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Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic To Lead EPA Transition (cbsnews.com)
Billly Gates writes: Trump's transition team is steamrolling ahead to transition the government. Trump chose Myron Ebell to oversee environmental policies. Myron Ebell is chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of climate change denialists and alarmists. Scientific American provides some background information about Ebell in a report from earlier this year: "In a biography submitted when he testified before Congress, he listed among his recognitions that he had been featured in a Greenpeace 'Field Guide to Climate Criminals,' dubbed a 'misleader' on global warming by Rolling Stone and was the subject of a motion to censure in the British House of Commons after Ebell criticized the United Kingdom's chief scientific adviser for his views on global warming. More recently, Ebell has called the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan for greenhouse gases illegal and said that Obama joining the Paris climate treaty 'is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate's authority.' He told Vanity Fair in 2007, 'There has been a little bit of warming ... but it's been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it's caused by human beings or not, it's nothing to worry about.' Ebell's views appear to square with Trump's when it comes to EPA's agenda. Trump has called global warming 'bullshit' and he has said he would 'cancel' the Paris global warming accord and roll back President Obama's executive actions on climate change."
People don't stop breeding,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually, between education, economics, and so forth, yeah they do. Several countries already have negative or neutral birthrates and are only net positive due to immigration.
There is no reason to beleive humans could not acheive equilibrium.
Do you realize what the difference in magnitude between 100,000 and 100 is?
It's about the same as the difference between a walking pace and a hypersonic aircraft.
Oh, fuck you. The richest nation on the planet, with 4% of the population, produces a quarter of the world's pollution directly. And even the Indian and Chinese pollution you whine about is to power factories, producing your electronics and cheap shit for Wal-Mart for you to buy.
Meanwhile, I wonder Trump thinks he can cancel the Paris Climate Accord? WIll he take take some white out to cover over the names of the other signatories?
Libya and Syria were civil revolts by subject populations against dictators, in both cases resisted with military force. In Libya the western world organized and deposed a dictator as required. In Syria the fallout of the motivational failure of the Republican party and the deadlock they inflict on the most powerful nation prevents equivalent and necessary actions to remove Assad.
This is one of the scare pieces the media ran to frighten liberals into destroying trump.
The article was written BEFORE Tuesday.
And judging from the cesspool responses in this thread, I'm also going to be exiting from reading and commenting here.
Beau, you should be ashamed of yourself. Either you aren't doing your job and being an editor, or you are abusing your job and being a jackass.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
IF global warming is anthropogenic - WE ARE FUCKED. Sticking a carbon tax is like putting a toll on a toilet at a bar and expecting that people will stop peeing.
Under capitalism, taxing something is basically the best way we have to encourage people not to do it, especially if the money is spent cleaning up after the people who do the thing anyway. We have alternatives to carbon release (even if the alternative is just to fix as much as we emit) and if we don't take them, we're gonna have a bad time. It may not even be necessary for industry to have net zero carbon emissions; it may be that if we ratchet back substantially we'll find a stasis point at which we can reasonably operate.
There are alternatives to carbon release, and the free market will find them if you make carbon release expensive. You know what doesn't work, though? Cap and trade schemes. Carbon caps are helpful, but if you let people trade you miss the point entirely. If you tax, then alternatives will be found.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The US needs energy independence. Renewables are now providing some of the cheapest electricity (recent bids for offshore wind power in Europe are at levels below electricity from coal). Renewables employs more people than fossil fuels in the USA. Renewables don't rely on a politically unstable region of the world, where the US has had to spend huge resources to ensure continued supplies.
We need oil today, but our investment should be in renewables. Focusing on fossil fuels is not an economically sound decision, even if you discount global climate change.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Teach them scientists with their fancy book-learnin' a less, once and for all. Who's with me?
If ignorance was good enough for my daddy and my grandaddy before me, then by gum, it's good enough for me. Godspeed you Mr President.
You are welcome on my lawn.
IF global warming is anthropogenic then it is a direct function of population size.
Nonsense. We could build things to last and keep them longer. We could use more insulation so that we use less heating oil. We could make hay while the sun shines not just literally but also in manufacturing so that we can use more wind power and the like which goes through production cycles. It's affected by population size, but there's a whole lot of other factors. Right now the primary driver is greed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am an economist. There is really very little difference between a tax and cap and trade. The tax is great if you know the cost of remediation or are pretty sure you know the price of the externality. But if you know your target quantity, then cap (at that target) and trade makes the most sense. The main difference is that in cap and trade you might issue permits instead of charging for them. Simple fix, cap and sell. You could even make it revenue neutral by using the revenue to cut the income tax.
But there is something we can do about climate within the scale of a century or two, and we do that by stopping the vomiting of large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. What you're doing is the last redoubt of the AGW deniner, to accept, but insist that short term goals should override long term goals.
If that's the case, why don't you light your house on fire and say "Well, at least I'll be warm tonight."
Beyond that, the costs to the US and global economies over the next few decades is go to mount and mount, and unless you're in your 70s or 80s, it's likely you'll be paying just like the rest of us for it, so in other words, being selfish and short sighted is fucking yourself over. And for what? It's not like the universe doesn't have plenty of other ways to produce energy. Are you really so fucking moronic that you want to sacrifice even your own well being so some rich fucking assholes can make a decade or two more profits?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
She exported fracking the world as Secretary of State. She waged war on Libya and Syria to keep the supply of energy moving. She was going to continue in the fine tradition of Obama - who was a bigger oil man than Bush and Cheney combined.
That's the problem with all the whining and bitching from Dems and the media, before the election, now, and after Trump takes the oath of office - every criticism you can make of Trump applies to Hillary Clinton, as much if not more so. The only "difference" here is that Hillary would utter the occasional platitude that we need to do something about climate change, while continuing to drill for more and more oil, and mine for more and more coal.
Excuse me, but the story isn't about Hillary. She has NOTHING to do with this decision. You should stop trying to avoid the issues.
If things keep going this way, I'm all for the UN coming in and setting up a new provisional government. This insanity has to come to an end some way.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
So let me get this straight. If you lived on a street where several of your neighbors were murderers, your solution wouldn't be to try to get them put away, your solution would be to grab an ax and join them in the frenzy?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Less funny longer time scale:
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx...
and it cost her Ohio. Coal's pretty worthless if you're not willing to allow massive pollution of the kind that has immediately negative consequences for people's quality of life. Sure, you can make steel with it instead of burning it for power, but there's a glut of Chinese steel that's not going away anytime soon.
The thing about Hilary is she wasn't going to make things better but she also wasn't going to make them worse. Trump will accelerate all the bad stuff while his running mate + supreme court picks take away women's reproductive rights. If you have a wife, girlfriend or daughter and no anything about the terror that is child birth left up to God's whim you know this is terrifying...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
1. The SA article is dated September 26, but the submitter carefully worded the opening sentence to make it sound like a post-election event ("Trump's transition team is steamrolling ahead to transition the government"). Those people we call "editors" either didn't check it or didn't care.
2. The SA article presents this as an absolute fact, but then essentially says "a little birdie told me so." Other sources (including one written today) are honest enough to call it what it is: a rumor.
Consider the scaling, on the scaling to the left our current trend would make for an almost vertical ascent.
According to Wikipedia he's got a BA in philosophy and a M.Sc in politics. Between getting out of school and setting himself as a climate expert he worked as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry.
He has never done anything STEM related or worked in any other field but politics.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is no logic to the reasoning. It is the reasoning of sociopaths and morons.
Didn't you get the memo? That is all the reasoning that is required to win an election for the control of a first world country these days. The sad part is the more I think about it, I don't blame Russia's hacking, Assange, Clinton's mediocre candidacy, stupid email issues blown insanely out of proportion, infinite fake stories, lies so thick they are impossible to keep up with or an of it, insane amounts of free press for trump, or any of the other ways the election was made far too easy for Trump.
I blame the people. It is not republican ideas or democrat ideas that are destroying the country. Both have good points at times and take things too far at times. No the true issues is the culture of anti-intellectualism. A great many people are actually proud of being fairly uninformed and easily duped.
How do you fix that? Seriously, how do you fix that? We tend to downplay the importance of liberal arts and history. Hell when I was in high school I thought I'd never need that.
We have to do better. The arc of history can hardly continuing to bend towards justice when the driver is incompetant.
... when now even biologists can detect the impact of global warming on the biosphere.
I am sure if we just keep ignoring the problem, it will go away.
As unfalsifiable as any inference from a geological or planetary or fossil record. Odd how this never seems to factor in unless we are dealing with climate science.
It's almost as if you don't want to know how the inference is made. Now why would that be?
Yah, it is a good thing we killed all the buffaloes and prevented their methane farts from warming the planet, the way the dinosaurs did.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
No, it's a direct function of the aggregate amount of heat-trapping gasses put into the atmosphere by all of the people on earth. If you could magically lower the rate of population growth to zero or below tomorrow, yet at the same time more and more of the developing world adopts more carbon energy demanding western lifestyles, you still won't have fixed the problem. Conversely, if we could magically make it so that we could have an equivalent lifestyle on a small fraction of the carbon-producing energy we use now, we could still maintain population growth with greatly reduced carbon output.
I'm not arguing in favor of continued population growth, anything but. But population alone is not the driving factor.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
So you get to decide which countries around the world have improper leaders, eh? What other countries should we invade on your suggestion?
Belgium. I vote for invading Belgium. I don't like their leader.
The article is so non-newsworthy
Apparently it is newsworthy because apparently a lot of voters had no clue what they were doing.
Someone had to do it.
What is the speculation based on?
Science.
I guess if you get all your science "knowledge" from crappy magazines you are going to believe in a lot of things that. Did you invest in housing real estate in 2005 since Time said it was going to be awesome (http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101050613,00.html)?
Scientific papers were a tad different than your interpretation of them it would seem: http://aerosol.ucsd.edu/classe... there are some charts 9 pages in if you prefer pictures to words.
The ice core samples have a typical resolution of hundred of years, sometimes a bit higher, combining with sediment analysis can narrow it down further. The data is plenty precise enough to reconstruct the thermal record.
But let's drop the pretence that this about the science.
You first, moran:
Hillary Clinton Tried to Push Fracking on Other Nations When She Was Secretary of State, New Emails Reveal.
Now that Tesla's fucked all Elon's got left is his Mars project.
If you'd asked me last week if I'd go to Mars I'd have said "no way".
Where do I sign up?
all those people complaining about elites and insiders are in for a shock
That's the problem with voting for "change." You are going to get it.
I was very surprised, just based off reading comments on this site over the past few days, how many ardent Trump supporters are here. I say surprised not because I am assessing a value judgement but because US presidential voting in recent years has become much more strongly correlated with education level, and I presumed that a tech site would reflect certain patterns as a result. (Full disclosure: I did not like any of the available ballot options and wrote in my presidential vote for Alexander Hamilton. I live in a solidly colored state on the West Coast and knew that my little exercise in protest would not have any meaningful effect on my state's electoral college votes, otherwise I would have voted seriously.)
At any rate, it turned out that many many more people than pollsters and the media expected cast their votes in the cause of upsetting the status quo. There's nothing wrong with being unsatisfied with the way things are and wanting to lob a big water balloon full of "f--k you" at the powers that be in this country.
When you vote for the loser, you enter a world of "coulda woulda shoulda" and you can just theorize how things would have been better. But when you vote for the winner, you have to own that vote because you're getting what you said you wanted. That's the price of winning. And it will be fascinating to see whether the people who cast a ballot to shake up the system like what they get when the system actually gets shaken up...
"95% of all Slashdot
Ben Carson one of the best pediatric neurosurgeons in the country. Was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at John Hopkins, that happens to be a Christian. Yep he screwed up a bit on the vitamins crap. Much better than the two previous Obummer sec'y who were both politicians, neither of the two had any education in medical field.
Because modern humans didn't exist 200 million years ago and didn't leave Africa until 20-thousand years ago so global temperatures prior to that are utterly irrelevant since we've NEVER had to survive (let alone to try thrive) in them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Don't bother looking when you're crossing the road because an an aeroplane might crash on your head. So develop a man portable air warning radar THEN think about getting new glasses.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yep, apparently a science budget that has been set by republicans for 6 years has been funding only the scientists who keep finding what the republicans really didn't want to hear. Hell the last several chairmen of the senate science committee were all very vocal deniers and the majority of them were creationists (Apparently knowing anything about, or even LIKING, science actually DISQUALIFIES you for the job of overseeing the government's science funding).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That's because deniers are overwhelmingly conservative and the position that short-term goals must have an absolute override over long-term outcomes is quintessential to all their thinking. It's the same reason they reject things like UBI, free college or universal healthcare - they see the immedate price (a short term goal) and ignore that the cost of all these things is actually NEGATIVE. They don't think far enough ahead to see that the return on investment is bigger than the price.
The same applies with climate change. The investments we need to make to change course are all cost-negative, but all they see is the short-term price-positive. And they are even LESS inclined to want to make the investments since the majority of them sincerely do not believe they'll live to get the ROI. Since there is nothing in it for them, and they don't actually LIKE their kids... well fuck everybody. But saying "fuck everybody" tends to have limited political clout (the new president-elect being an interesting exception) - so in order to actually fuck everybody else, their best course of action is to deny there is any reason to invest. That these denials fly in the face of overwhelming evidence, science itself, rational thought, critical thinking and indeed requires you to stick your head so far up your own rectum that if they ever needed brain surgery they would have to go to a proctologist clearly has never dissuaded them from the course.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The Trump effect is not a generational thing its a regional thing - look at the electoral college results map. If you're pissed, blame the right category of people please.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Probably they are betting on the chance, climate change won't affect them.. :D
1. If climate change doesn't happen, they won.
2. If climate change happens, it will destroy the liberals living on the coasts
Win-win situation.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
"hundred of years" -- really? we're talking about global warming since 1880 or so, surely hundred(s) of years is still too vague?
the real dilemma is, there are many ways the science could be wrong, but we trump that by saying, we cannot afford to wait. but i think that's a bad strategy, because the real issue is about risk. the more people try to insist the science is certain for all practical purposes, the less convincing it actually becomes, because world+dog know it cannot be that certain, because you're making scenarios about the future. i realise the PR is to insist it is certain for all practical purposes, but that strategy is about to blow up in people's faces, just like identity politics blew up in the face of the democrats.
two things everyone should be talking about: risk, where "doing nothing" is also on the table, because doing something is also a risk (unintended consequences, for starters). second, we need to own up our own values and attitudes and put them on the table and say, "i believe the world should devalue growth for its own sake" or "i believe humanity is needlessly greedy" or "i believe we have to develop as fast as we can, that that's the challenge, to explore new horizons" and so on. put the values on the table, and argue over those values as ethical questions worthy of their own inquiry. for example, should climate change plans trump human rights? well, that's an ethical question.
too often, people say "science" or "anti-science" when they really mean, my values versus your values.
science doesn't prove any particular values or ethical outlook. dictators often use natural resources, or their lack, as a weapon -- we should start with the values in any case. if climate change wasn't a known problem, wouldn't people still hold the values as the thing of most concern, to be what really matters for humanity?
mixing science and values leads directly to the kind of mind-fuckery where religious zealots have to invent their own "science" in order to "prove" that their own values -- no abortions -- are the "correct" values. and the story goes that margaret thatcher, one of the UK's most right-wing politicians, actually started championing global warming as the reason why the UK had to shut down its coal mines and so destroy the coal unions and cut off the miners' strikes.
which only goes to show that science and values are not the same game, not by a long shot. so yes, it isn't about science. that's really the point.
You are the perfect example of the intolerant left, you claim to be all accepting, but you're really not.
Tolerance of intolerance is not tolerance. It's accepting abuse.
In my experience, the left is FAR more xenophobic and intolerant than the right is,
Get back to me when the left goes back to lynching people, or dragging them behind pick-em-up trucks. The right never stopped.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
IF global warming is anthropogenic - WE ARE FUCKED. Sticking a carbon tax is like putting a toll on a toilet at a bar and expecting that people will stop peeing.
Under capitalism, taxing something is basically the best way we have to encourage people not to do it, especially if the money is spent cleaning up after the people who do the thing anyway...
BINGO! Regulations only work if the taxpayers are willing to fund a significant number of inspectors to enforce the regulations.have to fall in line. Those that don't will get surprise visits from inspectors, who will generally demand the unpaid tax at triple damages. That prevents, or at least reduces, transgressions.
I have heard some manufacturers quite literally say that they would prefer to use a "less poisonous" solvent in their process (for example). But if they did, its slightly higher cost would destroy their competitive advantage, and bankrupt them.
Really. There are plant-owners in industries that would much rather use a less toxic process solvent, but are prevented by free-market forces from doing so without losing any competitive advantage. They really do exist, but can do nothing unless the regulators or tax-men impose the same requirement on everyone in a market sector simultaneously and equally.
The EPA's SuperFund is a good example of this force for environmental clean-up in action.
The Community Reinvestment Act has never FORCED a bank to loan anyone money. Ever. It merely required that the banks stop discriminating by having different loan terms based on neighborhood.
That doesn't mean they were required to loan anyone money, only that they had to treat everyone the same.
And there was nothing in the law - any law - that required the banks to over-leverage, or lie about the ratings of their investment instruments, or to hide the poisonous mortgages in bundled-tiered-re-bundled packages.
> Conservative economists were warning about the bubble but were ignored.
Cite one.
=Smidge=