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The Presidential Candidate With a Plan To Run the US On 100% Clean Energy
merbs writes: Thus far, no other candidate has said they're going to make climate change their top priority. Martin O'Malley has not only done that, but he has outlined a plan that would enact emissions reductions in line with what scientists say is necessary to slow global climate change—worldwide emissions reductions of 40-70 percent by 2050. He's the only candidate to do that, too. His plan would phase out fossil-fueled power plants altogether, by midcentury.
AKA the ruin-the-economy candidate.
Human progress since the Industrial Revolution has been based on cheap energy. While in principle I'm all for clean energy, on the timeline he's talking about it will result in a massive increase in energy costs, essentially running us backwards. (It does create jobs, but only in the broken windows sense)
He needs to find a position that's still progressive, but realistic. Voters, even the ones that are actually well-informed and think this through, are not going to pick a candidate that puts clean energy over the economy and their individual well-being.
Ah, well, our choice is easy then. Do not vote for the guy.
Making the country's citizenry suffer for the sake of solving a non-existing problem — well, thank you for making it so easy to dismiss you, Mr. O'Malley.
Yes, I said it. It is a non-existing problem. And until you can find and post here a set of materialized predictions of the Global Warming "scientists", it shall remain non-existing. To qualify, each entry of your list must have two separate links: first to the prediction, the second — to the confirmation of it materializing within 80% of the predicted value(s). The texts must be dated at least a few years apart — predicting tomorrow's weather does not count.
Don't undertake this lightly — my past requests for the same list have resulted in a shit-storm of denunciations, name-calling, and down-modding (just watch the fate of this post), but no list... Somehow, nobody is able to find a link to a prediction published before it materialized. And some resident climate researchers on /. have even grudgingly admitted of being unable to fulfil the request — blaming the deficiencies of my pitiful mind for their failure, of course.
(To avoid overexposing myself to the downmodding haters, I shall not respond to any follow-up, that does not contain the list in the format requested. Sorry.)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So, really, it seems that there are some problems that are preventing the processing.
Those are social problems rather than engineering ones.
Fossil fuel usage will decline as better alternatives become economically viable.
If you add to the cost of fossil fuel the damage they do that time will come much sooner. If my neighbor builds a house by piling all the dirt on my property it will be a lot cheaper for him. If someone burns fossil fuel and warms the planet they don't personally bear the costs. Proper treatment of what economists call "externalities" has to be the job of society in the form of the government. That's what a carbon tax is all about. We solved acid rain at much less costs than anticipated. The miracle of the market really can find the best solution if the costs of externalities are factored in properly. We'll probably never get to zero use of fossil fuels, but we can get to much much less. The pope has done a service by pointing out that it's our moral imperative for the future. Now if only one party would stop saying "we're not scientists" we could make a lot of progress.
And yet Germany is making even better progress with true, natural energy. No nukes needed thank you. Sun, wind and tide can get the job done. But I do fear that assassins will be used to keep big oil and big coal going.
Yes, perhaps we too can do it the German way. All we need to do is reopen all our old coal-fired power plants, while at the same time encouraging Mexico to install nuclear, so we can buy it from them.
Nuclear is only expensive because hippies and NIMBY's and their politician toadies make it so expensive and time-consuming in upfront costs to actually build the plants and then later to store the waste. Yucca Mountain would have been storing waste at a reasonable cost a long time ago if the hippies and NIMBY's hadn't gotten in the way. The U.S. would be running on mostly nuclear generated power today if the hippies and NIMBY's and their fear-mongering hadn't gotten in the way. The U.S. *PIONEERED* nuclear power, yet today countries like France are way ahead of us in per capita nuclear power generation. Why? Because of the fucking hippies and NIMBY's and their bullshit!
And hilariously, the very same hippies and NIMBY'S responsible for the high cost of nuclear turn around and criticize nuclear for being too expensive!
You are correct, except in your definition of a Ponzi scheme. Simply paying people out of current receipts is not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme involves creating the illusion of high returns on investment by paying out the capital from new investors and calling it profit on the old investments while claiming that all of the original investments are still there. The difference is that Social Security does not claim you have any capital invested nor that you are making any profit - it has always been portrayed as paying current retirees from a tax on current workers (albeit, with some money put aside to smooth out the highs and lows caused by the employment and retirement numbers). The numbers can deceive people about the federal budget deficit, but it is not a Ponzi scheme by Social Security.