I learned this from the global warming alarmist alarmist:
Hold all climate forecasts to higher standards than financial reports. Equate all predictions as equal to the one with the worst case scenario. Interpret all forecast as paranoia that the world is ending. Never offer explanations as to why releasing significant amounts of known greenhouse gasses won't disrupt the climate society is adapted to. Note that the earth has been much hotter...at a time that was not conducive to human society Note that the earth has been much colder...at a time that was not conducive to human society Claim humans can adapt to anything but ignore the fact that when they need to do it within a few generations, most of them will die.
Pray tell, how much of a company's cash reserves should go towards impressing you?
Well since you're asking me, obviously ALL of it!
But seriously I am glad that when given the option of buying power from the grid (mostly coal) or a new PV project, they chose PV. BUT....its not like they stuck their neck out very far. Apple will (probably) need power for 25 years, they just paid for it up front. Their "investment" is essentially a purchase or a sunk cost for the future (probably not using that term correctly but hopefully you get the point).
All these tech companies have immense power (aka money) to make an epic statement. "In its most recent quarterly SEC filing, Apple reported that it had $158.8bn (£94.9bn) in cash and cash equivalents" (forbes). How many new hot text apps can they possibly buy with that? Its great that the $0.8b ended up in a new PV project that will pay itself off over 25 years. But think about how much impact just 10% of their straight up cash would have if truly invested in advanced power generation research over the same time. Half their cash is somewhere in the ballpark of the cost of 1/4 of our operating nuclear plants! Throw in some of their marketing expertise to shut up the anti nuke crowd and they could probably build more and single handedly eliminate coal as an energy source in the US with money to spare!
So yeah when you're worth ~$3/4 TRILLION, choosing to buy power from one source vs another doesn't really count as more than advocating, when just a little more risk you can make sweeping changes in a field that desperately needs it. Proportionally, all apple is doing is talk.
Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive officer, has advocated taking more steps to combat climate change."
The thing is when you're the CEO of the richest company in history (maybe?), you're in the unique position of actually being able to do something instead of suggesting other people do it (aka advocating). Way to be just like the rest of us, Tim Cook.
But for today I'll be glad Apple has spent ~0.7% or whatever of it's cash reserves on something they would have to buy anyway and thus gets counted as an investment. I'd be really impressed if they took $10B or so and spent it on some promising new nuclear or fusion project. What obligation does a corporation have to do such a thing in the free market where the shareholder is king? Well, a stable environment would be good for the economy.
Now please fill me in on all the great stuff Apple does for the environment so I can be less...less impressed!
I know right?? Star Trek proves that even after 400 (?) years of voice command optimization, the best activation method is still to physically press the communicator emblem thingy. If Picard isn't too busy for a quick gesture to get beamed out of a warp core explosion, you can push a button when you want to know where the closest chicken nuggets are.
Wow, yeah science should never attempt to be interesting, especially for the lay audience. All of the longstanding questions, brilliant technological achievements, and research built on the shoulders of giants is completely worthless to talk about when all the had to tell us is "there's moving dust on it".
In other news I wasted a whole 8 seconds reading that first sentence describing your unnecessary editorial opinion and post script. Your summary was twice as long as it needed to be.
Seriously, 10 short large font paragraphs interspersed between amazingly detailed imagery is too much?
Granted, we have no way to know how much of the government recommendation is based on science, and how much based on say, a corn lobby.
One of my favorite daily show punchlines was about some debate in congress during the recession about healthy school lunches. The punchline was "Congress can't deal with the economy, middle east, etc, because they are too busy declaring pizza a vegetable"
Yes and no. Ending a hugely expensive and unsuccessful program is a good thing. Allowing a special interest to essentially shut down an agency designed to monitor/regulate it is a bad thing.
Maybe not Mad Max, but probably a Verizon/Halliburton/Future toll road & fire dept conglomerate dystopia....not to say its not already here.
You taxes also pay for things you don't necessarily want but are a huge benefit to society at large...mainly keeping a very low rate of poor and elderly dropping dead in the street (social security/medicare/medicaid, the bulk of the budget). I'll give you those programs have their inefficiencies and can certainly be improved but for me, private industry has not demonstrated they could do it any better. Once any one company grows big enough its pretty much as inefficient as the government...only its mandate is profit for shareholders over all.
" NRA is "looking into this to see if gun owners were improperly targeted,"
I don't know who else would be targeted at a gun show so once the NRA picks up it's batphone you can bet the DEA will be as marginalized as the ATF (understaffed to monitor firearms nationwide, directorless for 7 years, etc), effectively ending the war on drugs.
So you're going with "think of the children...err...grandparents". That always goes over well on./. Exhibit A:
"Many of these deaths could be prevented and are known as “excess winter deaths.” Age UK said countries which experience much colder temperatures, such as Finland, Germany and France, have significantly lower winter death rates than the UK, because the UK has the oldest houses in the EU."
Apparently there are other factors involved besides heating oil prices. Then there is the classic "they turk urr jerbs!!!" Ignoring all the jobs that would be created with large scale clean energy adoption....not to mention stability. North Dakota is about to loose all the jobs they just got because Saudi Arabia feels like it. And I guess you didn't see any of the examples I cited where sweeping environmental regulations were put in place that fixed the potential problem without any overall economic damage. (For exhibit B see my other post)
Murray Salby. I'll refrain from the ad hominem on him and leave his personal history as an exercise to the reader even so it provides an obvious motive for being a denier (whoops I did it anyway). His argument seems to boil down to something like "natural CO2 emissions fluctuate and follow temperature rather than the other way around and are greater than man made emissions so AGW is no big deal" which might sound like a eureka moment (i.e. Everyone accidentally had it backwards!) but is in fact wrong:
Whatreallyhappened...classic data cherry picking for misdirection. I've debunked those enough in similar threads, I'm over it.
Indeed the climate has always been changing. It has been much hotter and much colder on earth. What that statement ignores is that neither of those conditions supported human society! The current bout of climate change is different because it's being caused by humans at an extremely fast rate. Sure the earth will recover but human society might not. If you think elderly deaths are bad, what happens when all of our farms have to move 1000s of miles and the 90ish% of humans that live within ~100miles of a coast have to migrate?
"I'm happy to be corrected"....sadly, human nature suggests otherwise.
As you know, in these institutions updated there materials in the 1970s to early 1980s, from "OMG panic man-made ice age" to "OMG panic global warming"
Nice myth. The "ice age panic" was one story that made Time magazine at a time when the majority of climate research indicated a warming trend due to human cause CO2 emissions.
I'm not going to try to convince you that AGW is a problem we should address (note I said "should be addressed", not panic over). Instead, are you afraid of something if those crazy scientists from your anecdotes get their way and the Fed institutes CO2 mitigation? Gas prices jump to $20/gallon? The government mandates CO2 trackers worn all the time? Economic disaster circa 2008?
I'll cite the elimination of lead in pretty much everything (no economic catastrophe) and the elimination of CFC's (no economic catastrophe). Also some fun facts on how we got to a point of not worrying about acid rain anymore:
"In 2007, total SO2 emissions were 8.9 million tons, achieving the program's long term goal ahead of the 2010 statutory deadline.[22]
The EPA estimates that by 2010, the overall costs of complying with the program for businesses and consumers will be $1 billion to $2 billion a year, only one fourth of what was originally predicted"
when they go back up to where they were 4 months ago, i dont want a 25% increase on that.
The gas tax was still $0.18 4 months ago. In fact, it has been since 1993. If prices went back up you'd be paying something like $3.56 instead of $3.51 with my hypothetical 25% increase. If that breaks your budget, don't be one of the morons that increases the sales rate of low mileage vehicles every time the price of gasoline dips temporarily.
The reason you think the gas tax is enough is because we're not in a crisis yet. This isn't exactly what you wanted but perhaps you could google more than 2 minutes:
"Nationwide in 2010, state and local governments raised $37 billion in motor fuel taxes and $12 billion in tolls and non-fuel taxes, but spent $155 billion on highways.[3] In other words, highway user taxes and fees made up just 32 percent of state and local expenses on roads. The rest was financed out of general revenues, including federal aid."
"During 2008 the fund required support of $8 billion from general revenue funds to cover a shortage in the fund. This shortage was due to lower gas consumption as a result of the recession and higher gas prices.[4] Further transfers of $7 billion and $19.5 billion were made in 2009 and 2010 respectively."
So what? That doesn't inherently mean its wrong. Maybe you could point out flaws in their selection of republicans for their survey instead of worthless partisan speculation.
I use gas. I've called and written all of my congressmen to tell them they should raise the gas tax (not that that does any good). Now is a perfect time because if you raise it 25%, no one (aside from fox news et al) is going to notice the difference between $1.82 and $1.87 (gas tax is $0.18 right now). At the very least, index it to inflation.
The other day I posted a bunch of examples of leading climate researchers from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale making statements like "by 2010, New York City will be underwater". Well, 2010 has come and gone and NYC is still there.
And you can bet those institutions have ignored the (probably) 30-40 years of additional evidence and have not updated their projections in any way and because some guys were wrong once you can completely ignore everything that comes from whoever they happened to work for at the time in perpetuity.
Side note: A case could be made that in 2010 NYC was underwater...great recession and all...
Besides, how many people just throw old pills in the *garbage* ? I'm pretty sure that's the main reason for drug resistance.
Huh, never thought of using a rhetorical question as evidence to unequivocally settle one of the most important health issues we face today. All those doctors must feel silly having wasted all that time researching.
You're probably joking or trolling but why the hell not?!
Cows produce huge amounts of it at regular intervals and its already part of the carbon cycle. Industrialized cattle farming (the cow forklift to slaughterhouse variety) probably releases enough methane to power itself. Plus they are likely located far from a power plant (wide open spaces and all) so you get back all the transmission losses as well! Sounds like a win win to me. Someone should get on it to see if it pans out. I know some farms already employ methane capture for power so why don't all of them?
Nahh, thats no fun. If we play the politics game we get some fun facts(ish): Obama has delivered Michelle Bachman's promise of $2 gas (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/19/michele-bachmann-stands-by-2-a-gallon-gas-pledge/) and is on track to deliver Mitt Romney's promise of 12M new jobs (or get real close anyway, 2.5M jobs are currently being added each year). Of course we all know the main connection between administrations and economic issues is taking credit when things are good and getting blamed when things are bad. (That said there are exceptions such as deregulation->mortgage crisis...getting off topic here)
If we want to be fair, these new methane regulations are merely holding oil producers accountable for the consequences of their activities. If that reduces production then its only reverting back to what it should have been all along had all costs been considered at the outset.
Side note: since those industrious oil scamps increased production all on their own without federal handouts (i.e. access to fed managed land) then we no longer need to consider drilling in ANWR and the like, right?
If congress defunds the EPA, a lot of US citizens will also find some balls....throughout their bodies. Some internally, some externally and some on their pre-existing balls themselves!!!
The reason it's probably going to drop precipitously in the next few months/year is due to the whims of OPEC, not the administration. Do heartland states really want to tie your economies so tightly to how Arabs are feeling?
The last time the Republcians had the large majority in the House was before the 1929 stock market crash. Something to think about.
While fun to point out, I don't see that as especially relevant. The republicans of the early 1900's are in no way comparable to those we are living with today. Back then they were the progressive party. TR created the federal environmental conservation movement! 40ish years earlier, republicans freed the slaves! Unfortunately at some point, something went drastically awry*
Says the cost per student is closer to $10k (if you add all the graphs). I'll give you that private school is still cheaper but for high school its pretty close.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned this from the global warming alarmist alarmist:
Hold all climate forecasts to higher standards than financial reports.
Equate all predictions as equal to the one with the worst case scenario.
Interpret all forecast as paranoia that the world is ending.
Never offer explanations as to why releasing significant amounts of known greenhouse gasses won't disrupt the climate society is adapted to.
Note that the earth has been much hotter...at a time that was not conducive to human society
Note that the earth has been much colder...at a time that was not conducive to human society
Claim humans can adapt to anything but ignore the fact that when they need to do it within a few generations, most of them will die.
Pray tell, how much of a company's cash reserves should go towards impressing you?
Well since you're asking me, obviously ALL of it!
But seriously I am glad that when given the option of buying power from the grid (mostly coal) or a new PV project, they chose PV. BUT....its not like they stuck their neck out very far. Apple will (probably) need power for 25 years, they just paid for it up front. Their "investment" is essentially a purchase or a sunk cost for the future (probably not using that term correctly but hopefully you get the point).
All these tech companies have immense power (aka money) to make an epic statement. "In its most recent quarterly SEC filing, Apple reported that it had $158.8bn (£94.9bn) in cash and cash equivalents" (forbes). How many new hot text apps can they possibly buy with that? Its great that the $0.8b ended up in a new PV project that will pay itself off over 25 years. But think about how much impact just 10% of their straight up cash would have if truly invested in advanced power generation research over the same time. Half their cash is somewhere in the ballpark of the cost of 1/4 of our operating nuclear plants! Throw in some of their marketing expertise to shut up the anti nuke crowd and they could probably build more and single handedly eliminate coal as an energy source in the US with money to spare!
So yeah when you're worth ~$3/4 TRILLION, choosing to buy power from one source vs another doesn't really count as more than advocating, when just a little more risk you can make sweeping changes in a field that desperately needs it. Proportionally, all apple is doing is talk.
Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive officer, has advocated taking more steps to combat climate change."
The thing is when you're the CEO of the richest company in history (maybe?), you're in the unique position of actually being able to do something instead of suggesting other people do it (aka advocating). Way to be just like the rest of us, Tim Cook.
But for today I'll be glad Apple has spent ~0.7% or whatever of it's cash reserves on something they would have to buy anyway and thus gets counted as an investment. I'd be really impressed if they took $10B or so and spent it on some promising new nuclear or fusion project. What obligation does a corporation have to do such a thing in the free market where the shareholder is king? Well, a stable environment would be good for the economy.
Now please fill me in on all the great stuff Apple does for the environment so I can be less...less impressed!
I know right?? Star Trek proves that even after 400 (?) years of voice command optimization, the best activation method is still to physically press the communicator emblem thingy. If Picard isn't too busy for a quick gesture to get beamed out of a warp core explosion, you can push a button when you want to know where the closest chicken nuggets are.
Wow, yeah science should never attempt to be interesting, especially for the lay audience. All of the longstanding questions, brilliant technological achievements, and research built on the shoulders of giants is completely worthless to talk about when all the had to tell us is "there's moving dust on it".
In other news I wasted a whole 8 seconds reading that first sentence describing your unnecessary editorial opinion and post script. Your summary was twice as long as it needed to be.
Seriously, 10 short large font paragraphs interspersed between amazingly detailed imagery is too much?
Granted, we have no way to know how much of the government recommendation is based on science, and how much based on say, a corn lobby.
One of my favorite daily show punchlines was about some debate in congress during the recession about healthy school lunches. The punchline was "Congress can't deal with the economy, middle east, etc, because they are too busy declaring pizza a vegetable"
Yes and no. Ending a hugely expensive and unsuccessful program is a good thing. Allowing a special interest to essentially shut down an agency designed to monitor/regulate it is a bad thing.
Maybe not Mad Max, but probably a Verizon/Halliburton/Future toll road & fire dept conglomerate dystopia....not to say its not already here.
You taxes also pay for things you don't necessarily want but are a huge benefit to society at large...mainly keeping a very low rate of poor and elderly dropping dead in the street (social security/medicare/medicaid, the bulk of the budget). I'll give you those programs have their inefficiencies and can certainly be improved but for me, private industry has not demonstrated they could do it any better. Once any one company grows big enough its pretty much as inefficient as the government...only its mandate is profit for shareholders over all.
Dual US/British citizen and earning money in Britain? Great, you'll be paying both UK and US income tax on that!
In return you get all the rights of citizenship in both the US and UK. Don't want all the benefits of citizenship? No problem, renounce it!
" NRA is "looking into this to see if gun owners were improperly targeted,"
I don't know who else would be targeted at a gun show so once the NRA picks up it's batphone you can bet the DEA will be as marginalized as the ATF (understaffed to monitor firearms nationwide, directorless for 7 years, etc), effectively ending the war on drugs.
Guess that means we should ignore you when it comes to astrophysics!
So you're going with "think of the children...err...grandparents". That always goes over well on ./. Exhibit A:
"Many of these deaths could be prevented and are known as “excess winter deaths.” Age UK said countries which experience much colder temperatures, such as Finland, Germany and France, have significantly lower winter death rates than the UK, because the UK has the oldest houses in the EU."
Apparently there are other factors involved besides heating oil prices. Then there is the classic "they turk urr jerbs!!!" Ignoring all the jobs that would be created with large scale clean energy adoption....not to mention stability. North Dakota is about to loose all the jobs they just got because Saudi Arabia feels like it. And I guess you didn't see any of the examples I cited where sweeping environmental regulations were put in place that fixed the potential problem without any overall economic damage. (For exhibit B see my other post)
Murray Salby. I'll refrain from the ad hominem on him and leave his personal history as an exercise to the reader even so it provides an obvious motive for being a denier (whoops I did it anyway). His argument seems to boil down to something like "natural CO2 emissions fluctuate and follow temperature rather than the other way around and are greater than man made emissions so AGW is no big deal" which might sound like a eureka moment (i.e. Everyone accidentally had it backwards!) but is in fact wrong:
https://andthentheresphysics.w...
Whatreallyhappened...classic data cherry picking for misdirection. I've debunked those enough in similar threads, I'm over it.
Indeed the climate has always been changing. It has been much hotter and much colder on earth. What that statement ignores is that neither of those conditions supported human society! The current bout of climate change is different because it's being caused by humans at an extremely fast rate. Sure the earth will recover but human society might not. If you think elderly deaths are bad, what happens when all of our farms have to move 1000s of miles and the 90ish% of humans that live within ~100miles of a coast have to migrate?
"I'm happy to be corrected" ....sadly, human nature suggests otherwise.
As you know, in these institutions updated there materials in the 1970s to early 1980s, from "OMG panic man-made ice age" to "OMG panic global warming"
Nice myth. The "ice age panic" was one story that made Time magazine at a time when the majority of climate research indicated a warming trend due to human cause CO2 emissions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...
And about 1000 other sources if you google "1970 ice age"
I'm not going to try to convince you that AGW is a problem we should address (note I said "should be addressed", not panic over). Instead, are you afraid of something if those crazy scientists from your anecdotes get their way and the Fed institutes CO2 mitigation? Gas prices jump to $20/gallon? The government mandates CO2 trackers worn all the time? Economic disaster circa 2008?
I'll cite the elimination of lead in pretty much everything (no economic catastrophe) and the elimination of CFC's (no economic catastrophe). Also some fun facts on how we got to a point of not worrying about acid rain anymore:
"In 2007, total SO2 emissions were 8.9 million tons, achieving the program's long term goal ahead of the 2010 statutory deadline.[22]
The EPA estimates that by 2010, the overall costs of complying with the program for businesses and consumers will be $1 billion to $2 billion a year, only one fourth of what was originally predicted"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
So tell my why addressing CO2 emissions is a bad idea (not that you explicitly stated as much in your comments)
when they go back up to where they were 4 months ago, i dont want a 25% increase on that.
The gas tax was still $0.18 4 months ago. In fact, it has been since 1993. If prices went back up you'd be paying something like $3.56 instead of $3.51 with my hypothetical 25% increase. If that breaks your budget, don't be one of the morons that increases the sales rate of low mileage vehicles every time the price of gasoline dips temporarily.
The reason you think the gas tax is enough is because we're not in a crisis yet. This isn't exactly what you wanted but perhaps you could google more than 2 minutes:
"Nationwide in 2010, state and local governments raised $37 billion in motor fuel taxes and $12 billion in tolls and non-fuel taxes, but spent $155 billion on highways.[3] In other words, highway user taxes and fees made up just 32 percent of state and local expenses on roads. The rest was financed out of general revenues, including federal aid."
http://taxfoundation.org/artic...
Here is some data from federal gas tax:
"During 2008 the fund required support of $8 billion from general revenue funds to cover a shortage in the fund. This shortage was due to lower gas consumption as a result of the recession and higher gas prices.[4] Further transfers of $7 billion and $19.5 billion were made in 2009 and 2010 respectively."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Heads are not rolling. They are doing whatever the opposite of rolling is.
IOW, it's effectively partisan.
So what? That doesn't inherently mean its wrong. Maybe you could point out flaws in their selection of republicans for their survey instead of worthless partisan speculation.
I use gas. I've called and written all of my congressmen to tell them they should raise the gas tax (not that that does any good). Now is a perfect time because if you raise it 25%, no one (aside from fox news et al) is going to notice the difference between $1.82 and $1.87 (gas tax is $0.18 right now). At the very least, index it to inflation.
The other day I posted a bunch of examples of leading climate researchers from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale making statements like "by 2010, New York City will be underwater". Well, 2010 has come and gone and NYC is still there.
And you can bet those institutions have ignored the (probably) 30-40 years of additional evidence and have not updated their projections in any way and because some guys were wrong once you can completely ignore everything that comes from whoever they happened to work for at the time in perpetuity.
Side note: A case could be made that in 2010 NYC was underwater...great recession and all...
Besides, how many people just throw old pills in the *garbage* ? I'm pretty sure that's the main reason for drug resistance.
Huh, never thought of using a rhetorical question as evidence to unequivocally settle one of the most important health issues we face today. All those doctors must feel silly having wasted all that time researching.
Fallon? Pisshhh, we were doing balls in your mouth back in highschool. ...no wait, not that way! Thats not what I meant!
You're probably joking or trolling but why the hell not?!
Cows produce huge amounts of it at regular intervals and its already part of the carbon cycle. Industrialized cattle farming (the cow forklift to slaughterhouse variety) probably releases enough methane to power itself. Plus they are likely located far from a power plant (wide open spaces and all) so you get back all the transmission losses as well! Sounds like a win win to me. Someone should get on it to see if it pans out. I know some farms already employ methane capture for power so why don't all of them?
To be fair,
Nahh, thats no fun. If we play the politics game we get some fun facts(ish): Obama has delivered Michelle Bachman's promise of $2 gas (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/19/michele-bachmann-stands-by-2-a-gallon-gas-pledge/) and is on track to deliver Mitt Romney's promise of 12M new jobs (or get real close anyway, 2.5M jobs are currently being added each year). Of course we all know the main connection between administrations and economic issues is taking credit when things are good and getting blamed when things are bad. (That said there are exceptions such as deregulation->mortgage crisis...getting off topic here)
If we want to be fair, these new methane regulations are merely holding oil producers accountable for the consequences of their activities. If that reduces production then its only reverting back to what it should have been all along had all costs been considered at the outset.
Side note: since those industrious oil scamps increased production all on their own without federal handouts (i.e. access to fed managed land) then we no longer need to consider drilling in ANWR and the like, right?
If congress defunds the EPA, a lot of US citizens will also find some balls....throughout their bodies. Some internally, some externally and some on their pre-existing balls themselves!!!
Is his complete failure to reduce production the reason you (likely) hate him? Since Obama took office, oil production has increased 50%:
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hi...
The reason it's probably going to drop precipitously in the next few months/year is due to the whims of OPEC, not the administration. Do heartland states really want to tie your economies so tightly to how Arabs are feeling?
The last time the Republcians had the large majority in the House was before the 1929 stock market crash. Something to think about.
While fun to point out, I don't see that as especially relevant. The republicans of the early 1900's are in no way comparable to those we are living with today. Back then they were the progressive party. TR created the federal environmental conservation movement! 40ish years earlier, republicans freed the slaves! Unfortunately at some point, something went drastically awry*
*IM(logic based)O
Your numbers are bogus.
Maybe, but you haven't proven that. You quoted cost per student. I quoted cost per tax payer, of which there are vastly more of. Second, this guy
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/d...
Says the cost per student is closer to $10k (if you add all the graphs). I'll give you that private school is still cheaper but for high school its pretty close.