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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.
[($)]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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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You do such a thorough job of "speaking for them" - perhaps they should hire you as their spokesperson.
Because we want the space to grow more cows.
Also once a forest is grown it's mostly zero sum, you have to continuously bury the transformed CO2 to make headway (preferably with as little loss of soil nutrients as possible).
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Of course the need to vote against gaining knowledge because it has a well known liberal bias.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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!
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.