All of those technologies are available, and in use, all over Africa. What ? You thought only US farmers were cruel and inhumane enough to practise factory farming ? Besides which, meat production is the smallest factor in the equation. Chicken is the staple meat in most African countries and has been factory farmed here for ages (it's the easiest animal to factory farm). But crops are the important one. Particularly wheat and corn.
And, again, there is no corn or wheat growing technology (including biotech) which is not in active use all over Africa - where those technologies work BETTER than they work in the USA due to a better climate for farming in.
>You are talking long term sustainability vs short term famine relief No. I'm talking about famine PREVENTION. The famines were (mostly) not caused by an inabillity to produce enough food locally. Hell most famines weren't even caused by wars. They were mostly caused by farm subsidies in the USA.
>Yet never heard of Robert Mugabe? Odd...
Mugabe is an exception to the rule - what happened in Zimbabwe hasn't happened anywhere else on the continent. You can hardly use him as a representative example. Until 1997 Zimbabwe was the largest food producer on the continent - the destruction of Zim's agriculture had nothing to do with any of the things *either* of us discussed, it was a wholly unique situation of a land-revolution that went very wrong.
Zimbabwe is a lesson in why post-colonial land-ownership reform is a critical thing to do - failing to do so, leaving people suffering in poverty next to the land of their ancestors while the former colonial masters keep profiting from all the land - sooner or later they get tired of it, and take the land back by force. Without either the capital or sklls to actually use that land productively. A good land reform plan - which includes training - would have prevented the destruction of Zimbabwe entirely. Arguably if their democratic process had worked better (or at least had included term limits) that would have ensured such a process came to pass.
You can't keep the colonial economic division going indefinitely after independence. It just doesn't work. It could only be brought about by massive force of arms, and without that force of arms to maintain it, it cannot be maintained. Better to have a planned, peaceful transfer of economic capital and power, than to wait until people get fed up and take it by force in unplanned chaos. If Native Americans had not been reduced to a minority in their own country - the same thing would likely have happened in America by the way.
>Universal health care is a moronic idea. Only price controls are more moronic. The only thing prices controls do is create shortages. Medicine will be cheap if you can find it.
Weird... the whole WORLD has implemented both - and this outcome hasn't happened ANYWHERE.
They all have better quality healthcare than the USA, that more people have access to (as in the entire population - no exceptioons), and they all pay LESS for that than you do for worse quality that fewer people can get.
I went and re-read the paragraph - in a week where too many people tried to convince me the NAZIs were progressive (and so Trump cannot be Hitler-like) you were the one who actually got the facts on that one right. My bad there.
Your analogy doesn't hold though. Your basically saying that we can't blame libertarian ideas for what libertarian ideas have done because they weren't implemented fully ? A part-dose should be a part-cure, it shouldn't cause another disease.
Lets take the bank bailouts. True, libertarians generally said we should have let the banks fail - but that was an untenable proposition. Letting the banks fail would have meant a second great depression - millions, perhaps billions, of people starving and dying, wars, death and destruction wrought on people who were entirely innocent in what happened. Ideally the situation should have been prevented from happening in the first place - for that you needed regulations, regulations that used to exist but got scrapped because of libertarian ideals. They may not have liked what was done later but libertarians caused the situation in the first place. Secondly - I've yet to see any libertarian call for a much more important thing that should have happened afterwards: prosecution and jailtime for the bankers who committed fraud. And make no mistake - ultimately the entire situation was caused by fraud on a massive scale. At every level. Fraud was used to get loans given to people beyond their means to pay them back (which is a fraud on both the lender and the borrower and a crime known as 'predatory lending'). And fraud was used to sell the resulting loans as securely rated investments afterwards - fraud in which the ratings agencies were complicit. So why did nobody go to jail ? Iceland jailed the bankers who committed the fraud, and declared fraudulent loans invalid - and their economy recovered better than anybody else's. There isn't even anything un-libertarian about that. A contract entered into under fraudulent conditions is not a valid contract.
So libertarian love of deregulation caused the problem, and the supposed libertarian preferred outcome would have destroyed the world.... and we're supposed to absolve libertarianism because we didn't destroy the world as per their prescription ? That's the problem with libertarianism, it's all simple ideological solutions, the same answers to every question - and it never considers that human beings are involved. That the mass layoffs they *always* defend is families going hungry over things they have no control over. That the weakening of the unions they so despise has consistently reduced people's quality of life. That the reductions in the price of consumer goods has been nowhere near as high as the reductions in wages and that even if that HAD been the case as they predict, it still doesn't fix the problem that the people whose wages were cut can't buy *anything*. It's a damn good thing we haven't tried full on libertarianism. Layoffs WITHOUT a social safety net ? America would be in the midst of a famine by now.
So... just because they signed off on it magically makes it NOT something proposed by Romney and written by the Heartland Institute ?
Dems only EVER signed off on it since it was the ONLY reform the republicans would buy into. That was what the dems in Mass. did, that's what the ones in congress under Obama did.
The mistake Obama made was to think he could cooperate with the republicans and work together on his vision - and he chose a republican darling plan to try and preserve that. But they had no intention of ever working with him on anything -even something they had wanted for decades. So then they called their own plan evil and pledged it's repeal. If Obama had known that, we'd have had medicare for all instead - since he had a dem majority in both houses and COULD have passed that. It would be a better, and cheaper, plan - the reps would have squeeled with no more effect than they did against the ACA and by now if they threatened a repeal they'd have a revolution on their hands.
Simply put - by the time Hitler was a senior member of the party, the NAZIs were about as socialist as the People's Republic of North Korea is republican.
Everybody knows that is what the party was called, a name it got long before Hitler was a member. Everybody who knows history ALSO knows that he got rid of all the socialism in the party long before they ever got into government - and that his very first act as Fuhrer was to slaughter every socialist in the German parliament. He STARTED his killing spree on socialists, that doesn't bode well for arguing he WAS one. He kept the conservatives alive and let them join the NAZI party, he didn't make that offer.
The man who blamed all the world's ills on "Jews and Socialists" most certainly was neither.
That would be 7 BILLION - not 7 million, and no your proposal is flawed. It would probably NEVER happen, but if it did - it would only happen once. After that - ever car manufacturer would make sure every car they sell contains every safety feature they ever invented, and they would put serious effort into inventing more. They would simply make the risk go away.
Sure accidents are mostly human error - but technology reduces the risk of that error being fatal by a huge margin. It's a problem that you need to be rich to actually benefit from that margin.
Moreover the real problem is that fatalities rarely affect the idiot who did something wrong -the problem is the innocent people they kill. The car that GETS hit is usually in more danger than the one that's doing the hitting (simple physics that - absorbing an impact is worse because you don't have existing momentum you can deflect), and the single most endangered group are pedestrians. We CAN make cars that could just about never hit a pedestrian even with a drunk driver - we just don't bother.
Aaah, I see your mistake. You conveniently didn't seperate out NEW CO2 from CO2 that was already part of the cycle. The page you linked actually TELLS you why your argument is bullshit. The numbers you give are a complete lie - but like any good lie - it's based on taking something true and lying about what it means.
Of the carbon that is added on TOP of what's in the existing cycle, the carbon that's actually a problem, we make almost all of it.
Just look at what you're doing - your argument is listend on the very page you used to back it up with as a "myth". Yet you made that argument without any of the context of WHY it's a myth. In other words you were deliberately trying to deceive people, and my argument is entirely intact - yours however is shredded.
"Anchor babies"... right. You mean American citizens ? Are you native american ? You're not ? So you are yourself ONLY a citizen because of somebody's anchor baby. And what do you propose ? Putting those young citizens into foster care to deport their mothers ?
And you think you are NOT being fucking evil ?
Oh and by the way - no other countries do NOT in fact do that. They all have immigration laws, but none of them are nearly as rabid about it as you lot are. And no other free country would turn away refugees. Even Australia didn't dare THAT one. It's not like it's a problem anyway - Mexican migration is negative and has been for years. You don't NEED to deport anybody - the ones that CAN leave are doing so of their own accord and have been for years. The rest, you'll never KEEP out because the reason they are there is because they are either there - or dead. Deporting those people - now that is REALLY evil.
You know - that's EXACTLY what people said about the original Hitler.... Here's the New York times in 1922 http://www.nytimes.com/times-i... declaring that all that talk of forced registrations and mass deportations and anti-semitism was just campaign bluster and he would never do it in real life if he ever got elected.
They were wrong.
I have no reason whatsoever to believe that YOU are any less wrong. If there is one thing I have learned it's that you can't believe a politician when he promises to do good - but when they promise to do evil, you better fucking believe they ALWAYS keep THOSE promises.
Those figures are not in the right ballpark, hell they are not even in the same sport. In reality the single largest CO2 emission source after human activity is volcanoes. The American Geophysical Union published a report that compared volcanic CO2 to human CO2. The short version is that the total annual volcanic CO2 contribution is 0.025% of what humans produce JUST from coal plants (which is a tiny fraction of our total CO2 production - but the easiest one to accurately measure).
Whoever gave you that number was lying through their teeth.
Humanity didn't exist 5 million or a hundred million years ago -our kind of society could not have existed then and would not survive such a change now (and since those climates changed very slowly - at the timeline we're talking about, it's a mass extinction event for most creatures which BY ITSELF could cause OUR extinction since we probably cannot survive independently of other animals - we evolved for a world with them in it).
But that's unlikely since our society will collapse long before we get there. Fear of a few hundred thousand refugees just made America elect the least qualified president in history upsetting global stability probably for decades to come. Imagine what a few BILLION refugees would mean ?
We don't even need climate change to kill anybody to destroy civlization. It just needs to make enough people hungry that they start running away to somewhere else. The social upheaval will do the rest, and much like the zombie appocalypse the REAL danger will be other people.
We'll adapt ? Sure, the same way we've ALWAYS adapted to significant shifts in climate: with massive wars and bloodshed. Only those were regional... this will be global. Yeah... maybe we should try NOT to cause that future ?
That sum is ONLY fair if you also factor in all the thousands of people who are indirectly harmed and killed to produce cheap fossil fuels. Forget climate change for a moment (which would only increase it), think of the respiratory illnesses that plague towns near coal mines and coal plants. Think of the thousands of kids dying from asthma attacks every day to keep it going.
These are overwhelmingly poor people (richer people can afford to not live near coal mines and plants). Think of all the people killed by the toxic polutants they constantly dump in water. Again - who lives in the run-off zones ? Not rich people.
For your argument to be valid - you have to show that the cost increase you attribute to renewables, and the deaths that causes, are MORE than the deaths caused by fossil fuels. Because if it isn't, then the transition will actually save more lives than it loses. We'll have FEWER people dying due to our energy needs than we have now. I sincerely doubt that this argument will work out in your favour but I look forward to your well researched data.
> Just as politics in Africa prevents those starving kids from accessing the surplus food we have here. Actually, it's mostly the politics in Europe and America that does that. The number one being: farm subsidies.
In reality, most of the continent of Africa is significantly better situated climate wise for agriculture and in theory capable of outproducing both American and the EU together. The main reason it doesn't is lack of a market. African farmers cannot competitively export to those markets due to the subsidies given to local farmers there. In fact, those subsidies are so high that they can't even sell at competitive rates to locals. The subsidised chicken from the US is cheaper than the locally grown one - even after shipping ! Which has put large numbers of African farmers out of business over the past few decades.
Of course this is hugely generalized and not actually useful for any *serious* analysis as Africa is a massive continent of over 60 nations - and about 5 times the size of Europe and America added TOGETHER. There is NOTHING that is universally true of all those people in this massive landmass. Lumping them together in one thing and trying to generalise is guaranteed to make it absolutely impossible anything you say can possibly be true. But what I said is true of many farmers in many African countries - while your theory is not true of any of them in any African countries I know about.
Source: I live in Africa, I have lived here for 36 years and have travelled extensively and lived in more than 30 African countries for extended periods.
Please note the key difference: those are all groups of private citizens (that mostly did not do the things you accuse them off anyway). These kids are suing the GOVERNMENT.
In the US system you CANNOT sue a private interest for violating your constitutional rights since you don't HAVE any constitutional rights in that context. The US constitution doesn't enumerate universal rights for you - it ONLY restricts what the GOVERNMENT can do - the rights the GOVERNMENT cannot infringe upon. Your employer still can, your neighbour still can.
Rights established by other laws can frequently be protected from private citizens as well, but constitutional rights ONLY restrict government. You can't sue any of those groups over a constitutional thing since they are not the government. You could perhaps sue some of them for harming you by violating some other ordinary civil law though (but good luck finding a lawyer who will try).
This is actually relatively unique to the USA. In most other countries in the free world constitutional rights are protected against violation by ANYBODY - including other private citizens, and there are legal limitations on the degree to which you can waive them in a contract. Most cannot be waived at all and any contract clauses that claim to waive them are unenforceable. In South Africa for example, we didn't need a civil rights act to make it illegal to refuse to let black people stay in your private hotel, the constitution says people have a right not to be discriminated against - and so it's a crime for ANYBODY including a private citizen or business to act in a discriminatory fashion. We also have a right to freedom of thought and speech - and of course judges sometimes have to balance between these when they conflict. The general balance has been that you can think and even say racist stuff all you want (and live with likely getting fired or boycotted for it) but as a business or employer cannot act on those beliefs. Round here, if your catering business that serves the public refuses to cater a gay wedding you could potentially go to jail for it (though nobody ever has - the government has actively avoided using the criminal justice system for discrimination cases - and rather deferred those to a special tribunal called the human rights commisison, which can only levy fines and does not have the power to jail people. This is because they, rightfully, believe that trying to convince people discrimination is wrong will be more effective than trying to fit all the bigots in our already overcrowded jails).
That depends on what the suit demands to an extend. This suit isn't demanding compensation - just that government stops the rights-infringing behaviour and starts acting correctly, such cases have already been won in several countries around the world (most recently in the Netherlands) and on other topics as well - court cases can and have forced governments to change policy. Much like sovereign immunity did not prevent the supreme court from legalising gay marriage. In South Africa when the government was denying the link between HIV and AIDS as an excuse to avoid having to make anti-retroviral treatments available in state hospitals, they were sued and the constitutional court ultimately found that their policy violated the people's constitutional right to healthcare, and forced them to make the drugs available. It was an interesting one since the drugs at the time (primarily nevirapine) were not yet great treatments for infection but WERE great at protecting vulnerable people from *getting* infected (notably it could prevent mother-to-child transmission in pregnancy).
The US system is different in some ways but similar enough that the case, at least in theory, could actually get to the supreme court and potentially lead to mandated policies. Whether that can happen in a court with a Trump appointed 9th judge is another question but not really related to the legality of the idea, merely to the likelihood of convincing the judges to do it.
And secretary of education Ben Carson doesn't believe in: evolution, climate science, physics, geology or history.
He does however believe: 1) That the pyramids were built to store grain (which raises the question: why did we find no grain in them - and what the hell were there all those dead kings doing in there ? 2) That the world is going to end any day now and it's a tragedy that it hasn't done so already (I think I prefer politicians who would not actually celebrate and try to hasten the end of human existence) 3) That the earth is only 6000 years old
Frankly you can basically sum it up as: the new secretary of education does not actually believe in education. If this particular neurosurgeon ever needs neurosurgery himself he would need to go to a proctologist on account of where his head is at.
The EC won't do it, unfortunately that's a pipe dream. The trouble is the EC's vote has to be ratified by congress - and the republicans control both houses, there is no way they would ratify any EC vote that doesn't put Trump in the white house. It would be political suicide for them - and the number one problem of American politicians is that they always rate "getting re-elected" as a higher and more important priority than "doing what's best for our constituents". The Democrats are just as guilty here, of course, but the problem remains - America lacks the kind of politicians who are willing to commit career suicide to do the right thing for the people. That is why special interests have so much power, that's why controversial but needed ideas never happen.
Compare this to other countries and it's almost a uniquely American phenomenon. In that regard, I think it's a major argument for term limits on congress. If politicians know they only get two terms there - then the second one (much like a president's second term) becomes about legacy - about trying to achieve something great before leaving. Something you will want to be remembered for. Treating it as a job for life means always, always playing it safe and gives a few (Relatively small) lobby groups way more power than they actually have.
You don't have one. Obamacare was a republican plan, originally written by the heartland institute and first implemented in law by governor Mitt Romney. Why do you think the left was never happy with it. We only tolerated it as "better than nothing" we never thought it was "good" - it was Obama's 'reach across the aisle' move to do healthcare reform EXACTLY as republicans have always wanted to do it - and then suddenly they hated it.
America needs truly Universal Healthcare - along with price controls on pharmaceuticals. You want an actual democratic plan ? It means putting all the insurance companies out of business for ever.
Slashdot Mirror
All of those technologies are available, and in use, all over Africa. What ? You thought only US farmers were cruel and inhumane enough to practise factory farming ? Besides which, meat production is the smallest factor in the equation. Chicken is the staple meat in most African countries and has been factory farmed here for ages (it's the easiest animal to factory farm). But crops are the important one. Particularly wheat and corn.
And, again, there is no corn or wheat growing technology (including biotech) which is not in active use all over Africa - where those technologies work BETTER than they work in the USA due to a better climate for farming in.
>You are talking long term sustainability vs short term famine relief
No. I'm talking about famine PREVENTION. The famines were (mostly) not caused by an inabillity to produce enough food locally. Hell most famines weren't even caused by wars. They were mostly caused by farm subsidies in the USA.
>Yet never heard of Robert Mugabe? Odd...
Mugabe is an exception to the rule - what happened in Zimbabwe hasn't happened anywhere else on the continent. You can hardly use him as a representative example. Until 1997 Zimbabwe was the largest food producer on the continent - the destruction of Zim's agriculture had nothing to do with any of the things *either* of us discussed, it was a wholly unique situation of a land-revolution that went very wrong.
Zimbabwe is a lesson in why post-colonial land-ownership reform is a critical thing to do - failing to do so, leaving people suffering in poverty next to the land of their ancestors while the former colonial masters keep profiting from all the land - sooner or later they get tired of it, and take the land back by force. Without either the capital or sklls to actually use that land productively.
A good land reform plan - which includes training - would have prevented the destruction of Zimbabwe entirely. Arguably if their democratic process had worked better (or at least had included term limits) that would have ensured such a process came to pass.
You can't keep the colonial economic division going indefinitely after independence. It just doesn't work. It could only be brought about by massive force of arms, and without that force of arms to maintain it, it cannot be maintained. Better to have a planned, peaceful transfer of economic capital and power, than to wait until people get fed up and take it by force in unplanned chaos.
If Native Americans had not been reduced to a minority in their own country - the same thing would likely have happened in America by the way.
>Universal health care is a moronic idea. Only price controls are more moronic. The only thing prices controls do is create shortages. Medicine will be cheap if you can find it.
Weird... the whole WORLD has implemented both - and this outcome hasn't happened ANYWHERE.
They all have better quality healthcare than the USA, that more people have access to (as in the entire population - no exceptioons), and they all pay LESS for that than you do for worse quality that fewer people can get.
I went and re-read the paragraph - in a week where too many people tried to convince me the NAZIs were progressive (and so Trump cannot be Hitler-like) you were the one who actually got the facts on that one right. My bad there.
Your analogy doesn't hold though. Your basically saying that we can't blame libertarian ideas for what libertarian ideas have done because they weren't implemented fully ? A part-dose should be a part-cure, it shouldn't cause another disease.
Lets take the bank bailouts. True, libertarians generally said we should have let the banks fail - but that was an untenable proposition. Letting the banks fail would have meant a second great depression - millions, perhaps billions, of people starving and dying, wars, death and destruction wrought on people who were entirely innocent in what happened. Ideally the situation should have been prevented from happening in the first place - for that you needed regulations, regulations that used to exist but got scrapped because of libertarian ideals. They may not have liked what was done later but libertarians caused the situation in the first place. Secondly - I've yet to see any libertarian call for a much more important thing that should have happened afterwards: prosecution and jailtime for the bankers who committed fraud. And make no mistake - ultimately the entire situation was caused by fraud on a massive scale. At every level. Fraud was used to get loans given to people beyond their means to pay them back (which is a fraud on both the lender and the borrower and a crime known as 'predatory lending'). And fraud was used to sell the resulting loans as securely rated investments afterwards - fraud in which the ratings agencies were complicit.
So why did nobody go to jail ?
Iceland jailed the bankers who committed the fraud, and declared fraudulent loans invalid - and their economy recovered better than anybody else's. There isn't even anything un-libertarian about that. A contract entered into under fraudulent conditions is not a valid contract.
So libertarian love of deregulation caused the problem, and the supposed libertarian preferred outcome would have destroyed the world.... and we're supposed to absolve libertarianism because we didn't destroy the world as per their prescription ? That's the problem with libertarianism, it's all simple ideological solutions, the same answers to every question - and it never considers that human beings are involved. That the mass layoffs they *always* defend is families going hungry over things they have no control over. That the weakening of the unions they so despise has consistently reduced people's quality of life. That the reductions in the price of consumer goods has been nowhere near as high as the reductions in wages and that even if that HAD been the case as they predict, it still doesn't fix the problem that the people whose wages were cut can't buy *anything*. It's a damn good thing we haven't tried full on libertarianism. Layoffs WITHOUT a social safety net ?
America would be in the midst of a famine by now.
So... just because they signed off on it magically makes it NOT something proposed by Romney and written by the Heartland Institute ?
Dems only EVER signed off on it since it was the ONLY reform the republicans would buy into. That was what the dems in Mass. did, that's what the ones in congress under Obama did.
The mistake Obama made was to think he could cooperate with the republicans and work together on his vision - and he chose a republican darling plan to try and preserve that. But they had no intention of ever working with him on anything -even something they had wanted for decades. So then they called their own plan evil and pledged it's repeal. If Obama had known that, we'd have had medicare for all instead - since he had a dem majority in both houses and COULD have passed that. It would be a better, and cheaper, plan - the reps would have squeeled with no more effect than they did against the ACA and by now if they threatened a repeal they'd have a revolution on their hands.
Simply put - by the time Hitler was a senior member of the party, the NAZIs were about as socialist as the People's Republic of North Korea is republican.
Everybody knows that is what the party was called, a name it got long before Hitler was a member. Everybody who knows history ALSO knows that he got rid of all the socialism in the party long before they ever got into government - and that his very first act as Fuhrer was to slaughter every socialist in the German parliament. He STARTED his killing spree on socialists, that doesn't bode well for arguing he WAS one. He kept the conservatives alive and let them join the NAZI party, he didn't make that offer.
The man who blamed all the world's ills on "Jews and Socialists" most certainly was neither.
That would be 7 BILLION - not 7 million, and no your proposal is flawed. It would probably NEVER happen, but if it did - it would only happen once. After that - ever car manufacturer would make sure every car they sell contains every safety feature they ever invented, and they would put serious effort into inventing more. They would simply make the risk go away.
Sure accidents are mostly human error - but technology reduces the risk of that error being fatal by a huge margin. It's a problem that you need to be rich to actually benefit from that margin.
Moreover the real problem is that fatalities rarely affect the idiot who did something wrong -the problem is the innocent people they kill. The car that GETS hit is usually in more danger than the one that's doing the hitting (simple physics that - absorbing an impact is worse because you don't have existing momentum you can deflect), and the single most endangered group are pedestrians. We CAN make cars that could just about never hit a pedestrian even with a drunk driver - we just don't bother.
Aaah, I see your mistake. You conveniently didn't seperate out NEW CO2 from CO2 that was already part of the cycle. The page you linked actually TELLS you why your argument is bullshit. The numbers you give are a complete lie - but like any good lie - it's based on taking something true and lying about what it means.
Of the carbon that is added on TOP of what's in the existing cycle, the carbon that's actually a problem, we make almost all of it.
Just look at what you're doing - your argument is listend on the very page you used to back it up with as a "myth". Yet you made that argument without any of the context of WHY it's a myth. In other words you were deliberately trying to deceive people, and my argument is entirely intact - yours however is shredded.
I'm afraid it's true, Trump has seriously proposed Carson for secretary of education.
"Anchor babies" ... right. You mean American citizens ? Are you native american ? You're not ? So you are yourself ONLY a citizen because of somebody's anchor baby. And what do you propose ? Putting those young citizens into foster care to deport their mothers ?
And you think you are NOT being fucking evil ?
Oh and by the way - no other countries do NOT in fact do that. They all have immigration laws, but none of them are nearly as rabid about it as you lot are. And no other free country would turn away refugees. Even Australia didn't dare THAT one. It's not like it's a problem anyway - Mexican migration is negative and has been for years. You don't NEED to deport anybody - the ones that CAN leave are doing so of their own accord and have been for years.
The rest, you'll never KEEP out because the reason they are there is because they are either there - or dead. Deporting those people - now that is REALLY evil.
You know - that's EXACTLY what people said about the original Hitler....
Here's the New York times in 1922 http://www.nytimes.com/times-i... declaring that all that talk of forced registrations and mass deportations and anti-semitism was just campaign bluster and he would never do it in real life if he ever got elected.
They were wrong.
I have no reason whatsoever to believe that YOU are any less wrong. If there is one thing I have learned it's that you can't believe a politician when he promises to do good - but when they promise to do evil, you better fucking believe they ALWAYS keep THOSE promises.
Those figures are not in the right ballpark, hell they are not even in the same sport.
In reality the single largest CO2 emission source after human activity is volcanoes. The American Geophysical Union published a report that compared volcanic CO2 to human CO2. The short version is that the total annual volcanic CO2 contribution is 0.025% of what humans produce JUST from coal plants (which is a tiny fraction of our total CO2 production - but the easiest one to accurately measure).
Whoever gave you that number was lying through their teeth.
Humanity didn't exist 5 million or a hundred million years ago -our kind of society could not have existed then and would not survive such a change now (and since those climates changed very slowly - at the timeline we're talking about, it's a mass extinction event for most creatures which BY ITSELF could cause OUR extinction since we probably cannot survive independently of other animals - we evolved for a world with them in it).
But that's unlikely since our society will collapse long before we get there. Fear of a few hundred thousand refugees just made America elect the least qualified president in history upsetting global stability probably for decades to come. Imagine what a few BILLION refugees would mean ?
We don't even need climate change to kill anybody to destroy civlization. It just needs to make enough people hungry that they start running away to somewhere else. The social upheaval will do the rest, and much like the zombie appocalypse the REAL danger will be other people.
We'll adapt ? Sure, the same way we've ALWAYS adapted to significant shifts in climate: with massive wars and bloodshed. Only those were regional... this will be global.
Yeah... maybe we should try NOT to cause that future ?
That sum is ONLY fair if you also factor in all the thousands of people who are indirectly harmed and killed to produce cheap fossil fuels. Forget climate change for a moment (which would only increase it), think of the respiratory illnesses that plague towns near coal mines and coal plants. Think of the thousands of kids dying from asthma attacks every day to keep it going.
These are overwhelmingly poor people (richer people can afford to not live near coal mines and plants). Think of all the people killed by the toxic polutants they constantly dump in water. Again - who lives in the run-off zones ? Not rich people.
For your argument to be valid - you have to show that the cost increase you attribute to renewables, and the deaths that causes, are MORE than the deaths caused by fossil fuels. Because if it isn't, then the transition will actually save more lives than it loses. We'll have FEWER people dying due to our energy needs than we have now.
I sincerely doubt that this argument will work out in your favour but I look forward to your well researched data.
>How you can judge this as being a hoax, it's a mystery to me or anyone else with more than 2 brain cells
Just like it needs three atoms to be a greenhouse gas, it needs 3 braincells to understand.
> Just as politics in Africa prevents those starving kids from accessing the surplus food we have here.
Actually, it's mostly the politics in Europe and America that does that. The number one being: farm subsidies.
In reality, most of the continent of Africa is significantly better situated climate wise for agriculture and in theory capable of outproducing both American and the EU together. The main reason it doesn't is lack of a market. African farmers cannot competitively export to those markets due to the subsidies given to local farmers there. In fact, those subsidies are so high that they can't even sell at competitive rates to locals. The subsidised chicken from the US is cheaper than the locally grown one - even after shipping !
Which has put large numbers of African farmers out of business over the past few decades.
Of course this is hugely generalized and not actually useful for any *serious* analysis as Africa is a massive continent of over 60 nations - and about 5 times the size of Europe and America added TOGETHER. There is NOTHING that is universally true of all those people in this massive landmass. Lumping them together in one thing and trying to generalise is guaranteed to make it absolutely impossible anything you say can possibly be true.
But what I said is true of many farmers in many African countries - while your theory is not true of any of them in any African countries I know about.
Source: I live in Africa, I have lived here for 36 years and have travelled extensively and lived in more than 30 African countries for extended periods.
I can only presume their lawyer is working pro bono ? Or has agreed to work on seed funding?
I'm pretty sure that if the victim was Donald Trump then there's at least even odds that you can find a jury that will acquit.
Please note the key difference: those are all groups of private citizens (that mostly did not do the things you accuse them off anyway).
These kids are suing the GOVERNMENT.
In the US system you CANNOT sue a private interest for violating your constitutional rights since you don't HAVE any constitutional rights in that context. The US constitution doesn't enumerate universal rights for you - it ONLY restricts what the GOVERNMENT can do - the rights the GOVERNMENT cannot infringe upon. Your employer still can, your neighbour still can.
Rights established by other laws can frequently be protected from private citizens as well, but constitutional rights ONLY restrict government. You can't sue any of those groups over a constitutional thing since they are not the government. You could perhaps sue some of them for harming you by violating some other ordinary civil law though (but good luck finding a lawyer who will try).
This is actually relatively unique to the USA. In most other countries in the free world constitutional rights are protected against violation by ANYBODY - including other private citizens, and there are legal limitations on the degree to which you can waive them in a contract. Most cannot be waived at all and any contract clauses that claim to waive them are unenforceable.
In South Africa for example, we didn't need a civil rights act to make it illegal to refuse to let black people stay in your private hotel, the constitution says people have a right not to be discriminated against - and so it's a crime for ANYBODY including a private citizen or business to act in a discriminatory fashion. We also have a right to freedom of thought and speech - and of course judges sometimes have to balance between these when they conflict. The general balance has been that you can think and even say racist stuff all you want (and live with likely getting fired or boycotted for it) but as a business or employer cannot act on those beliefs.
Round here, if your catering business that serves the public refuses to cater a gay wedding you could potentially go to jail for it (though nobody ever has - the government has actively avoided using the criminal justice system for discrimination cases - and rather deferred those to a special tribunal called the human rights commisison, which can only levy fines and does not have the power to jail people. This is because they, rightfully, believe that trying to convince people discrimination is wrong will be more effective than trying to fit all the bigots in our already overcrowded jails).
That depends on what the suit demands to an extend. This suit isn't demanding compensation - just that government stops the rights-infringing behaviour and starts acting correctly, such cases have already been won in several countries around the world (most recently in the Netherlands) and on other topics as well - court cases can and have forced governments to change policy.
Much like sovereign immunity did not prevent the supreme court from legalising gay marriage. In South Africa when the government was denying the link between HIV and AIDS as an excuse to avoid having to make anti-retroviral treatments available in state hospitals, they were sued and the constitutional court ultimately found that their policy violated the people's constitutional right to healthcare, and forced them to make the drugs available. It was an interesting one since the drugs at the time (primarily nevirapine) were not yet great treatments for infection but WERE great at protecting vulnerable people from *getting* infected (notably it could prevent mother-to-child transmission in pregnancy).
The US system is different in some ways but similar enough that the case, at least in theory, could actually get to the supreme court and potentially lead to mandated policies. Whether that can happen in a court with a Trump appointed 9th judge is another question but not really related to the legality of the idea, merely to the likelihood of convincing the judges to do it.
And secretary of education Ben Carson doesn't believe in: evolution, climate science, physics, geology or history.
He does however believe:
1) That the pyramids were built to store grain (which raises the question: why did we find no grain in them - and what the hell were there all those dead kings doing in there ?
2) That the world is going to end any day now and it's a tragedy that it hasn't done so already (I think I prefer politicians who would not actually celebrate and try to hasten the end of human existence)
3) That the earth is only 6000 years old
Frankly you can basically sum it up as: the new secretary of education does not actually believe in education. If this particular neurosurgeon ever needs neurosurgery himself he would need to go to a proctologist on account of where his head is at.
The EC won't do it, unfortunately that's a pipe dream. The trouble is the EC's vote has to be ratified by congress - and the republicans control both houses, there is no way they would ratify any EC vote that doesn't put Trump in the white house. It would be political suicide for them - and the number one problem of American politicians is that they always rate "getting re-elected" as a higher and more important priority than "doing what's best for our constituents". The Democrats are just as guilty here, of course, but the problem remains - America lacks the kind of politicians who are willing to commit career suicide to do the right thing for the people. That is why special interests have so much power, that's why controversial but needed ideas never happen.
Compare this to other countries and it's almost a uniquely American phenomenon. In that regard, I think it's a major argument for term limits on congress. If politicians know they only get two terms there - then the second one (much like a president's second term) becomes about legacy - about trying to achieve something great before leaving. Something you will want to be remembered for. Treating it as a job for life means always, always playing it safe and gives a few (Relatively small) lobby groups way more power than they actually have.
You really ought to have watched the WHOLE video...
>Can't afford democratic plans anymore.
You don't have one. Obamacare was a republican plan, originally written by the heartland institute and first implemented in law by governor Mitt Romney. Why do you think the left was never happy with it. We only tolerated it as "better than nothing" we never thought it was "good" - it was Obama's 'reach across the aisle' move to do healthcare reform EXACTLY as republicans have always wanted to do it - and then suddenly they hated it.
America needs truly Universal Healthcare - along with price controls on pharmaceuticals. You want an actual democratic plan ? It means putting all the insurance companies out of business for ever.