (they won't work) and other high tech mirages, let's start doing what we can do.

And if they're politically unviable bc the rich, who spend so much time alternately wringing their hands about climate change and scolding "us" for using too many resources, block them ... well, they're not really concerned about climate change at all.
Are they?

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Thursday, December 19, 2024 1:56 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:

Are they?
There is already a plan for the United States. But it is NOT your plan. Maybe Signym can convince Trump? Whoops! Trump is not open to anybody's plan. Trump promised to cancel all plans.

Biden just unveiled America’s ambitious new climate goal. Trump will assuredly undo it

By Ella Nilsen | Thu December 19, 2024

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/19/climate/biden-new-climate-goal-paris-tr
ump-climate/index.html

The ambitious new target aims to cut US climate pollution to 61-66% below 2005 levels by 2035.

The US will only be able to cut pollution 24-40% below 2005 levels in the next decade if Trump successfully repeals Biden’s climate law and unravels key regulations, according to the nonpartisan climate think tank Rhodium Group.

It is unclear whether Trump will be able to convince congressional Republicans to kill Biden’s clean energy law, which is pouring billions of dollars and thousands of jobs into GOP districts.

Trump has said he intends to drill for more oil and gas, shred federal climate regulations and seek to overturn Biden’s clean energy law.

A new target is required every five years by the international Paris Agreement, which Trump has promised to once again pull the US out of.

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

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Thursday, December 19, 2024 4:29 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


There are at least two things where Trump and I disagree, and energy/ climate change/ environment is one.

You elitist, anti-humans only have yourselves to blame. If you (and that means you too, SECOND) had only advocated practical, humane policy changes instead of draconian "make the rich richer" schemes, you might have gotten buy-in from a majority.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Thursday, December 19, 2024 4:54 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:
There are at least two things where Trump and I disagree, and energy/ climate change/ environment is one.

You elitist, anti-humans only have yourselves to blame. If you (and that means you too, SECOND) had only advocated practical, humane policy changes instead of draconian "make the rich richer" schemes, you might have gotten buy-in from a majority.
Buy-in? The only buy-in that will happen is solar and wind because both cost much less than fossil fuel. Price drives everything. But get Americans to use less energy? That ain't gonna attract any voters except cartoon characters such as Lisa Simpson when she is old enough.

Perhaps Trumptards in Texas are different than in your state, but from where I am standing, few of Trump's voters believe climate change will have any significant affect in the next few decades. Some think it can't happen because God will take control of the climate and prevent change. For those Texans who don't believe God will intervene if the change comes at all, eventual change will be in the far future, so why do anything new now? Why change long-standing habits of using as much energy as you want? Why impoverish Texas, which prospers from selling fossil fuel?

Trump perfectly adjusted to that attitude. That's how the winner won. Trump repeated back to his kind what they wanted to hear about themselves: you are the BEST! Don't ever change! You should have all the energy you need! And fossil fuel is where the future is going! Light the world on fire and dance in the glorious light of the flames.

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

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Saturday, December 21, 2024 7:08 AM

SECOND

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


The newest Clean Jobs Midwest report shows how the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) gave clean energy jobs in the state an influx of employees, pushing the total past 73,000 and counting.

With Milwaukee ranking seventh in the Midwest for clean energy employment and a workforce deeply involved in projects like energy-efficient lighting and heat pump installations, Wisconsin positions itself as a key player in the region's clean energy transition.

This boom in employment has been growing at nearly four times the pace of Wisconsin's overall economy while investing billions into renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. Globally, an International Energy Agency report found that the energy sector added over 2.5 million jobs in 2023, bringing the total to 67 million globally.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/wisconsin-clean-energy-jobs
-investment-innovation/

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

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Saturday, December 21, 2024 7:09 AM

SECOND

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


When will electric airliners make sense?

Dec 14, 2018 article, six years ago but it is probably still true.

Electric aircraft only make sense economically with fuel at about $100/barrel or higher.
(The global average jet fuel price week ending 13 Dec 2024 is $89.23/bbl.
https://www.iata.org/en/publications/economics/fuel-monitor/ )

How all of this would affect air travel is very sensitive to the capacity of future batteries. The authors estimate that an effective range of about 1,100 kilometers would allow electric aircraft to cover 15 percent of the total air miles (and corresponding fuel use) and nearly half the total flights.

Upping the range to 2,200 kilometers would allow 80 percent of the global flight total to be handled by electric aircraft.

The one thing that's holding it back is technology, as batteries simply aren't close to the needed capacities. While we can't rule out a radical advance in battery chemistry, current rates of change mean we'll have to wait for more than 30 years before air travel no longer means a roar of jet engines.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/when-will-electric-airliners-m
ake-sense/

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

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Saturday, December 21, 2024 2:36 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


When will electric airliners make sense?

When pigs fly.


Seriously, this isn't a question of money, as SECOND seems to think. It's a question of battery technology. When batteries have the same energy density per pound as jet fuel, then it'll happen.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Saturday, December 21, 2024 2:48 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
SIGNY: You elitist, anti-humans only have yourselves to blame. If you (and that means you too, SECOND) had only advocated practical, humane policy changes instead of draconian "make the rich richer" schemes, you might have gotten buy-in from a majority.

SECOND: Buy-in? The only buy-in that will happen is solar and wind because both cost much less than fossil fuel.
No, they don't. It very much depends on where you are. For us, with our very high electricty costs, it makes sense. But solar north of about 37deg N makes no economic sense. Windmills in windless areas? Heat pumps where winter temps reach 15F? You're joking, right?

Quote:
SECOND: Price drives everything.
No, it doesn't. Our fearless leaders waste a fuckton of money on stupid shit, like wars that don't affect our security. What drives our policies is PROFIT, and, specifically, how much $$$ our pols can pocket from their corporate sponsors.

Quote:
SECOND But get Americans to use less energy? That ain't gonna attract any voters except cartoon characters such as Lisa Simpson when she is old enough.
Which Americans, son? The homeless? The ones who can't afford AC or a more fuel efficient car? The ones who have to decide between heat and eat?

Yanno who won't reduce their energy usage?
Try wresting private jets from the hands of the wealthy.




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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, December 23, 2024 10:12 AM

SECOND

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


Methane emissions in the Permian Basin fell significantly in the past year, but the incoming Trump Administration's policies threaten to reverse this progress.

Dec 23, 2024, 6:59 AM CST

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Will-Trump-Policies-Slow-Methane
-Emissions-Cuts-in-the-Permian.html

The Biden Administration has enacted rules on reducing emissions from oil and gas operations, including a recently finalized methane fee that has been opposed by the industry.

Last year, emissions from the Permian fell by 26%, according to a recent study by S&P Global and Insight M Inc. Methane intensity declined even more, by over 30%, as absolute emission volumes fell while Permian oil and gas production continued to rise, the study found.

In a sign of what the energy industry can expect, Trump last month picked a shale boss, Chris Wright, chief executive of Liberty Energy, as his nomination to lead the Department of Energy.

However, analysts say that the companies are now unlikely to swerve from the path of cutting emissions as they continue to promote their efforts in producing more oil and gas with fewer emissions.

“They’ve made commitments to their shareholders, they’ve set a plan in place, they’ve allocated capital,” Kevin Birn, an analyst at S&P, told the Financial Times, commenting on the findings of the study on the Permian methane emissions trends.

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

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Tuesday, December 31, 2024 8:55 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


another year of climate records broken

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Tuesday, December 31, 2024 9:37 AM

SECOND

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


When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024 is our annual report, published this year for the first time - 27 December, 2024

Every December, people ask us how severe the year’s extreme weather events were. To answer this question, we’ve partnered with Climate Central to produce a report that reviews some of the most significant events and highlights findings from our attribution studies. It also includes new analysis looking at the number of dangerous heat days added by climate change in 2024 and global resolutions for 2025 to work toward a safer, more sustainable world.

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/when-risks-become-reality-extr
eme-weather-in-2024/

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

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Tuesday, December 31, 2024 10:48 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
another year of climate records broken


Yes.

But don't expect TPTB to change their power hungry, profit-seeking, warmaking ways any time soon.



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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, January 1, 2025 5:46 AM

SECOND

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


The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated

By Mark Olalde, illustrations by Peter Arkle | Dec. 30, 2024

https://www.propublica.org/article/oil-orphan-wells-cleanup-playbook-s
iana-tom-ragsdale

The question of who pays for cleanup remains unanswered. Time and again, oil companies have offloaded their oldest wells. Their tactics are not written down in one place or peddled by a single law firm — but companies follow an unmistakable pattern. The strategy, which is legal if followed properly, has become such a tried-and-true endeavor that researchers and environmentalists dubbed it “the playbook.”

Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with clean-energy-focused think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, studies fossil fuel companies’ cleanup costs. “There’s almost a cheerleading squad for shedding your liabilities, like a snake sheds its skin and just slithers away,” he said.

Should you want to become an oil executive and try this strategy yourself, here’s how it works …

As you launch your business, begin by collecting subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives from the government to guarantee you can pump oil and gas profitably. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies total in the trillions each year, according to organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. (Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion in 2023
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel-subsidies
-surged-to-record-7-trillion )

Next, start pumping and profiting.

As you set up your business, create layers of shell companies. Down the road, they’ll provide a firewall between you and your liabilities — key among them, cleanup costs.

Once oil and gas production slows, sell low-producing wells. Smaller drillers operating on thinner margins, known in the business as “scavenger companies,” will be happy to take them off your hands.

Rinse and repeat by selling wells as their profits slow to a trickle. They’ll be sold again to ever-smaller companies that teeter on the edge of insolvency. Maintenance and environmental stewardship will usually fall by the wayside as companies eke out a profit. Studies show that the number of environmental violations rises as wells pass to less-capitalized drillers. But these wells aren’t your problem any longer.

Pull any remaining profits before regulators hit you with violations and fines for your remaining wells that aren’t pumping and may be leaking.

Then, idle the wells — pausing production, but not plugging them or cleaning up — and walk away. Regulators are typically tasked with ensuring that as much oil as possible is pumped out of the ground, so rules allow wells to sit idle, instead of being plugged, in case prices surge and it becomes profitable to restart them. However, a study in California found that, after wells are inactive for only 10 months, there’s a 50-50 chance they will never produce again.

Regulators will likely grow tired of asking you to clean up your wells, but you can make the case for leaving them unplugged for now. Pitch grand plans, as other drillers have — maybe repurposing the wells for bitcoin mining, carbon sequestration or the synthesis of hydrogen fuel — that require the wells to remain open.

When regulators’ patience has reached its limit, remind them what will happen if they come down hard on you. Fines or other extra costs could force your business into bankruptcy, leaving your unplugged wells as orphans and taxpayers on the hook. Ask them if they want to be responsible for that catastrophe.

“The root of the problem is there’s no regulator of the oil industry across North America,” Boychuk said, adding that “the rule of law has never applied to oil and gas.”

When regulators finally act, declare bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect businesspeople like you who took risks. More than 250 oil and gas operators in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, according to law firm Haynes Boone. (Industry groups estimate there are several thousand oil companies in the country.)

Regulators only require oil and gas companies to set aside tiny bonds that act like a security deposit on an apartment. Because you didn’t clean up your wells, you’ll lose that money, but it’s a fraction of the profits you’ve banked or the cost of the cleanup work. ProPublica and Capital & Main found that bonds typically equal less than 2% of actual cleanup costs.

More at https://www.propublica.org/article/oil-orphan-wells-cleanup-playbook-s
iana-tom-ragsdale

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

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 4:52 AM

SECOND

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


Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth

Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on.

By Zoë Schlanger | January 6, 2025, 1:41 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/01/climate-models-ear
th/681207/

Fifty years into the project of modeling Earth’s future climate, we still don’t really know what’s coming. Some places are warming with more ferocity than expected. Extreme events are taking scientists by surprise. Right now, as the bald reality of climate change bears down on human life, scientists are seeing more clearly the limits of our ability to predict the exact future we face. The coming decades may be far worse, and far weirder, than the best models anticipated.

This is a problem. The world has warmed enough that city planners, public-health officials, insurance companies, farmers, and everyone else in the global economy want to know what’s coming next for their patch of the planet. And telling them would require geographic precision that even the most advanced climate models don’t yet have, as well as computing power that doesn’t yet exist. Our picture of what is happening and probably will happen on Earth is less hazy than it’s ever been. Still, the exquisitely local scale on which climate change is experienced and the global purview of our best tools to forecast its effects simply do not line up.

Today’s climate models very accurately describe the broad strokes of Earth’s future. But warming has also now progressed enough that scientists are noticing unsettling mismatches between some of their predictions and real outcomes. Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist at Columbia University, and his colleagues recently found that, on every continent except Antarctica, certain regions showed up as mysterious hot spots, suffering repeated heat waves worse than what any model could predict or explain. Across places where a third of humanity lives, actual daily temperature records are outpacing model predictions, according to forthcoming research from Dartmouth’s Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin. And a global jump in temperature that lasted from mid-2023 to this past June remains largely unexplained, a fact that troubles Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, although it doesn’t entirely surprise him.

“From the 1970s on, people have understood that all models are wrong,” he told me. “But we’ve been working to make them more useful.” In that sense, the project of climate modeling is a scientific process that’s proceeding normally, even excellently. Only now the whole world needs very specific information to make crucial decisions, and they needed it, like, yesterday. That scientists don’t have those answers might look like a failure of modeling, but really, it’s a testament to how bad climate change has been permitted to get, and how quickly.

Models simply can’t function on the scale at which people live, because assessing the impact of current emissions on the future world requires hundreds of years of simulations. Modeling the Earth at one-square-kilometer pixels would take “like a hundred thousand times more computation than we currently have,” Schmidt, of NASA, told me.

Trees and land are major sinks for carbon emissions, and that this fact might change is not accounted for in climate models. But it is changing: Trees and land absorbed much less carbon than normal in 2023, according to research published last October. In Finland, forests have stopped absorbing the majority of the carbon they once did, and recently became a net source of emissions, which, as The Guardian has reported, swamped all gains the country has made in cutting emissions from all other sectors since the early 1990s. The interactions of the ice sheets with the oceans are also largely missing from models, Schmidt told me, despite the fact that melting ice could change ocean temperatures, which could have significant knock-on effects. Changing ocean-temperature patterns are currently making climate modelers at NOAA rethink their models of El Niño and La Niña; the agency initially predicted that La Niña’s cooling powers would kick in much sooner than it now appears they will.

That models already appear to be severely underestimating climate risk in several places is a bad sign for what’s ahead and our capacity to see it coming. “It should be worrying that we are now moving into a world where we’ve kind of reached the limit of our physical understanding of the Earth system,” Kornhuber said.

While models struggle to capture the world we live in now, the planet is growing more alien to us, further from our reference ranges, as the climate keeps changing. If given unlimited time, science could probably develop models that more fully captured what we’re watching play out. But by then it would be too late to do anything about it. Science is more than five decades into the modeling endeavor, and still our best tools can only get us so far.

***************
"Climate Change is a Chinese Hoax" – wise man Donald Trump as he withdraws from Paris Climate Agreement for a second time.

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

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 4:59 AM

SECOND

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


2024 LNG Export Study: Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports

https://fossil.energy.gov/app/docketindex/docket/index/30

The conclusions of the report are measured yet damning. The Department of Energy did not outright advise banning new exports of natural gas. But, as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm wrote in a statement, the department found that “unfettered exports” of American gas would reduce supply domestically, potentially driving up wholesale gas prices in the U.S. by more than 30 percent. The report also found that increasing LNG exports could generate 1.5 gigatons of direct greenhouse-gas emissions a year by 2050. That’s equivalent to about a quarter of current annual U.S. emissions, and would more than eclipse the emission reductions the country has made since 2000. If the department’s predictions are correct, the U.S. would be essentially abandoning any pretense of trying to limit climate change. The LNG industry has long countered that it can use carbon-capture technology to counteract its emissions. But that technology is far from functional at any meaningful scale. Even when the Energy Department researchers factored in hypothetical “aggressive” use of carbon capture and storage, emissions were projected to rise.

In the report, the Biden administration also says that its original argument for LNG exports—that Europe needed the gas for energy security during the Russian war with Ukraine—has fallen apart. Demand in Europe is plateauing and is expected to decline, and instead, the increased exports from the U.S. would mostly go to benefit China, already the world’s largest LNG importer, Granholm wrote. This has long been pointed out by LNG’s opponents; it is striking to see the facts laid out by the federal government. The continued pace of LNG exports is “neither sustainable nor advisable,” Granholm wrote.

The DOE report makes clear that liquefied natural gas is neither a form of clean energy nor a bridge to a cleaner future. In fact, exporting more of it, Granholm wrote, would serve mostly to generate “wealth for the owners of export facilities.”

The report itself does nothing to block plans by Trump to lift the pause on LNG-export terminals on his “very first day back.” Proponents of these terminals say they are an economic boon to the places where they are built, and create jobs in regions that need them. (Most of these jobs are connected to constructing the terminals, and are temporary.) The American Gas Association condemned the DOE report as a means to justify the “mistake” of Biden’s LNG pause; the financial research firm S&P Global put out a report the same day that found that LNG exports contribute $400 billion to American GDP, and that the pause and other regulatory measures jeopardize an additional $250 billion in incremental GDP.

With Republicans about to control all three branches of government, though, he wouldn’t predict how the coming fight against new export infrastructure would go. Still, to justify issuing future permits, the Department of Energy must determine that each new export operation is in the public interest. And now the Department of Energy has made a case for why it isn’t.

More at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/gas-lng-climate-tr
ump/681041/

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

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 7:35 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


The tourism video Arctic Wildlife in Greenland


Visit Greenland


that giant Ice Cube Glacier called Greenland a historical part of an expanding Danish Empire a Viking Dane Empire mostly gone today, some of the ice is now less than 10m 33ft thick, with radar and satellite mapping the ice is thought to sit on top of a giant island bedrock, recently scientists discovered Greenland's Grand Canyon or the possibility that Greenland might actually be three islands almost joined together with a big slab of glacier ice on top, the glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago.


France tells Trump to keep his hands off Greenland: EU will defend its 'sovereign borders'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14262207/France-Trump-EU-atta
ck-sovereign-borders-President-invading-Greenland.html

EU will not tolerate a Trump takeover of Greenland, says France
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/08/eu-will-not-tolerate
-trump-takeover-of-greenland-france/

the scientists say it once had Dinosaurs Issi "cold" in Greenlandica plateosaurid dinosaur described in 2021 from the Late Triassic Fleming Fjord Formation of Greenland, is that 210 million years ago?
it contains one species, Issi saaneq; the full binomial name means "cold bone"

times when the Lands were in different places and Earth was warmer


but then Dinosaurs have even been found in the South Pole in Antarctica digs

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Friday, January 10, 2025 4:03 PM

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


Climate change is very close to its 1.5°C flashing red light level

By Kevin Drum | January 10, 2025 – 11:56 am

https://jabberwocking.com/climate-change-is-very-close-to-its-1-5c-fla
shing-red-light-level/

The New York Times reports today that the world has officially warmed by more than 1.5°C. This is based on the Copernicus ERA5 estimate for 2024, which I'm unable to confirm because the Copernicus folks won't let me download their annual data unless I register with a 12-character password—which I did—and then respond to an email confirmation—which they refused to send. https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-indicators/temperature

However, I can show you the more conventional NASA data:

According to NASA, we're at 1.28°C above the pre-industrial baseline and it will still be a few years before we hit 1.5°C.

How many years? That depends. If you extrapolate from long-term trends it looks like 2037 or so (and around 2050 to hit 2°C). But temps have been skyrocketing recently, and if you extrapolate from that we're only a few years away.

So it's anywhere between now and soon, depending on whose data turns out to be most accurate. Happy New Year.

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

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Friday, January 10, 2025 5:50 PM

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


Earth records hottest year on record in 2024 and breached the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold

Last year’s global average temperature easily passed 2023’s record heat and kept pushing even higher.

It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris climate pact, according to the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Service, the United Kingdom’s Meteorology Office and Japan’s weather agency.

The European team calculated 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.89 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. Japan found 1.57 degrees Celsius (2.83 degrees Fahrenheit) and the British 1.53 degrees Celsius (2.75 degrees Fahrenheit) in releases of data coordinated to early Friday morning European time.

American monitoring teams — NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the private Berkeley Earth — were to release their figures later Friday but all will likely show record heat for 2024, European scientists said.

The six groups compensate for data gaps in observations that go back to 1850 — in different ways, which is why numbers vary slightly.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/climate-change/earth-records-hottest
-year-on-record-in-2024-and-the-jump-was-so-big-it-breached-a-key-threshold/ar-BB1rdGMf

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

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Sunday, January 12, 2025 10:10 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Warm Dry Weather, drained Lakes nobody collecting River Water running off mountains and hills


then mix in some Political Corruption


and sicko Arsonists are added to the mix


This is Malibu - one of the wealthiest affluent places on the entire planet, now it’s being burnt to ashes.
https://x.com/its_The_Dr/status/1876975165889814616


quote Elon Musk

DEI means people will DIE

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1878289952657560030#m

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Monday, January 13, 2025 7:57 AM

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


U.S. Natural Gas Power Plants to Flourish Alongside the AI Boom

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Jan 13, 2025, 5:00 AM CST

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-Natural-Gas-Powe
r-Plants-to-Flourish-Alongside-the-AI-Boom.html

U.S. natural gas is set to be a big winner in the AI boom with several dozen new gas-fired power plants expected to be built in America by the end of the decade, according to analysts.

A total of 80 new gas power plants could be constructed by 2030, adding about 46 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity, per estimates from energy data provider Enverus cited by the Financial Times. This would be 20% higher than the gas capacity additions in the past five years.

Yet, five years ago expectations were that America’s power consumption may have already peaked and would only flatline going forward.

AI and the data centers have upended these forecasts and now U.S. power demand is expected to rise each year in the coming years.

The surge in U.S. power demand due to the AI advancements and data center construction is set to unleash a new boom in the build-out of natural gas power plants to provide reliable 24/7 electricity.

Big Oil is already proposing to help power the AI revolution and the enormous energy consumption with gas power plants. Chevron and Exxon are talking to power generators, energy providers, and data centers to provide what they describe as lower-carbon energy.

The incoming Trump Administration is expected to favor strongly natural gas to power America’s growing electricity demand and scrap some Biden-era environmental constraints on new natural gas generation.

Natural gas-fired power generation in the United States soared to a record high last year, driving up global gas demand.

In recent years, power demand in the United States, the single largest portion of which is delivered by gas-fired power plants, has surged and is expected to continue to soar with rising electrification and more electricity necessary to power and cool data centers.

U.S. power-generating companies are announcing plans for the highest volume of new natural gas-fired capacity in years as the AI boom is driving demand for electricity.

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

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Monday, January 13, 2025 8:11 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 JAYNEZTOWN:
Warm Dry Weather, drained Lakes nobody collecting River Water running off mountains and hills


then mix in some Political Corruption


and sicko Arsonists are added to the mix


This is Malibu - one of the wealthiest affluent places on the entire planet, now it’s being burnt to ashes.
https://x.com/its_The_Dr/status/1876975165889814616


quote Elon Musk

DEI means people will DIE

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1878289952657560030#m
Elon Musk thinks this has never happened before. He could google and learn that he is in serious error:

#1 Spitting Hot Fire: Malibu Wildfires and the Santa Anas
By Ryan Reft | July 11, 2013
https://www.pbssocal.org/history-society/spitting-hot-fire-malibu-wild
fires-and-the-santa-anas

#2 A brief history of Malibu wildfires
November 25, 2007
https://malibutimes.com/article_be86d151-e381-5db5-9a85-66cc05586070

With today’s year-long fire season, it’s comforting to know that Malibu pioneer Frederick Rindge had the same experience with wildfires that we do.

In his 1898 book, “Happy Days in California,” the last owner of the Spanish land grant, Malibu Rancho, wrote about the “Great Drought of 1897” and a three-day wildfire resulting from dreaded Santa Ana winds.

He described a family putting wet blankets on buildings exposed to flying embers; escaping to a nearby creek; and community aid to survivors.

“The dry year and the mountain fire just about ruined one of the settlers…,” Rindge wrote. “But he had friends. From far and near they gathered together… and each was requested to bring something for a woodland feast in the great sycamore grove.

“Besides this, each one was asked to give a dollar toward a purse to be presented to the unfortunate family… it was pleasantly agreed that the recipients should organize a like benefit for the next man burned out; thus all feeling of being an object of charity was removed.”

Since 1929, there has been an average of two wildfires per decade [see list at bottom]. Neighbors help neighbors and response and recovery have become more institutionalized.

In his 1958 book, “The Malibu,” Broad Beach resident Lawrence Clark Powell wrote of the December 26, 1956, “Newton Fire,” which burned 26,000 acres, destroyed 100 homes and caused one death.

An operator at the “County Fire Station at Zuma” told residents to evacuate, Powell wrote. He and his wife carried a toy poodle and a cat to the beach. Neighbors brought the Powell’s horse and burro to the beach, and the other Powell cats came out of hiding to join them. The Powells joined neighbors in putting out small fires on the beach. A county engine came from Downey and called for backup to save homes in the path of flames from Encinal Canyon. Edison Company lineman blasted chemical foam on the brush. Deputy sheriffs sealed off roads to keep away looters. The Zuma Fire Station was the staging area for firefighters from San Diego and San Luis Obispo, Powell wrote.

In her 1950 book, “My Fifty Years in Malibu,” Carbon Beach resident Dorothy Stotsenberg described devastation from the 1970 “Wright Fire” (28,000 acres, 10 deaths, 103 homes destroyed) in Malibu Knolls, Malibu Road and Serra Retreat. A clothing center set up at Malibu Presbyterian Church after that blaze was the genesis of The Artifac Tree thrift shop founded by the late Honey Coatsworth, Stotsenberg wrote.

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 9:25 AM

SECOND

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


Catastrophic tipping point in Greenland reached as crystal blue lakes turn brown, belch out carbon dioxide

Live Science reports | Jan 24, 2025

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-t
ipping-point-in-greenland-reached-as-crystal-blue-lakes-turn-brown-belch-out-carbon-dioxide

Thousands of Greenland’s crystal-clear blue lakes have turned a murky brown thanks to global warming — and the worst part is that they’ve started emitting carbon dioxide.

Record heat and rain in 2022 pushed the lakes of West Greenland past a tipping point, so rather than absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2), they began to emit it into the atmosphere, according to a new study.

The changes began in fall, which is normally a snowy time for Greenland. However, heat waves turned snow into rain and thawed the island’s permafrost — frozen ground that stores carbon, iron and other elements. The rains then washed these elements into lakes, turning them brown.

Less sunlight was able to penetrate the lakes as they darkened, which had a ripple effect on the microscopic plankton living in the water. The number of plankton absorbing CO2 through photosynthesis — the process of turning sunlight into energy — declined, while the amount of plankton breaking down and releasing carbon increased, according to a statement released by the University of Maine.

The lakes normally absorb CO2 in the summer, but by the following year they had flipped to become carbon dioxide producers. These types of widespread changes would normally take centuries. Researchers have observed the browning of lakes across the Northern Hemisphere, including the U.S., but it typically takes multiple decades — much longer than the transformation of Greenland’s lakes.

“The magnitude of this and the rate of change were unprecedented,” study lead author Jasmine Saros, a professor of paleolimnology and lake ecology at the University of Maine, said in the statement.

The researchers published their findings Tuesday (Jan. 21) in the journal PNAS. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2413855122

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

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Wednesday, January 29, 2025 6:37 AM

SECOND

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


Trump tries to seize the power of the purse with ‘an illegal executive order’

‘It’s an Illegal Executive Order. And It’s Stealing.’

Trump wants to go around Congress and freeze enormous amounts of federal spending. Can he?

By Russell Berman | January 28, 2025, 10 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/trump-executive-o
rder-spending-congress/681484/

Buried within one of the dozens of executive orders that President Donald Trump issued in his first days in office is a section titled “Terminating the Green New Deal.” As presidential directives go, this one initially seemed like a joke. The Green New Deal exists mostly in the dreams of climate activists; it has never been fully enacted into law.

The next line of Trump’s order, however, made clear he is quite serious: “All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” The president is apparently using “the Green New Deal” as a shorthand for any federal spending on climate change. But the two laws he targets address much more than that: The $900 billion IRA not only funds clean-energy programs but also lowers prescription-drug prices, while the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law represents the biggest investment in roads, bridges, airports, and public transportation in decades. And the government has spent only a portion of each.

In one sentence, Trump appears to have cut off hundreds of billions of dollars in spending that Congress has already approved, torching Joe Biden’s two most significant legislative accomplishments. The order stunned even some Republicans, many of whom supported the infrastructure law and have taken credit for its investments.

And Trump didn’t stop there. Yesterday, the White House ordered a pause on all federal grants and loans—a move that could put on hold an additional tens of billions of dollars already approved by Congress, touching many corners of American life. Democrats and government watchdogs see the directives as an opening salvo in a fight over the separation of powers, launched by a president bent on defying Congress’s will. “It’s an illegal executive order, and it’s stealing,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told me, referring to the order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law.

Withholding money approved by Congress “undermines the entire architecture of the Constitution,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told me. “It essentially makes the president into a king.” Last night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans “blatantly disobeys the law.”

The Constitution gives Congress the so-called power of the purse—that is, the House and the Senate decide how much money the government spends and where it goes. Since 1974, a federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act has prohibited the executive branch from spending less than the amount of money that Congress appropriates for a given program or purpose. During Trump’s first term, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated that law by holding up aid to Ukraine—a move that became central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

Trump has argued that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, and so has his nominee for budget director, Russell Vought, who had the same job at the end of the president’s first term. Vought also helped write Project 2025, the conservative-governing blueprint that attracted so many attacks from Democrats that Trump disavowed it during the campaign.

In his Senate confirmation hearings this month, Vought repeatedly refused to commit to abiding by the impoundment act even as he acknowledged that it is “the law of the land.” “For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation if they could do it for less,” he told senators at his first hearing. During his second appearance, when Van Hollen asked him whether he would comply with the law, Vought did not answer directly. “Senator, the president ran against the Impoundment Control Act,” he replied. His defiance astonished Democrats. “It’s absolutely outrageous,” Van Hollen told me.

The pause on funds for the Biden-signed laws did not draw as much attention as other moves Trump made on his first day back in the White House, especially his blanket pardons for January 6 defendants. Nor was it the only one that appeared to test the limits of his authority. A separate executive order froze nearly all foreign aid for 90 days, while others targeted birthright citizenship and civil-service protections for federal employees.

But the order cutting off spending for the IRA and the infrastructure law could have far-reaching implications. State and municipal governments in both Democratic and Republican jurisdictions worry that they may not be able to use investments and grants that the federal government promised them. “It’s creating chaos,” DeLauro said. “I honestly don’t think the people who are dealing with this know what they are doing.” She listed a range of popular and economically significant programs that appear to be on pause, including assistance for home-energy bills and money to replace lead pipes that contaminate drinking water.

“It was alarming,” Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska told me. Bacon, a Republican who narrowly won reelection in a district Trump lost, called the White House after reading the text of last week’s executive order to seek assurance that money he’d secured for Nebraska—including $73 million to upgrade Omaha’s airport—wouldn’t be stopped.

The immediate confusion became so intense that a day after Trump signed the order, the White House issued a memo seeking to clarify its scope that seemed to slightly narrow its impact and open the door for some spending to continue. Bacon told me that he was assured the directive applied mostly to Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate, which Trump railed against on the campaign trail and is part of the IRA. DeLauro, however, said the memo offered little clarity: “Everything is at risk.”

Yesterday’s memo extending the funding pause to all federal grant and loan programs set off another frenzy. The directive sought to exempt Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as other direct aid to individuals. But according to a copy of the memo published by The Washington Post, it explicitly targets “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Whether the funding pause constitutes an illegal impoundment is unclear. The executive branch does have some latitude in how it spends money. And yesterday’s memo instructs federal agencies to halt funding only “to the extent permissible under applicable law.” Describing last week’s order targeting the IRA and infrastructure law, Vought told senators that it was merely a “programmatic delay,” a term that arguably falls within what federal departments are allowed to do.

More broadly, executive orders are frequently less consequential than they appear, Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan and occasional Atlantic contributor, told me about last week’s directive. “It’s one thing to try to get a really nice headline for cutting back on government spending. It’s another thing altogether to decline to spend money that people are expecting you to spend,” Bagley said. “I would not be surprised if rhetoric does not match reality.”

To Charlie Ellsworth, a senior adviser with the nonprofit watchdog Congressional Integrity Project, Trump’s executive order on clean energy unmistakably oversteps the law. “They could have done this legally, but they didn’t,” Ellsworth, a former Schumer aide, told me. A new administration, for example, could have justified a pause in spending to ensure that a program was being funded in accordance with the law. But the order instead instructs agencies to ensure that the spending aligns with new policies set by the Trump administration. Ellsworth said that the order is “self-evidently” illegal.

The fight is almost certain to wind up in the courts, which have repeatedly ruled against the president’s ability to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. Indeed, Vought’s Senate testimony seemed to invite a legal challenge that could lead the Supreme Court, now with a 6–3 conservative majority and three Trump-appointed justices, to reconsider the question. “That seems to be their game plan,” Ellsworth said. “They want to get sued. They want to go to the Supreme Court.”

Van Hollen told me that he believes the Court would rule against Trump but that preferably the dispute won’t get that far. “You would hope that Republicans in Congress recognize they have an institutional interest in protecting Article I [of the Constitution] and the power of the purse, which is clearly congressional,” Van Hollen said.

Beyond the question of legality, Van Hollen warned that Trump’s orders would jeopardize virtually all negotiations over spending on Capitol Hill, because Democrats would not be able to trust the administration to keep its end of any agreement. Although Republicans have majorities in both the House and the Senate, they will need to strike deals with Democrats to avert government shutdowns and a catastrophic default on U.S. debt.

There were early signs of GOP pushback on last week’s spending freeze, but it fell well short of a revolt. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the chair of the Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee, said at one of Vought’s hearings that he disagreed with the administration’s view on spending and impoundments. “I think if we appropriate something for a cause, that’s where it’s supposed to go, and that will still be my position,” Paul said. And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chair of the Budget Committee, said at a second Vought hearing that he, too, had “concerns” about impoundment. But neither of them planned to stand in the way of the nominee who has argued for the president to wrest control of spending from Congress. “When you win, you get to pick people,” Graham told Vought. “And I’m glad he picked you.”

On the Republican side, the fight might be left to lawmakers such as Bacon, who has some protection from presidential retribution because he represents a purple district where voters might reward him for standing up to Trump. The GOP, he said, should go after policies it opposes through legislation, not executive order. “You just can’t determine what laws you want to execute and what you don’t,” Bacon said of Trump. Executive orders, he added, “have gotten out of hand” from presidents in both parties. “You can’t change the law,” Bacon said. “I think Republicans should stay true to that notion.”

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

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Thursday, February 6, 2025 7:40 AM

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


A transformer supply crisis bottlenecks energy projects

By Andrew Moseman | 11 Dec 2024

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transformer-shortage

The recent book Energy 2040 (Springer), coauthored by Georgia Tech’s Divan, lays out some of the staggering numbers. The capacity of all the energy projects waiting to connect to the U.S. grid amounts to 2,600 GW—more than double the nation’s entire generation capacity currently. An average estimate of U.S. EV adoption suggests the country will have 125 million EVs by 2040. The electricity demands of U.S. data centers may double by the end of this decade because of the boom in artificial intelligence.

Download Energy 2040 from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Energy+2040

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:15 AM

SECOND

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


Record-smashing global temperature findings

By Chloe Bryant | February 19, 2025

https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/record-smashing-weather-event-glo
bal-warming-climate-norm/

As reported by The Weather Network, the dates of Jan. 14 through Jan. 22 saw record-high global temperatures, a feat even more alarming considering the arctic blast that pummeled much of North America over the same period.

Global temperatures peaked on Jan. 19, reaching 55.9 degrees Fahrenheit, a 1.7 degree increase from normal temperatures for the same time of year, according to data released by Copernicus.

Why is the record-breaking warmth concerning?

Though a warm January doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the year will follow suit, it does reflect an alarming trend of rising temperatures seen in recent years.

2024 was the hottest year on record, confirmed by scientists at NASA, and the previous 10 years have been the warmest 10 on record.

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

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Wednesday, February 26, 2025 1:25 PM

SECOND

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


EPA tells White House to strike down landmark climate finding

By Maxine Joselow | February 26, 2025, 11:41 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/02/26/epa-enda
ngerment-finding-trump-climate/

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has privately urged the White House to strike down a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat climate change, according to three people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

The 2009 “endangerment finding” cleared the way for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act by concluding that the planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on emissions from cars and power plants.

By repealing the endangerment finding, the Trump administration would be taking one of its most consequential steps yet to derail federal climate efforts. In recent days, the administration has also blocked work that is central to international climate research and barred federal scientists and diplomats from attending a major climate event in China.

EPA officials weighed whether to reverse the endangerment finding during President Donald Trump’s first term but opted not to do so.

Conservatives have argued that repealing the finding is critical to unraveling what they see as burdensome limits on emissions from various sectors of the economy. Environmentalists, in contrast, say the finding has justified stronger regulations that have yielded enormous benefits for the planet and public health.

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order that tasked the EPA with reviewing the “legality and continuing applicability of” the endangerment finding. The order gave Zeldin 30 days to submit recommendations to Russell Vought, the head of the White House budget office.

EPA officials have not shared the recommendations publicly. EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou declined to comment on the matter Tuesday, saying in an email, “EPA is in compliance with this aspect of the President’s Executive Order.”

Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff at the end of Trump’s first term and wrote the EPA chapter in the conservative blueprint Project 2025, has been advising the administration on repealing the endangerment finding, according to the three individuals briefed on the matter.

Jonathan Brightbill, who was a top deputy in the Justice Department’s environment and natural resources division during Trump’s first term, has also provided legal advice, these people said. Brightbill recently served on the Trump transition team at the Justice Department and is a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn.

Gunasekara and Brightbill did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The endangerment finding has sparked legal and political battles in Washington for more than 15 years. In 2007, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In response, the EPA first issued the endangerment finding and then established the first-ever carbon limits for vehicles and power plants.

During Trump’s first term, skeptics of mainstream climate science filed a petition asking the EPA to repeal the determination. But agency lawyers rejected that petition on Trump’s last day in office in 2021.

Allies of the fossil fuel industry cheered the idea that the administration would revisit the issue.

“They unfortunately didn’t do this in the first term, so I’m pleased to see that they’re working on this in the second term,” said Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, an advocacy group for the oil and gas sector.

Myron Ebell, who led the EPA transition team during Trump’s first term, said nixing the endangerment finding could make it easier to overturn Biden-era climate policies.

“If you want to go back and redo one of these rules, you’re going to have a very spirited court battle if you ignore the endangerment finding,” said Ebell, the chairman of the conservative American Lands Council. “So I think they really need to do this.”

Environmental advocates said they would challenge the move in court. “If the Trump EPA proceeds down this path and jettisons the obvious finding that climate change is a threat to our health and welfare, it will mean more polluted air and more catastrophic extreme weather for Americans,” said David Doniger, a senior strategist and attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We will see them in court.”

Sean Donahue — an attorney who has represented environmental groups that support the endangerment finding — said he thinks any repeal effort will be struck down, given the robust body of scientific evidence on the dangers of planetary warming.

“You can have a lot of good and reasonable disputes about exactly how we should be addressing climate change,” he said in a phone interview. “But the proposition that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities don’t endanger public health and welfare is not a position that could be supported by the science or what EPA’s own record suggests.”

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

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Thursday, March 6, 2025 8:36 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Wy Are We Ignoring The Most Powerful Climate Solution?
Thursday, Mar 06, 2025 - 05:05 PM

Authored by Mollie Engelhart

Everywhere I look, I see people talking about climate change. There’s no shortage of solutions being pushed—electric cars, lab-grown meat, carbon capture technology—but almost none of these address the root of the problem. Meanwhile, the most powerful solution, one that is already proven to work, is ignored: regenerative agriculture.

I am a regenerative farmer. I don’t just believe in the principles of rebuilding soil, restoring ecosystems, and managing land in a way that sequesters carbon—I live it. Every day, I see the results firsthand: healthier soil, stronger crops, increased biodiversity, and livestock that thrive without chemical inputs. I also see how the current system actively works against this approach, prioritizing profit-driven, industrial solutions over simple, nature-based ones.

So why is regenerative agriculture ignored while flashy, high-tech solutions dominate the conversation? The answer is simple: There’s no money in it for corporations.

Regenerative Farming Doesn’t Fit the Profit Model

Industrial agriculture is built on dependency—on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds. It thrives on monocultures that strip the land of nutrients, requiring even more chemical intervention just to sustain itself. Companies make billions selling these inputs, and governments subsidize the entire system. Regenerative farming, on the other hand, restores soil naturally—through cover cropping, rotational grazing, and composting. When farmers build fertility through natural cycles instead of synthetic inputs, chemical companies lose customers.

This is why you don’t see billion-dollar ad campaigns promoting regenerative farming. There is no corporate giant profiting from farmers planting cover crops or integrating livestock with row crops. Instead, money flows to industries that keep farmers dependent on fertilizers, patented seeds, and ever-expanding government subsidies.

The Climate Narrative

The same forces that created our industrial food system also control the climate narrative. It’s a lot easier to sell wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars than it is to fundamentally change the way we farm. The entire renewable energy sector has been built into a multitrillion-dollar industry, with subsidies, government incentives, and global investment pouring into its expansion.

Meanwhile, regenerative agriculture—the one approach that could actively reverse environmental damage and sequester carbon on a massive scale—is barely mentioned. Why? Because it’s nearly impossible for big corporations to monetize regenerative agriculture the way they can monetize other industries.

When a company sells an electric vehicle, a solar farm, or a wind turbine, they make money. When a farmer plants diverse crops, rotates livestock, and stops using chemical fertilizers, no one gets rich—except the farmer and the community that benefits from healthier land and food.

If climate change were truly about reducing emissions and restoring balance to our ecosystems, regenerative agriculture would be front and center. Instead, it’s pushed to the margins because it doesn’t generate profits for those who control the narrative.

Carbon Markets and Technocratic Fixes

Many of the climate solutions we hear about today—carbon credits, lab-grown meat, renewable energy offsets—aren’t about solving the problem. They’re about monetizing it. Instead of reducing emissions at the source, carbon markets allow big polluters to buy their way out of responsibility, trading credits rather than actually regenerating land.


MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/why-are-we-ignoring-most-powerf
ul-climate-solution

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Thursday, March 6, 2025 8:41 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
DOGE Homes In On Shady Climate "Popup NGO Shell" That Received Billions From Biden

A noteworthy statistic from the National Council of Nonprofits reveals that NGOs employ 250,000 people in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. In the DOGE era, taxpayer funds for these nonprofits are under intense scrutiny, sending shockwaves across the Deep State.

The DOGE team appears to have set its crosshairs on a "popup nonprofit shell" company called Climate United Fund.

FOX Business' Elizabeth MacDonald wrote on X that the Climate United Fund received the largest nonprofit grant in history—a $7 billion award from the Biden-Harris regime to operate what has been described as a "massive climate slush fund." Just before the nonprofit shell received billions, it mysteriously blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars.

MacDonald provided more color on the shady Climate United Fund:

This is disturbing – Biden and Obama Democrats created a new beast, the "popup nonprofit shell" they suddenly launch to take in your taxpayer money supposedly for things like climate change and illegal immigration. Major front for taxpayer abuse with accusations of grift growing by the hour. Never saw it like this in decades covering IRS/taxes.

Check out the tax returns for one of these popup NGO shells, the Climate United Fund which got the biggest nonprofit grant in history out of Biden's massive climate slush funds.

Kamala Harris and Biden's EPA chief Michael Regan gave $7 billion total to the suddenly created Climate United Fund in April 2024 after it launched just five months earlier in November 30, 2022 when Its tax returns show it started with a tiny $547K in revs.

But it spent a massive $451K of that $547k in just two months in 2023, a quarter of that on legal fees and the majority $323K mysteriously blown on no one knows what because its tax returns don't say.

It has no stipulated plans for how it will spend your $7B in tax $$, just ephemeral solar projects in Idaho, Arkansas, and Oregon that amount to only about $50M total, a fraction of the $7B. It also gave money out of that $7b to Power Forward Communities linked to Stacey Abrams.

It has little to no details on how much its officers get paid that you typically see on NGO 990s, in fact virtually no details, red flags that it's a shell.

It supposedly is a partnership betw Dem insiders at investment firm Calvert Impact Capital, Community Preservation Corp. and a group called "Self-Help" (irony noted).

Beth Bafford is its CEO, a former "special assistant" in Obama's OMB and a regional field director for the Obama Campaign.

As we tweeted about a month ago, it has ties to Democratic Party of California chairman and California State Treasurer Phil Angelides, Obama's Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, United Farm Workers of America co-founder Dolores Huerta and Patrice Willoughby of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Judge Glock, the Director of Research and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, noted on X that the Climate United Fund got your $7B after submitting a small 49-page report. That was all it took.

Jeff Carlson described the Climate United Fund as potentially "one of the primary vehicles to take advantage of the giant taxpayer-funded slush funds created by Biden—or whoever was running him."

"This is more than Grant Laundering. This is Program Laundering. And it looks like Obama's fingerprints are all over it," Carlson said.


MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/doge-hones-shady-climate-popup-ngo-s
hell-received-billions-biden

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 31, 2025 10:15 AM

SECOND

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


Arctic sea ice sets a record low maximum in 2025

THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 2025

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/analyses/arctic-sea-ice-sets-record-lo
w-maximum-2025

Arctic sea ice extent appears to have reached its annual maximum on March 22, 2025. This is the lowest maximum in the 47-year satellite record, with previous low maximums occurring in 2017, 2018, 2016, and 2015.
Quote:
I am frankly surprised this page has not been taken down, which is one reason I wanted to make a record of the data here. Angry Bear is fortunate to have it also.
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/03/arctic-sea-ice-makes-new-record-low-
annual-max
https://bonddad.blogspot.com/2025/03/arctic-sea-ice-make-lowest-ever.h
tml

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

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Tuesday, April 8, 2025 9:52 PM

SECOND

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


Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax (Trump is convinced)

US federal agencies to 'unleash' coal energy after Biden 'stifled' it: 'Mine, Baby, Mine'

'Misguided policies from previous administrations have stifled this critical American industry,' Energy Secretary Wright said of coal production

By Emma Colton, Diana Stancy | April 8, 2025 5:37pm EDT

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-federal-agencies-unleash-coal-ener
gy-after-biden-stifled-it-mine-baby-mine

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday afternoon that will cut through red tape surrounding the coal industry, including directing the National Energy Dominance Council to designate coal as a "mineral," end a current pause to coal leasing on federal lands, promote coal and coal technology exports, and encourage the use of coal to power artificial intelligence initiatives, Fox News Digital learned of the upcoming executive order.

The order also instructs the Department of Justice to identify every "unconstitutional" state or local regulation that is "putting our coal miners out of business," according to Trump.

"The value of untapped gold in our country is 100 times greater than the value of all the gold at Fort Knox, and we're going to unleash it and make America rich and powerful again under this order," Trump said Tuesday ahead of signing the order.

"Pound for pound, coal is the single most reliable, durable, secure and powerful form of energy," Trump said. "It's cheap, incredibly efficient, high density, and it's almost indestructible. You could drop a bomb on it, and it's going to be there for you to use the next day, which you can't say with any other form of energy."

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

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