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Proposal For United Nations To Study Climate-Cooling Technologies Rejected (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A push to launch a high-level study of potentially risky technological fixes to curb climate change was abandoned on Thursday at a U.N. environmental conference in Nairobi, as countries including the United States raised objections. "Geoengineering" technologies, which are gaining prominence as international efforts to curb climate-changing emissions fall short, aim to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or block some of the sun's warmth to cool the Earth. They could help fend off some of the worst impacts of runaway climate change, including worsening storms and heatwaves, backers say. But opponents argue the emerging technologies pose huge potential risks to people and nature, and could undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not least because many are backed by fossil-fuel interests. Observers at the U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi said the Swiss-backed proposal was rejected in part because it called for a "precautionary principle" approach to geoengineering the climate. That principle says great care must be taken in starting activities that have unclear risks for human health or the environment. The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction. You solve it by doing things in a balanced way from now on so that over time, the net result is balanced.
It's not like Lincoln said "okay, that's enough with black slavery, let's make the white man be slaves for a couple of centuries to balance things out"
You fix a problem by doing the right thing, today, and moving forward.
In this particular case, it means passing laws which put stricter limits on emissions than what currently exist, so that manufacturers are forced (yes forced, because as much as we might want them to, they aren't going to do it entirely voluntarily... or certainly not at the speeds that are required) to innovate and come up with long term environmentally friendly solutions to the problems that we are facing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We need to understand these things better, knowledge is power, a little knowledge can do exactly as you described, bad things. We need a FULL understanding of this desperately.
[($)]
What should be done is obvious: start with emission reductions and invest heavily in sequestration techniques. It is also obvious how to distribute the costs - according to cumulative CO2 contributions.
Good luck having this happen with the greedy and selfish US having a veto vote.
Mark Shepard on Restoration Agriculture - "Annual agriculture is all about living through our concepts... our idea we've imposed on reality & when reality doesn't behave according to our idea, what do we do? We input... we can never input enough to make our false concept correct." http://bit.ly/1GnbtAA
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
You don't care about fixing a problem but forcing a preferred solution down people's throats.
You can see the same thing in the way nuclear isn't even a thought in the Green New Insanity.
The UN already has plans for fighting global warming... This idea of using technology to counter-act global warming runs afoul of their preferred plan: Agenda 21 (depopulate the humans).
We'll revisit this proposal in 20 years when its obvious that everyone's efforts to try and curb emissions has completely failed. Keeping with the trend of humanity being completely reactionary in all this.
Americans "hate Nazis" only in Hollywood propaganda. In real life, Dr. Joseph Merkwurdigliebe was buried in Arlington with honors after being snatched from the jaws of justice and brought home to work for DARPA.
The problem is that climate change has become totally politicized. It wasn't always this way. In 2007, a debate moderator asked the Republican candidates if they thought climate change was a "serious problem". All but Fred Thompson agreed. That is unimaginable today. Denialism has become a right wing litmus test.
The left isn't much better. They mostly see climate change as an opportunity to push an agenda for taxes, coercive big government, and centralization. So they reject even considering solutions that don't serve that agenda. They don't fear geo-engineering will have unintended consequences. They fear the opposite: That it will turn out to be a good solution.
Then an extremist shooter goes nuts live streaming a terror attack...whatever they were installing was apparently "just in time". Now we just have to wait for the prewritten legislation to get rubber stamped through congress by both parties. Watch for Patriot Act 2 this summer!
APGW is too much of a cash cow for Political leaders to sacrifice power over. The solution can only allowed to be a political one, it can never be an economic or technological one.
The proposal should go forward if for nothing else than to learn more, regardless of whether the technology/research is useful or not... used or not. Everyone nay saying it likely feels threatened because they are only driven by fear and ignorance. Seriously what is it going to hurt to research it? Other than your personal politics?
the research could actually go towards helping prove that APGW is real, rather than just a theory. It may also help identify better metrics so we can make an accurate prediction as well... since we know they have only failed in all of their models.
Then we'll let you start fucking with our world's climate maybe. Maybe.
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Makes perfect sense. But it still doesn't explain why my frog's gay.
Um, no. The left does not fear that climate change will have a good solution. You're just being silly.
This has nothing to do with your money you fucking mong, and everything to do with EVERYONE'S air and quality of life.
Eat a cock, Reagan would piss on your head.
captcha: ecstasy
less than $100 a ton. x the Atmosphere = A LOT OF MONEY!
Good to know Saudi Arabia is looking out for us. LOL
Truth is, the frogs were always gay.
The UN has been transformed over the past several decades to transfer wealth and power from group of people to another. It's mission has totally changed and should be abolished.
always have kittens at the mere thought that someone might be able to solve the problem without carting trillions of dollars out of the USA and distributing it worldwide. I mean, if we were to figure out how to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and have pre-industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere in 20 years, then they would have no reason to attempt to steal all our money and bring poverty to the citizens of the USA.
Its hard to believe that there are those that do NOT see that this movement is engineered in Moscow in order to damage their chief rival, the USA. The fact that those who beat this drum are aghast at geo-engineering is ample evidence that the whole thing has, as a goal, the diminishment of the USA rather than actually solving the CO2 in the atmosphere problem.
Help me understand your position...
The refrigerator alarmists are rejecting the "turn up AC to fix slowly warming refrigerator" approach because they'd rather fix the refrigerator
And you must think they just want your money... because the AC plan is fine and that's the cheaper way to solve the problem?
"Carting trillions dollars out of USA" is on par with "negroes are raping our womuns". Also, you have not figured out how to "suck out the CO2", and are unlikely to find it, so shut up and gtfo.
And herein we see the Dunning-Kruger effect. Nuclear good, geo-engineering bad! Am I a nuclear engineer or a climate modeler? Why no of course not! But I read third hand sources that wrote opinion articles on these subjects that tangentially might be related to these professions. Thus hear me internet! Hear me when I say we should do nothing to stop the doom of all human civilization. All is well!
Nuclear power is socialism. Deal with it idiotic Republican snowflakes. Socialism and fascism are inherently and historically conflicted, you are completely uneducated.
As someone who had an ancestor working for the allies in sigint and later for IBM as a translator at the warcrimes tribunal and who, if it isn't obvious, is very much of German descent, you sir are an absolute, jumped up idiot.
they would have no reason to attempt to steal all our money and bring poverty to the citizens of the USA.
You would have been spot on with this sharp and super-smart observation, if not for the small fact that The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
Its hard to believe that there are those that do NOT see that this movement is engineered in Moscow in order to damage their chief rival, the USA
This conspiracy theory would have been very interesting as well, except that Moscow is, as a major fossil fuels exporter, among the staunchest opponents of CO2 emissions reductions.
You're probably just as "well" informed about the other aspects of the global warming issues.
Um yes ... the Trotsky-slut bitch.progs have no desire for anything , but the reduction of USA std. of Living. They expect to gain power from those dispossessed of jobs and property. Trotsky-slut bitch.progs ought to be bitch.slapped into the gutter, pissed on and fed to DemoRat drug-dealer pittbulls ... snarl ... bite ... riptear ...
Yes, and in order to gain that knowledge you must... NOT study it?
They didn't vote down implementing technologies, they voted down gaining knowledge.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yeah! If ya wants caputlaism ya gots ta go with glowrt powrr, sully repubeican inelc fangot!
No one is stopping the USA developing such technologies, and indeed it and other countries are funding such research, such as UK, Germany. However it is really hard to do. It's not engineered by Moscow - it's far too broad a movement for that to be credible.
If global warming was caused by us adopting technologies without understanding the consequences, why would anyone think that the solution is adopting more technologies the consequences of which we don't understand?
Um, no. The left does not fear that climate change will have a good solution. You're just being silly.
I don't think so. It is not just geo-engineering that the left opposes. They are also opposed to carbon sequestration and nuclear. Both of these use our existing industrial infrastructure, and don't require any big new government initiatives. The economics of building new nukes is questionable, but shutting down working existing nukes was insane.
The left loves big coercive new initiatives. Yet most of the progress that we have made so far, such as LED bulbs, efficient variable speed motors, better insulation, more efficient engines, better batteries, cheap gas from hydraulic fracturing to replace coal, have all come from innovations by capitalists.
The problem with the "Green New Deal" is that it ignores solutions that are working, and focuses instead on spending lots of tax dollars on things that have failed.
A very small but visible segment of the left does fear a good solution. They're the homeopathic types who see climate change as a sort of Earth goddress retribution for technology, through the lens of their back-to-nature values. They want the only solution to be the end of industry and return to a fantasy idyllic native american tribal balance with nature.
I certainly wouldn't say they have any political sway in the democratic party, though.
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No one is stopping the USA developing such technologies, and indeed it and other countries are funding such research, such as UK, Germany ...
... China.
I actually took time to search for info and that is what it comes down to (*). Why should we spend billions when the science of it is not clear i.e. we are shooting while not seeing the perp. What is worse - most of the effects of the measures I see my government and the 'activists' are pushing have only one thing that one can say about them - they are damned expensive. Some of them are probably outright dangerous on top. Turning off all the coal power plants as well as the nuclear power plants is idiotic for any nation unless the decision makers have diesel generators and do not give a flying f. about the rest of the population.
* - Go and do your own search on it. I did this not because I had doubts 8b humans have no impact but because I was wondering why again and again the news of terrible things that are attributed to global warming proved not to be true. One such case was the sickly polar bear that some 'journalist' made a photo of at the the end of 2014. The recent discussion of so called environmentalists about CO2 and NOx on German streets made me even more angry as they not only have no data to back up their danger claims but also positioned measuring stations deliberately in wrong locations. I have now developed skepticism to all these 'activists' claim. Greta phenomenon is also making me wonder who is manipulating us and for what benefit. So these are the reasons I took time and actually tried to look for it. I am not a scientists so I have no real understanding of all of processes involved of course. As an engineer I have a clue what complexity of modeled processes means however.
If you had an ancestor who was being paid by IBM during the WWII, he or she was receiving 3rd Reich money paid for helping the Nazis run their concentration camps. Be proud.
You do such a thorough job of "speaking for them" - perhaps they should hire you as their spokesperson.
Why can't we just plant more trees?
Atmospheric carbon dioxide sequestration is not a very good solution, as the concentration of CO2 is so low, that removal will require a huge amount of energy, and this energy will have to be produced in some way.
As for nuclear, it is no less problematic than the fossil fuels. First, it is a heavily subsidized industry which will simply not exist on its own if not for the "need" of several countries to maintain nuclear arsenals. Extraction and enrichment are very resource intensive and polluting operations; reactor operation is inherently unsafe regardless of what you hear; reprocessing the spent fuel is dangerous and a huge risk in all possible ways (health, political and terrorist, economic, ecological), and storing nuclear waste is still a problem with no solution; most of the spent fuel is currently stored on site at the nuclear plants in conditions that aren't good enough even for chemical poisons. On top of it, nuclear power generation is about as efficient as internal combustion engine.
There is no scenario on Earth where nuclear is a winner.
Before having to "take carbon out of the atmosphere", just go to the source, it will be cheaper and way easier. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
You obviously know nothing about nuclear power outside of media hype over bombs, chernobyl, and fukushima. Go read for yourself which is worse: the full supply chain for solar cells or nuclear power. I would say you would be surprised, but you won't do it because this was a disingenuous statement out of ignorance.
Source?
Yeah, buddy, except that I am a senior reactor physicist at a real nuclear power plant and I do nuclear power for a living. But come on, be specific, teach me, how is the wind turbine supply chain worse than fuel reprocessing?
Think of the tragedy if we solved the problem overnight. The attempt to redistribute wealth from America to hostile countries who hate us would fail. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Either we do something expensive to undo CO2's effects or we do something LESS (burn carbon fuels). This is pretty simple thinking and the only reason why it still gets questioned as to which to choose is because there's a shitload of cash in burning carbon fuels and that money in a capitalist system has much more power than people do.
Why was the whole point of the Paris agreement to take money from America and give it to hostile countries who hate us? It was a scam. We have tons of our own people who need help, after we fix their problems we can start meddling in other countries.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is good for a 10 year reduction.)
3) Has it escaped everyone that we are currently adding about $1T to the National Debt every year and NOBODY has a clue what to do about it - at least nobody in Washington (Clue: The last year that the National Debt didn't go up was 1957. We've raised and lowered the income taxes numerous times since without achieving that desired result. It's blinding obvious to me that income taxes are absolutely incapable of funding the gov't, and should be abolished. The Founders set up the nation to run on consumption taxes such as excise taxes and tariffs. We should abolish all the income taxes - personal, corporate, capital gains, payroll, self-employment, alternative minimum, gift, estate, etc. etc. - and replace them all with consumption taxes once again. The FairTax is the best proposal since it is the only progressive consumption tax, but something - anything along those lines would have a better chance of funding some solutions that we need fairly urgently.)
Gee, solving multiple problems at once? We can't have that!
Ezekiel 23:20
All the things mentioned are much less a problem than the simple fact that new nuclear costs over ten cents per kWh. Nobody's going to build such a thing anymore. Why, when wind turbines cost 60-70% less?
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh, and #4, the subject of the whole thread is that the powers that be have decided NOT to research any such generalized solution such as sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere with machinery, but instead attempt to continue going down the impossible road of leaving the carbon in the ground. That is, of course, what would be necessary to start lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere - we have to stop putting it in the atmosphere in the 1st place, and can only do that by stopping the fossil fuel burning. We can't do the transportation sector without some dramatically improved batteries that are also cheap - it does no good to have a battery that costs too much because poor people still have to have a way to move around the USA without it costing too much, otherwise they die from living in poverty, which can take 10 years off your life - a big chunk when compared to smoking that can take up to 7 years off your life. But we don't even want to TRY to avoid having to do the impossible by researching other approaches. This still screams "conspiracy to bankrupt the USA via bogus science" to me. Its like phishing attacks in the email, they give you information designed to scare hell out of you, such as you supposedly just requested that your email be discontinued, and then give you a bogus link to click that will send the malware to your computer to encrypt everything on your drives that looks like your personal data so they can sell you the decryption key at an exorbitant price. Only this bunch is telling us we have to stop using the thing that makes modern life enjoyable, cheap energy, and go back to either farming with animal power or use expensive energy and kill some millions of folks. I call BS, and think we should study things like actually sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere by machinery - expensive, too, but at least theoretically possible without killing millions of folks.
That's such a cop-out statement.
Pollution is bad, regardless of the long term impacts on the planet. I've been to Beijing, the orange haze is nasty.
We should be pushing technologies that eliminate the largest portion of pollutants.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Fixing the refrigerator without killing a lot of folks that are on the lower income end of the economic chart is currently impossible. The GW Alarmists are all about increasingly sucking $$$ out of the USA, and thus killing American citizens via casting them into poverty. Some of us would rather research approaches that do NOT kill millions of Americans by casting them into poverty while trying to pay for the approach of fixing the refrigerator, which is actually beyond repair with the technology we have available to us now. We'd rather turn down the AC, and continue with the refrigerator that is still working, just somewhat poorly. Maybe someday someone will invent the magic battery that is cheap and high enough capacity to compete with fossil fuel cars and cheap and lightweight enough for automotive use and cheap and recharges fairly quickly and cheap and power dense enough to shoehorn it into vehicles and... oh BTW, cheap enough to be used by other than rich people. Then the transportation sector can go full-electric, we will have fixed the refrigerator with new technology, and can then run on energy which can be generated by solar and wind and geo and tidal and so forth - and we can leave the carbon in the ground. But ignoring realities and killing folks via massive poverty is not something I'm inclined to favor.
Democrats believe climate change began 100 years ago. Everyone else knows the climate has always been and always will be changing.
Setting aside the logical impossibility of applying the "precautionary principle", the sentence is ambiguous. Who is the "it" calling for the precautionary principle? Is it the Swiss plan, as the wording implies, or the Assembly, which makes more sense in the broader context of the piece? If "it" is the plan to study geoengineering, and the Assembly is being cautious overall, then why the objection (unless suddenly they realized I'm right and the precautionary principle is nonsense) to more caution? If "it" is the Assembly, then the sentence is horribly written but at least it fits with the overall context of the Assembly saying it's a bad/unsafe idea to look at geoengineering solutions.
Oop, hold that thought. Phone call for you.
Here, it's Stalin. He wants to call you a faggot.
Wait. Other line. It's the Chairman. He just finished piling up 5,000 skulls for the revolution, but is graciously taking a moment to also call you a lying faggot.
Wow! Switchboard is full tonight. There's about 100,000,000 dead people who were killed by fascist leftist authoritarians who, strangely enough, all also believe you to be a cum-guzzling gutter fag of the highest order.
Carbon isn't a pollutant. It's a natural part of the life process.
Your ilk has purposefully conflated it with actual pollution, because of said agenda above.
I wish I could believe but when the left got all on board the climate change train, Nuclear was the best solution but they would have nothing to do with it. So no I don't think they want actual solutions.
The left isn't much better. They mostly see climate change as an opportunity to push an agenda for taxes, coercive big government, and centralization.
More projection from the emotionally defective right. Jesus Christ, you're a fucking retard and I get so goddamned tired of reading your bullshit
I don't know who you mean by "The Left" but most liberals are just regular folks who are concerned about the environment. They are not Trotsky-ite subversives, just like "The Right" isn't all Neo-nazi hate mongers. They are just poorly-informed Fox-viewers (just kidding)
Just masking the symptoms of any global problem would only make it much worse (over time), but people could not see it anymore!!!
Until the underlying problem grows into "impossible to mask anymore" stage & suddenly released @ full power!!!
Not to mention, after geoengineering first done, whenever climate does anything bad (flood/drought/hurricane/storm) anywhere in the world, those countries would blame (& ask money for all damages), whatever countries made geoengineering happen!!!
"fascist leftist authoritarians"
If you want to demonize lefties for socialism that's at least intellectually honest. Seeing Fascists as left wing is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the left/right spectrum is. Even Mussolini himself would be happy to inform you of that if you just read his history and understood what happened in Europe that brought about fascism but you just keep going on babbling nonsense.
Riddle me this, if Fascism is left wing then why was Hitler supporting the monarchy loving catholic true believer ultra right wing Franco during the Spanish civil war?
Well, pets tend to take on habits from their owner.
Just look at the New Green Deal. It's ostensibly about climate, but almost entirely about social justice, communism, and the destruction of America as a world power.
Yes, but surely it has SOME downside?
*rimshot*
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Seconded. If you want the country to become ‘woke’ on the carbon problem, then you might want to try not automatically rejecting every technology that might work at scale.
The moment you talk about CO2 as pollution you reveal yourself to be an anti-science idiot, making the the of what you say about anything pointless to read.
The original New Deal, Roosevelt’s plan, included massive hydro projects that generations later are still the best renewable energy sources we have. It also summoned nuclear energy into being, the largest-scale carbon free source that we can still apply today.
The Green New Deal explicitly rejects both technologies, which is why it’s not going to save us any carbon. At best it will create some make-work jobs for wind turbine builders.
Right. We don't even know how to end poverty or what to do with our trash and now we want to control the climate. Stupid humans.
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agenda21
If your solution is to tear down a society that has contributed to the highest standard of living of all time for the majority of the planet, maybe your solution is wrong.
https://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/
They already had proposals that were not to study, but to implement, despite the verbiage used here.
Says it's a plot by the Chinese to keep America from being great again!
They're doing a pretty shit job of it with all the food aid and and free medicine.
Wind turbines don't provide consistent energy. You can't rely on them to provide enough power when you've got a heat wave or cold snap. They're fine as a supplemental power source, but nuclear works great as a reliable source of power.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
So, obviously, curbing emissions is clearly the best approach to arresting climate change. Lowering emissions is Plan A.
But what is wrong with creating a Plan B? Or a complementary project that enhances Plan A?
That study is basically a detailed look at some technologies that might help. It wouldn't implement them; it wouldn't change anything. The purpose of that study is nothing more than to understand our options.
This decision is asinine, but I wouldn't expect anything else from a denialist administration.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
This makes sense if you understand that these people are not so much pro-environment as they are anti-technology.
Wind turbines don't provide consistent energy. You can't rely on them to provide enough power when you've got a heat wave or cold snap. They're fine as a supplemental power source, but nuclear works great as a reliable source of power.
.That completely ignores that there are storage techniques.
Of course the need to vote against gaining knowledge because it has a well known liberal bias.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
That's one of those annoying red herrings. Who is 'automatically rejecting every technology that might work at scale'? I can try to speculate who you're attacking here and why, but f_ that. It's up to you to be specific who you're talking about. Especially because I don't know any group that rejects all solutions. They might reject your favorite solution, but then you're at the same level as the ones you're attacking.
Yes, we should clean up after ourselves and not leave a toxic waste dump for the generations to come, yes, we should limit toxic emissions that can hurt our atmosphere and the air we breath but as it relates to climate changing it's time to adapt to a changing environment rather than trying crazy experiments to "cool" the planet because as the sci-fi geo-engineering joke goes ... this is how the world will end. Large scale focused human meddling with the atmosphere/climate will never end well .... we don't even begin to really understand all of the facets of what makes our climate such that pretty much all weather and climate models are desperately incomplete so any one measure or group of measures could still have serious unforeseen consequences.
Well yeah, the climate deniers need to maintain internal consistency with their collective delusion. Otherwise we'd be led to suspect they're just paid stooges for the coal industry.
-Bob-
They are also opposed to carbon sequestration [wikipedia.org] and nuclear. Both of these use our existing industrial infrastructure, and don't require any big new government initiatives
How, exactly, do you plan on widespread carbon sequestration without a government initiative making it profitable?
Also, nuclear requires a government initiative to deal with the waste since the government is required to deal with it by law. Also, it requires a new government initiative in the form of massive subsidies to make nuclear profitable.
You can not get a full understanding without doing it. And doing it has an enormous potential for disaster.
What would you study? We're already at the point where all that's left would be implementing it, and studying the results.
That implementation has a potential for massive disaster, and is unlikely to produce a feasible clean-up system - none of the proposals are efficient enough to do at sufficient scale to actually fix climate change.
So, huge potential downside affecting vast numbers of people. Tiny potential upside. The alternative, "reduce emissions and stop clear cutting everything", has very little risk and will solve the problem in about the same timetable.
And their utilization is about 15%, which makes it instantly a few times more expensive than nuc. And requirement of backup cources. And transport.
Look at Germany - complete disaster:CO2 emmissions per kWh INCREASED since they started their "green" program pasing out the nukes (they are approx. half-way through to zero now) and are one of the worst in Europe. And surrounding states must constantly go through import/export cycles with Ger. to ballance the instability. Everything for what? a few percent for Angela's popularity (she was pro nuclear but she made this decission to boost her popularity among generally anti-nuke German population,and in worst possible moment - during the Fukushima panic). Angela's departure is already a decade overdue.
Wind turbines don't provide consistent energy.
That is true locally, but not if they are widely disbursed. The wind is always blowing somewhere.
The winds are stronger and steadier at greater heights, so taller turbines produce more reliable power.
Offshore wind is very reliable. Above about about 35N, ocean winds never stop.
.That completely ignores that there are storage techniques.
The problem is that the costs of storage negate many of the benefits of wind.
We need better storage tech, but we should also be building a national HVDC network.
Who is 'automatically rejecting every technology that might work at scale'?
The participants in the UN conference in Nairobi, for starters.
Climate change is a serious issue, and no potential solution should be summarily rejected for political reasons.
It is reasonable to oppose geo-engineering, since we don't yet know enough about the consequences.
It is NOT reasonable to oppose scientific research on geo-engineering out of fear that it may actually work well.
1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
Blowing money on "a start" that can never produce the necessary results isn't exactly the best way to spend money.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is good for a 10 year reduction.)
One key element of the Green New Deal that you are unwilling to understand is the efforts within the program create jobs. Somebody has to actually refit old houses to be better insulated, and so on.
Those jobs reduce poverty, ameliorating the problem you cite here.
3) Has it escaped everyone that we are currently adding about $1T to the National Debt every year and NOBODY has a clue what to do about it
We know exactly what to do about it because that deficit was created by a massive tax cut on the wealthy.
Fixing it is also trivially easy. Reverse those tax cuts. It would require you to give up your tax cut fetish though.
Clue: The last year that the National Debt didn't go up was 1957. We've raised and lowered the income taxes numerous times since without achieving that desired result.
1998-2001 called, and would like to remind you they existed. Though acknowledging that evil liberal tax hikes reduce the deficit and thus debt would require abandoning your tax cut fetish.
It's blinding obvious to me that income taxes are absolutely incapable of funding the gov't, and should be abolished. The Founders set up the nation to run on consumption taxes such as excise taxes and tariffs
The founders also set up the nation to not have a standing military and pressed for limited-to-no foreign entanglements. So, unless you also want massive defense cuts resulting in the US dropping out of being a superpower, you don't actually want to go back to what the founders set up.
Also, between your rant about how terrible poverty is and your tax proposals, you forgot that consumption taxes take a far larger percentage of poor people's income.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide sequestration is not a very good solution
Indeed. But that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about sequestration of highly concentrated CO2 coming directly out of power plants and cement factories.
Using Oxy-fuel combustion, which removes the N2 before burning, results in almost pure CO2 in the exhaust. The CO2 can then either be injected into geological shale formations, or sold as an industrial feedstock.
If it the CO2 is injected, it can improve the yield from shale gas fields, which results in even more CO2 reduction as the cheap gas displaces much dirtier coal.
Laws are not all tyranny.
Marginally true.
But remember: Every time somebody says "There ought to be a LAW!", what they are really saying is "I want people with guns to use violence to stop other people from doing things I don't like!"
Government is violence, and should be used sparingly.
Sometimes that's legitimate, I approve of using violence to stop murders, rapes, and theft. Often it's not, I do not approve of using violence to prevent people from speaking their opinions, for example.
Why was the whole point of the Paris agreement to take money from America and give it to hostile countries who hate us?
It wasn't. The idea is we need the third world to "skip over" the step in their industrialization where they get energy from fossil fuels. That requires money. The wealthy countries would provide some of that money in order for the poor countries to be able to afford this skip.
After all, Miami going underwater is going to cost us a hell of a lot more money than a coastal village in a poor country going underwater. We have a greater financial incentive to fix the problem, and the money to fix it.
We have tons of our own people who need help, after we fix their problems we can start meddling in other countries.
Great countries are capable of doing more than one thing at a time. If we actually are a great country, we can help our poor and these third world countries at the same time.
Plans like the Green New Deal do this by employing those poor people. Folks like you call this a terrible thing, making it rather doubtful that you care about poverty in the US.
Maybe you should read the actual agreement before spouting bullshit, eh.
The Paris agreement is about voluntary measures to reduce CO2 to some targets, measures that every country has largely determined by itself. It is definitely not "taking money from America". Nobody is taking money from America, just the opposite, money is being pledged to go the poorer countries in America.
I don't know who "you" are, but seeing how you equate two continents with one country on one of them I can only assume you're a US citizen. If that is the case, don't you think that it is a bit disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical to get your panties in a twist about your country "meddling in other countries" on this issue given the disasters in the Middle East that your country is causing?
Get a sense of proportion for your outrage, otherwise nobody will take you seriously.
How do you verify that the money was spent on its intent? You don't. There was no mechanism. It was just a transfer of money from us, who need it badly for our own people, to a bunch of corrupt kleptocracies that would simply steal the money and ship it right back overseas.
Bahaha, like the far left gives a shit about working class Americans. They voted for Trump! You think they're racist fascist deplorables, remember? Who's better: you educated people or the people of walmart? The working class thinks the world is flat, Jews have dual loyalty to Israel, God created the world in 7 days and illegal immigrants are coming to take all the jobs away. Pull the other one.
If we actually are a great country,
Glenn Loury, asked whether he believes African Americans should be encouraged to take pride in being citizens of the United States, he offers this characterization of the view espoused by many progressives:
The cultural distance between progressives and working class people is now vast and I see little reason why that should change.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
on this issue given the disasters in the Middle East that your country is causing?
USA out of the middle east. No more wars. Out of Syria, out of Venezuela, out of NATO. The whole world hates us because we meddle. Our people are hurting, we need a break. Let's solve our own problems before we think we can take on the world's problems. How about a humanitarian intervention in our inner cities instead of some foreign shithole where they despise America and everything it stands for?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
How about you don't sprout bullshit to me on /. but instead talk about it to your politicians about it. Then get back to me and report what did they tell you. See how far you go, eh?
Also, a nice diversion on your Paris agreement bullshit, this impotent foreign policy rant of yours. Congrats.
"for the majority of the planet"
wrong
Denialism has become a right wing litmus test.
In the US. Not in the rest of the world. And even in the US it's only partly true. Outright denialists are mostly a few gatekeepers who have outsized influence. The rest is people who aren't outright denialists but don't want to lose their lifestyle or be told what to do.
Aren't you a gem. I tell you I'm in favor of US to stop meddling, and you still shit on me.
Princeton University study: Public opinion has "near-zero" impact on U.S. law.
Gilens & Page found that the number of Americans for or against any idea has no impact on the likelihood that congress will make it law. "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
One thing that does have an influence? Money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a "statistically non-significant impact," Economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence. http://scholar.princeton.edu/s...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"Fascism is a form of radical authoritarianism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce."
Because the Left is so well known for allowing open expression (burned down UC Berkeley), tolerating opposition (ban, demonitize, silence, divest, sanctions against any who disagree), and not wanting to make industries public or destroy private property (AOC, Bernie, and their mindless drones).
You're good on excuses, that's for sure. Well, it is a way of life, too.
displacing much dirtier coal with cheap gas is not a CO2 reduction
Just Sayin'
You solve a problem... by solving the problem.
You do NOT solve it by saying
"This class of (potential) solutions BAD BAD BAD! Forbidden to even Look!"
"You fix a problem by doing the right thing, today, and moving forward." ...Who gets to decide what is "the Right Thing"
But
"today" ...few solutions come without side effects. ...'cus Terrorists
Are we sure that the Right Thing is less bad than other Things?
I offer for your consideration the USA Patriot Act.
That had to be passed Today
Are you completely pleased with the results?
You 'talk' of "...forced (yes forced..." ...Are)
I ask you to consider the case where something You want (or advocate or even
is "...forced (yes forced..." to be other than you would have it.
That will never happen, of course...
Phrases like "Everybody/Nobody should..."
"...should be forced to..."
"...balancing freedom against..."
"...only cost you a little more..."
tend to send shivers up my spine....
displacing much dirtier coal with cheap gas is not a CO2 reduction
Yes it is. Gas has twice the energy per kg of carbon emission.
In America, replacing coal with gas has done more to reduce carbon emissions than everything else that we have done combined.
How do you verify that the money was spent on its intent? You don't. There was no mechanism.
There was also no mechanism to transfer the money in the Paris accord either.
It was a plan, mostly aspirational. Implementation details were intended to be worked out later. Presumably, there would be specific deals that fall under the effort, such as building a particular photovoltaic plant.
It was just a transfer of money from us, who need it badly for our own people
If you actually believed this, you wouldn't keep voting for people who keep cutting aid to the poor.
Bahaha, like the far left gives a shit about working class Americans. They voted for Trump! You think they're racist fascist deplorables, remember?
You do realize that Clinton is a centrist, right? The "far left" candidate in 2016 was Sanders.
Who's better: you educated people or the people of walmart?
Neither. But that's a bit problematic for you, isn't it? Those egg-heads have to be worse for some reason, right?
The cultural distance between progressives and working class people is now vast and I see little reason why that should change.
You believe this because you're unwilling to find out what progressives actually think. Because you've spent a long, long time getting your news and entertainment from sources that attack a caricature, in order to get you to keep voting to cut the spending you keep saying we desperately need.
You have the option to stop being played for a fool, and look at what people are actually proposing. To find out what those evil libtards actually think about you.
And we both know you will never take that option.
Leftists are not liberal. How do you tell a liberal from a leftist? Easy. Liberals believe in free speech. They might disagree with what you say, but they'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Leftists like yourself use censorship as a weapon of first resort. Being offended is reason enough to use this extreme measure. Intimidation is another frequently used tactic.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
does anybody own one?? kiss it goodbye after dimmed sky. and those solar panels you just put on your house? no worky. i hope plants dont mind dimmed sun...maybe beaches will be filled with full coverage parkas afterwards
Dude, we know for a fact that you don't want to help any fucking body but your rich white boys. We don't forget who you are when we log off. I've been hearing you spout your conservative libertarian crap for years on here. You absolutely don't give two shits about poor people and certainly not the minority ones. Just the other day you went off the handle about the muslims again when shitting on Rep Omar was all the rage. You simply hate liberals and want to oppose out of principal. That's fine. That's your right. But fuck off with the "fixing our own house" bullshit. You don't want to do that either!
Oh, you and I both know quite well what the Left thinks of ordinary Americans, and it's not pretty. Jonathan Haidt's experiments ask liberals and conservatives to fill out questionnaires about their values, then to predict how someone from the opposite tribe would fill out the questionnaire. He finds that conservatives are able to predict liberals' answers just fine and seem to have a pretty good understanding of their worldviews, but that liberals have *no idea* how conservatives think or what they value.
If one side understands the other better, and by extension probably their arguments better too, and still holds their position...that speaks to the strength of their position. When faced with questions such as "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal" or "Justice is the most important requirement for a society," liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Carbon isn't a pollutant. It's a natural part of the life process.
So is water but you can drown in it; drink too much of it and it's a huge hassle when too much of it falls from the sky.
Is Mr. Burns trying to sell more Nuclear power again?!
1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
Blowing money on "a start" that can never produce the necessary results isn't exactly the best way to spend money.
Its that or doing nothing. So, the approach is not yet perfect. Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is good for a 10 year reduction.)
One key element of the Green New Deal that you are unwilling to understand is the efforts within the program create jobs. Somebody has to actually refit old houses to be better insulated, and so on.
How many? Two? The raising of taxes would put millions out of work.
Those jobs reduce poverty, ameliorating the problem you cite here.
No, they don't. Not everyone can do 'em, and there wouldn't be many of them.
3) Has it escaped everyone that we are currently adding about $1T to the National Debt every year and NOBODY has a clue what to do about it
We know exactly what to do about it because that deficit was created by a massive tax cut on the wealthy.
That is absolutely wrong. Revenues to the gov't WENT UP after the tax cuts, as expected, its just that Congress far outstripped the raise in revenue by spending far more than the extra that came in.
Fixing it is also trivially easy. Reverse those tax cuts. It would require you to give up your tax cut fetish though.
There was a deficit before the tax cuts, too, its just that the tax cuts raised the revenue to the gov't. Had spending not been increased, the deficit would have gone down.
Clue: The last year that the National Debt didn't go up was 1957. We've raised and lowered the income taxes numerous times since without achieving that desired result.
1998-2001 called [cnn.com], and would like to remind you they existed. Though acknowledging that evil liberal tax hikes reduce the deficit and thus debt would require abandoning your tax cut fetish.
The National Debt went up in those years, too, whether witchcraft was used to declare the budget "balanced", the National Debt still went up. The last time it didn't was 1957.
It's blinding obvious to me that income taxes are absolutely incapable of funding the gov't, and should be abolished. The Founders set up the nation to run on consumption taxes such as excise taxes and tariffs
The founders also set up the nation to not have a standing military and pressed for limited-to-no foreign entanglements. So, unless you also want massive defense cuts resulting in the US dropping out of being a superpower, you don't actually want to go back to what the founders set up.
Its a choice. What to sit here with the Russians and the Chinese running carrier task groups and boomer submarines up and down our coasts? Want to not be able to do anything when the next bunch of assholes uses a foreign base to train terrorists to distribute, say, Anthrax from a perch on the Shennendoah Parkway, and let the wind spread it to kill maybe a million people? I may still be immune from my trip to Iraq and its accompanying vaccination, but I'd hate to wake up to having dead neighbors for as far as I could drive, and then not having the military to chase down the perpetrators. We have a treasure of natural resources, infrastructure, and human resources (potenital slaves) that foreigners should not feel free to plot against without the thought that the US Millitary will be landing in their front yards if they attempt to harm America.
Also, between your rant about how terrible poverty is and your tax proposals, you forgot that consumption taxes take a far larger pe
3 X 10^12 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere X $100 / ton = $3 X 10^14 to remove it all.
$1K = $1 X 10^3
$1M = $1 X 10^6
$1B = $1 X 10^9
$1T = $1 X 10^12
3 X 10^12 Tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere X $100 / Ton = $300 X 10^12 to remove it all.
Of course removing it all would be suicidal, as the plants would all die, followed by all the animals.
But, we are at about 400 parts per million of concentration of CO2. The pre-industrial level of CO2 was about 280 PPM. So, we really only want to remove 120 ppm of CO2, which is 120 / 400 = 30% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. 30% of the $300T is $90T.
Soooo.... using the MIT approach, it would cost EXACTLY the same impossible amount of money to send CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels. OBTW, lets not forget that it is impossible to deal with the transportation sector CO2, because we can't run it on electricity generated from the sun or wind or anything else, and you won't get food for 360 million people delivered 100's of miles to your local food store by horses and wagons. It'll have to come on BIG trucks and the have to move by diesel. There's no choice. There are other examples of the absurdity of AOC's Green New Deal, too numerous to ridicule individually, but an approach that would work if we spent the same impossible amount of money would actually succeed.
Oh, wait, wait, wait... MIT's solution would work for the entire planet, while AOC's screwball law would only affect the USA - India, China, Russia, and pretty much everyone else in the world that have historically failed to achieve the objectives of all the CO2 reduction that they've agreed to in the past, would STILL burn fossil fuels whenever they wanted to, and so the AOC approach would be ineffective at everything except bankrupting America.
No, they change gender as required, didn't you even watch Jurassic Park?
"If you actually believed this, you wouldn't keep voting for people who keep cutting aid to the poor."
We vote for him because we / he know / knows that the best way to help the poor is not to simply give them a gov't handout, but to instead provide them with an opportunity to work in a well-paying job, which is exactly what he's been doing and continues to attempt to do. Its what the corporate income tax cut is about, since that creates far more manufacturing jobs than other approaches to the problem, and manufacturing jobs traditionally pay better.
> ost of the progress that we have made so far, such as LED bulbs, efficient variable speed motors, better insulation, more efficient engines, better batteries, cheap gas from hydraulic fracturing to replace coal, have all come from innovations by capitalists.
When these capitalists were compelled by regulations put in place by Democrats & Democratic Government.
Remember the emissions standard and the light bulb phaseout put by the Obama administration that accelerated LED bulbs to market?