There's some truth in there, but I think you're missing the fact that the two approaches can be tackled simultaneously. A cap and trade system would be a quick way to wring the inefficient CO2 use out of the developed economies.
You also miss an important trend: as the cap and trade focuses research on low-CO2 energy generation technologies in the developed world, those technologies will mature quickly, and be available for developing countries as well. It's not obvious that every country needs to go through a "coal phase", any more than they need to go through a land line phase on their way to cell phones.
Perhaps we could do a cap and trade system where only the developed countries participated directly, but they could get credit for subsidizing green tech in the developing world.
But the fact that most of the increase in CO2 output over the next 50 years will come from developing nations is hard to deny. They have the increasing population and they'll have the standard of living increases. We can't ask them not to develop. But we could be lucky, and they'll discover routes to development that lead to a more sustainable end game.
The increase in ice is expected over most of the continental shelf. The stuff near the coasts is fair game. Also, I believe the increased ice is expected to be temporary.
While I'd replace all coal with nuclear in a heartbeat given the chance, I don't think nuclear power is viable. To me, it seems too expensive, too politically infeasible, too centralized, and too prone to terrorism. Concentrating solar looks very viable at the moment, and I think geothermal could become a major player before 2020 with the right incentives.
But I think energy efficiency is the untapped gold mine. I've seen quotes for nuclear running about $6000-$11000 per installed kW of capacity. By my rough calculations, for $3500 you could buy enough CFL bulbs up front* to eliminate the need for that kW of capacity for 30 years.** Even better, CFLs eliminate that demand precisely when the energy is needed. Any generation-based solution has to predict demand and compensate.
Thank you for your responses to the skeptics. They've been excellent.
* If you assume that the cost of bulbs will go down over time, or that you could invest the money for the bulbs you don't need immediately, or that another high-efficiency lighting technology will beat CFLs in the future, the strategy works even better.
** $3/bulb, bulbs last an average of 5 years, running for 3 hours a day on average, 17w CFL vs. 60w incandescent.
I think your analogy of withholding vital medical treatment until things get suddenly and catastrophically worse is apt, though I know it's not what you're aiming for.
Yes, there's some amount of global warming that we won't be able to stop. We may have even passed a couple of tipping points that are going to compound our problems. But there is still a lot of "expected" CO2 emissions that we could avoid rather easily.
So what if it costs trillions of dollars to mitigate climate change? You talk about that like it's a huge number. In fact, the worldwide GDP in 2008 was 50T. So even assuming the economy stays flat over the critical next 30 years, that gives us (as a species) about a 1.5 quadrillion budget to work with. A few trillion is a rounding error, and far short of the numbers required for "adaptation".
It's still quite a wad to blow if global warming is a hoax. But it's not. AGW is the majority view of the scientific community, and the opposition is tiny and fragmented. In short, you can argue all you want over whether the word "consensus" is warranted, but the majority opinion of the experts in the field is that:
1) Global warming is happening. 2) It is caused primarily by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. 3) The consequences are going to be somewhere between fairly bad and catastrophic.
To me, it's enough that devoting 1% or 2% of global GDP to stopping things from getting worse.
I believe you've also significantly underestimated the costs of adaptation and remediation. A lot of people are talking in terms of a 20% drop in global GDP due to the effects of warming. I think that could be conservative. The biosphere provides tens of trillions in direct services to mankind, and underpins 100% of all economic activity. After all, how much economic activity would we have if we were all dead?
The predictions are absolutely frightening. If we have 3C in warming over the next century -- that's a pretty middle-of-the-road estimate -- we could lose vast numbers of species, perhaps a third of the total. Even if you don't particularly care about the rot-gutted Andean tree smirt, it's a sign of a severe degradation in the ecosystem that keeps us all alive. We really are playing with fire.
Some of the planets are warming. Some aren't. Some, we aren't sure. Pluto is easily explained by seasonal changes. None of it has anything to do with what's going on on the Earth.
The rough analogy of what you're proposing: "Until you can guarantee that this building will stand forever, why shouldn't I keep whacking at the foundation with a ball peen hammer?"
Fact: The Earth has never had a static climate.
Fact: Life can adapt nicely to gradual changes in climate.
Fact: What we are undergoing is not gradual. In fact, from a geological and an evolutionary viewpoint, it's more like a killer asteroid than the natural warming trends of the past.
They're estimating that if we raise the temperature by 3C over the next hundred years, we could lose a third of all the species on the planet to global warming alone. Damage like that takes tens of millions of years to recover from.
So yes it does matter whether we're the cause of climate change.
I think there is a use for the term "denialist", but that it doesn't cover all climate change skeptics. Just the dishonest ones, who use arguments far beneath what ought to be their actual level of scientific understanding. For example, "global warming stopped in 1998" is a pretty blatant one, if offered by someone who should know better than to try and lie with statistics.
So, your entire argument is warmed over, "reactionary" anti-government cynicism? How boring. In case it escaped your notice, corruption and boondogglery isn't exactly monopolized by the public sector.
I agree, clean drinking water is a good investment. In fact, I probably believe it more sincerely than you do. Otherwise, you wouldn't be obsessed with taking money out of the "global warming bucket" to buy it. You'd be proposing taking it out of the military bucket, or the farm subsidies bucket, or the "Americans buying mammoth houses with three spare bedrooms" bucket, or the fuel bucket, or the "cheap crap from China" bucket, or the "maintaining an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons" bucket. How much of that AIG money would it have taken to provide clean water for every person in the Third World?
The only reason to single out the "global warming bucket" is if you don't want money going into that bucket.
Further, as I said, there are millions of tons of CO2 that could be removed from the atmosphere *at a profit*, so we could make great strides in fighting global warming without ever reaching for any bucket.
The government can indeed force someone to reveal their sources. There is no "right to silence" in the Constitution. There is only the right to not testify against yourself. You can be thrown in jail for refusing to testify when the judicial system wants to know something that you know. Journalists are protected in some states by shield laws, but there is currently no federal protection. A law is in the works, but I doubt it's ironclad. According to the Supremes, the first amendment doesn't protect reporters directly, but the government has to show a "compelling interest" in getting the information that they're trying to compel from the reporter.
If the government shows compelling interest, the reporter can go to jail for not complying.
You rush to the defense of Stevens because you believe his reputation suffered due to unfair accusations. Interesting how much less respect you accord Mark Begich's reputation, when his only offense was running against Stevens while he was having legal troubles.
You also claim that the prosecution -- done by the Department of Justice, under the direction of Bush appointees -- was politically motivated. Could you elaborate on who in the Bush DoJ was motivated by the desire to remove a Republican senator? Could you explain how this partisan attack on a Republican happened, when the Bush Justice Department was seven times more likely to investigate Democrats than Republicans?
You claim that Stevens has been exonerated. Not technically true. His conviction was thrown out as a mistrial. That's not the same thing as receiving a not guilty verdict. A not guilty verdict would mean that the same charges could never be brought against Stevens again. In this case, the government could have requested a retrial on the same charges. One of the reasons they didn't was because Stevens is now merely a very, very, very old private citizen. If there was a good chance of him recovering his Senate seat, he'd almost certainly be getting what he really deserves: a fair trial, untainted by the prosecutorial misconduct of the last trial.
Ted Stevens, "one of the few honest politicians in the Senate?" I'll be laughing about that one for weeks.
First, the lie that it's easier to adapt to climate change than prevent it. It's a lie, because the only way we're going to get through this is to do both. We're already pretty much guaranteed a rise of 2C. More likely, we'll end up with 3C, even with aggressive action. There are going to be changes, and we are going to have to adapt. Worse, we're already at risk of running into feedback loops that will compound the rise.
But if we try to take your "adapt only" approach, while changing nothing about the behaviors that brought us here in the first place, if we keep increasing our coal mining, if we unlock the CO2 in tar sands, if we increase our deforestation rates, we're talking a rise of 6C or 7C. The consequences will be apocalyptic.
The second lie is that the ecosystems will adapt. Except, we suppose, for those lesser, unworthy species which are too weak or stupid, but hey, we're better off without them. Proponents act as though we're doing the ecosystem a favor.
This is a very dangerous sort of stupidity. First, we are making changes to the Earth at a pace that vastly outstrips the ecosystem's natural adaptability. That rise in global temperature has to be viewed in the context of the toxins we put into the ecosystem, the way our structures break up and separate swaths of habitat, our penchant for introducing new species everywhere we go, man-made dead zones in the ocean, and a thousand other stresses we're already putting on the ecosystem.
We also have to remember that, while the Earth has had large temperature swings in the past, they were spread out over much longer timeframe. The difference between a 5C swing over a hundred thousand years, and a similarly large swing over 150 years is the difference between gently braking to a stop and slamming into a concrete wall.
Finally, and most important, proponents of your dangerous delusions act as though we are utterly disconnected from our natural world. If you calculated the economic value of all the economic services we get from our natural world, well, it dwarfs the costs of anything we could consider doing to preserve them. If we assume that climate change leads to even a 20% degradation in the value of those services, it will hurt mankind more than anything most global warming doomsayers are proposing.
"Good stewardship" requires us to do nothing, when there are dozens of things we could be doing that can reduce CO2 and save money at the same time?
And how in the hell is building a solar collector like introducing an invasive species? Do you often see solar installations humping each other, and giving birth to other solar installations?
What are these negative effects you fear if we adopt "reactionism" (after spending thirty years studying the problem)? If we adopt more solar and wind power, if we flood the market with plug-in hybrids, if we retrofit existing buildings with greater energy efficiency and demand higher standards for new buildings, if we replant the forests, what are the terrible, terrible consequences?
Let's discuss this "hundred trillion dollars" figure.
First, citation frakking needed.
On the other hand, is that really such a huge number? That total amounts to approximately two years of the world's GDP. If the alternative is, say, a 20% risk of societal collapse (which, for the sake of the math, I will define as a 50% reduction in world GDP and a 30,000% increase in cannibalism), then dumping a hundred trillion dollars into fixing it would pay for itself in two years.
Still, I strongly dispute the number. The estimates I remember say that tackling climate change ought to cost less than 2% of world GDP. The important thing to remember is that many, many of the remediation costs have other, positive economic effects. In other words, by doing things like weatherizing buildings, building more fuel-efficient cars, and installing other energy efficiency technology, we can save money and carbon at the same time. I couldn't find the chart, but there's this nifty chart that took estimates of various remediation actions, ordered them by cost per ton, and basically showed that the ones that the money saved by the cash-positive remediation steps very nearly balanced out the money spent on cost-negative remediation steps.
Transmission costs are tiny. You can carry electricity 600 miles, and only lose 3-5%. This is not a valid objection.
The wind is generally more reliable offshore than it is on land, and I really doubt that a calm spell could beset an entire coast at the same time. The studies I've noticed indicate that wind could provide 70% of all power, without much overcapacity or reliability issues. All that is required is a nationwide grid system.
In order to claim that you need a 1:1 backup system, you have to ignore that. You also need to ignore all of the following:
1) The potential for high-capacity energy storage. A small fleet of electric cars would be able to store and sell electricity. Energy could be used to produce hydrogen, which could generate electricity in the down times.
2) The ability to predict the weather days in advance, well enough to predict serious shortfalls in supply and make adjustments.
3) The future ability to make the grid (and the appliances connected to it) aware of current energy prices.
You also claim that this backup system -- which we don't actually need -- would necessarily be running 24/7 anyways, which is wrong. Natural gas plants have a much shorter spin-up time. Solar thermal plants could double as grid backup, just by burning, well, any damned thing. As long as its reservoir is hot, it can produce electricity.
Please, find me one reputable source for this "100% backup" claim of yours.
But the point the GP was making was, after Colbert lost the bid to be on the ballot, he didn't pursue a write-in campaign. He never asked anyone to write his name on any ballot. So it's a bit pointless to diss him for not rocking the vote.
I love that so many people are having success with the less stringent approach to copyright, and I do think that copyright protections have gone off the rails. But I have mixed feelings about forcing a zero-copyright approach on all twits. It's insane to try and enforce copyright on a single message, but I figure the feed as a whole is as worthy of copyright protection as any other creative work.
Actually, let me rethink that. Twitter is a lot messier than other copyrighted works, because feeds are (by design) meant to be split up, mashed together, filtered, and republished to other websites. There's no perfect way to map 17th-century concepts on the 21st-century world. So maybe public domain would make some sense in this case.
Public domain might be a good solution for individual twits, tweets, tweens, whatever. But I can imagine someone doing something elaborate and creative with Twitter over the course of months and hundreds of posts. They might want to eventually publish it as a book, which is harder to do if they've lost all copyright claim to their work.
It's a concern, but not an insurmountable one. There was a proposal floating about for campaign finance reform. All donation limits would be eliminated. However, the money would have to be routed through the FEC. The money gets directed to the candidates, but in such a way that donors can't prove to the candidate that they'd made the contribution.
The plan both curtails government's ability to rig the system, and makes it difficult for donations to garner any sort of quid pro quo.
You could have a system where every citizen in the U.S. gets, say, $100 to direct to any qualified* news outlet. FOX News, Democracy Now, a local newspaper, a prominent blogger, wouldn't matter. Anyone doing reporting in the public interest could accept the individual donations. The government would be funding it, but they would have relatively little say over who got funded.
Sure, they could revoke an organization's news org status, but it would be a Big Deal, like revoking the charitable status of a church today.**
* Yeah, this is going to cause no end of debate. But I shouldn't be able to pocket the money just by pointing to my own blog.
** Some people argue that the non-profit rules do muzzle churches to some extent.
* The protests against the Republican convention were far more extensive. * The RNC protests were preceded by a wave of "pre-emptive" arrests, complete with hyperventilating (and ultimately wrong) reports of urine stockpiles. It was heavy-handed and anti-democratic. * Long and short of it: Republican's can't protest worth crap. Democrats have been honing their skills since the sixties. Small, lame protests are inherently less newsworthy than large, disruptive protests.
Slashdot Mirror
There's some truth in there, but I think you're missing the fact that the two approaches can be tackled simultaneously. A cap and trade system would be a quick way to wring the inefficient CO2 use out of the developed economies.
You also miss an important trend: as the cap and trade focuses research on low-CO2 energy generation technologies in the developed world, those technologies will mature quickly, and be available for developing countries as well. It's not obvious that every country needs to go through a "coal phase", any more than they need to go through a land line phase on their way to cell phones.
Perhaps we could do a cap and trade system where only the developed countries participated directly, but they could get credit for subsidizing green tech in the developing world.
But the fact that most of the increase in CO2 output over the next 50 years will come from developing nations is hard to deny. They have the increasing population and they'll have the standard of living increases. We can't ask them not to develop. But we could be lucky, and they'll discover routes to development that lead to a more sustainable end game.
The increase in ice is expected over most of the continental shelf. The stuff near the coasts is fair game. Also, I believe the increased ice is expected to be temporary.
While I'd replace all coal with nuclear in a heartbeat given the chance, I don't think nuclear power is viable. To me, it seems too expensive, too politically infeasible, too centralized, and too prone to terrorism. Concentrating solar looks very viable at the moment, and I think geothermal could become a major player before 2020 with the right incentives.
But I think energy efficiency is the untapped gold mine. I've seen quotes for nuclear running about $6000-$11000 per installed kW of capacity. By my rough calculations, for $3500 you could buy enough CFL bulbs up front* to eliminate the need for that kW of capacity for 30 years.** Even better, CFLs eliminate that demand precisely when the energy is needed. Any generation-based solution has to predict demand and compensate.
Thank you for your responses to the skeptics. They've been excellent.
* If you assume that the cost of bulbs will go down over time, or that you could invest the money for the bulbs you don't need immediately, or that another high-efficiency lighting technology will beat CFLs in the future, the strategy works even better.
** $3/bulb, bulbs last an average of 5 years, running for 3 hours a day on average, 17w CFL vs. 60w incandescent.
I read it. Did you?
There's nothing there to indicate that the current collapse is part of a natural cycle, or that we've touched off something utterly unstoppable.
We have passed some points of no return. We're still looking ahead at others, and how many more we pass depends entirely on our actions today.
Whining fatalism helps nobody.
I think your analogy of withholding vital medical treatment until things get suddenly and catastrophically worse is apt, though I know it's not what you're aiming for.
Yes, there's some amount of global warming that we won't be able to stop. We may have even passed a couple of tipping points that are going to compound our problems. But there is still a lot of "expected" CO2 emissions that we could avoid rather easily.
So what if it costs trillions of dollars to mitigate climate change? You talk about that like it's a huge number. In fact, the worldwide GDP in 2008 was 50T. So even assuming the economy stays flat over the critical next 30 years, that gives us (as a species) about a 1.5 quadrillion budget to work with. A few trillion is a rounding error, and far short of the numbers required for "adaptation".
It's still quite a wad to blow if global warming is a hoax. But it's not. AGW is the majority view of the scientific community, and the opposition is tiny and fragmented. In short, you can argue all you want over whether the word "consensus" is warranted, but the majority opinion of the experts in the field is that:
1) Global warming is happening.
2) It is caused primarily by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.
3) The consequences are going to be somewhere between fairly bad and catastrophic.
To me, it's enough that devoting 1% or 2% of global GDP to stopping things from getting worse.
I believe you've also significantly underestimated the costs of adaptation and remediation. A lot of people are talking in terms of a 20% drop in global GDP due to the effects of warming. I think that could be conservative. The biosphere provides tens of trillions in direct services to mankind, and underpins 100% of all economic activity. After all, how much economic activity would we have if we were all dead?
The predictions are absolutely frightening. If we have 3C in warming over the next century -- that's a pretty middle-of-the-road estimate -- we could lose vast numbers of species, perhaps a third of the total. Even if you don't particularly care about the rot-gutted Andean tree smirt, it's a sign of a severe degradation in the ecosystem that keeps us all alive. We really are playing with fire.
Bah. I'm feeling lazy. link link link
Some of the planets are warming. Some aren't. Some, we aren't sure. Pluto is easily explained by seasonal changes. None of it has anything to do with what's going on on the Earth.
Next question?
The rough analogy of what you're proposing: "Until you can guarantee that this building will stand forever, why shouldn't I keep whacking at the foundation with a ball peen hammer?"
Fact: The Earth has never had a static climate.
Fact: Life can adapt nicely to gradual changes in climate.
Fact: What we are undergoing is not gradual. In fact, from a geological and an evolutionary viewpoint, it's more like a killer asteroid than the natural warming trends of the past.
They're estimating that if we raise the temperature by 3C over the next hundred years, we could lose a third of all the species on the planet to global warming alone. Damage like that takes tens of millions of years to recover from.
So yes it does matter whether we're the cause of climate change.
I think there is a use for the term "denialist", but that it doesn't cover all climate change skeptics. Just the dishonest ones, who use arguments far beneath what ought to be their actual level of scientific understanding. For example, "global warming stopped in 1998" is a pretty blatant one, if offered by someone who should know better than to try and lie with statistics.
Interesting. Thanks for the link. The perverse incentives in the Kyoto Protocol were especially concerning.
So, your entire argument is warmed over, "reactionary" anti-government cynicism? How boring. In case it escaped your notice, corruption and boondogglery isn't exactly monopolized by the public sector.
I agree, clean drinking water is a good investment. In fact, I probably believe it more sincerely than you do. Otherwise, you wouldn't be obsessed with taking money out of the "global warming bucket" to buy it. You'd be proposing taking it out of the military bucket, or the farm subsidies bucket, or the "Americans buying mammoth houses with three spare bedrooms" bucket, or the fuel bucket, or the "cheap crap from China" bucket, or the "maintaining an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons" bucket. How much of that AIG money would it have taken to provide clean water for every person in the Third World?
The only reason to single out the "global warming bucket" is if you don't want money going into that bucket.
Further, as I said, there are millions of tons of CO2 that could be removed from the atmosphere *at a profit*, so we could make great strides in fighting global warming without ever reaching for any bucket.
You're right. We need to get both sides of the story, not rush to judgment about who is at fault.
If only there were some way for this guy to publish his side of the story. Maybe he should start a blog or something.
The government can indeed force someone to reveal their sources. There is no "right to silence" in the Constitution. There is only the right to not testify against yourself. You can be thrown in jail for refusing to testify when the judicial system wants to know something that you know. Journalists are protected in some states by shield laws, but there is currently no federal protection. A law is in the works, but I doubt it's ironclad. According to the Supremes, the first amendment doesn't protect reporters directly, but the government has to show a "compelling interest" in getting the information that they're trying to compel from the reporter.
If the government shows compelling interest, the reporter can go to jail for not complying.
You rush to the defense of Stevens because you believe his reputation suffered due to unfair accusations. Interesting how much less respect you accord Mark Begich's reputation, when his only offense was running against Stevens while he was having legal troubles.
You also claim that the prosecution -- done by the Department of Justice, under the direction of Bush appointees -- was politically motivated. Could you elaborate on who in the Bush DoJ was motivated by the desire to remove a Republican senator? Could you explain how this partisan attack on a Republican happened, when the Bush Justice Department was seven times more likely to investigate Democrats than Republicans?
You claim that Stevens has been exonerated. Not technically true. His conviction was thrown out as a mistrial. That's not the same thing as receiving a not guilty verdict. A not guilty verdict would mean that the same charges could never be brought against Stevens again. In this case, the government could have requested a retrial on the same charges. One of the reasons they didn't was because Stevens is now merely a very, very, very old private citizen. If there was a good chance of him recovering his Senate seat, he'd almost certainly be getting what he really deserves: a fair trial, untainted by the prosecutorial misconduct of the last trial.
Ted Stevens, "one of the few honest politicians in the Senate?" I'll be laughing about that one for weeks.
I hear these two lies a lot.
First, the lie that it's easier to adapt to climate change than prevent it. It's a lie, because the only way we're going to get through this is to do both. We're already pretty much guaranteed a rise of 2C. More likely, we'll end up with 3C, even with aggressive action. There are going to be changes, and we are going to have to adapt. Worse, we're already at risk of running into feedback loops that will compound the rise.
But if we try to take your "adapt only" approach, while changing nothing about the behaviors that brought us here in the first place, if we keep increasing our coal mining, if we unlock the CO2 in tar sands, if we increase our deforestation rates, we're talking a rise of 6C or 7C. The consequences will be apocalyptic.
The second lie is that the ecosystems will adapt. Except, we suppose, for those lesser, unworthy species which are too weak or stupid, but hey, we're better off without them. Proponents act as though we're doing the ecosystem a favor.
This is a very dangerous sort of stupidity. First, we are making changes to the Earth at a pace that vastly outstrips the ecosystem's natural adaptability. That rise in global temperature has to be viewed in the context of the toxins we put into the ecosystem, the way our structures break up and separate swaths of habitat, our penchant for introducing new species everywhere we go, man-made dead zones in the ocean, and a thousand other stresses we're already putting on the ecosystem.
We also have to remember that, while the Earth has had large temperature swings in the past, they were spread out over much longer timeframe. The difference between a 5C swing over a hundred thousand years, and a similarly large swing over 150 years is the difference between gently braking to a stop and slamming into a concrete wall.
Finally, and most important, proponents of your dangerous delusions act as though we are utterly disconnected from our natural world. If you calculated the economic value of all the economic services we get from our natural world, well, it dwarfs the costs of anything we could consider doing to preserve them. If we assume that climate change leads to even a 20% degradation in the value of those services, it will hurt mankind more than anything most global warming doomsayers are proposing.
"Good stewardship" requires us to do nothing, when there are dozens of things we could be doing that can reduce CO2 and save money at the same time?
And how in the hell is building a solar collector like introducing an invasive species? Do you often see solar installations humping each other, and giving birth to other solar installations?
What are these negative effects you fear if we adopt "reactionism" (after spending thirty years studying the problem)? If we adopt more solar and wind power, if we flood the market with plug-in hybrids, if we retrofit existing buildings with greater energy efficiency and demand higher standards for new buildings, if we replant the forests, what are the terrible, terrible consequences?
Let's discuss this "hundred trillion dollars" figure.
First, citation frakking needed.
On the other hand, is that really such a huge number? That total amounts to approximately two years of the world's GDP. If the alternative is, say, a 20% risk of societal collapse (which, for the sake of the math, I will define as a 50% reduction in world GDP and a 30,000% increase in cannibalism), then dumping a hundred trillion dollars into fixing it would pay for itself in two years.
Still, I strongly dispute the number. The estimates I remember say that tackling climate change ought to cost less than 2% of world GDP. The important thing to remember is that many, many of the remediation costs have other, positive economic effects. In other words, by doing things like weatherizing buildings, building more fuel-efficient cars, and installing other energy efficiency technology, we can save money and carbon at the same time. I couldn't find the chart, but there's this nifty chart that took estimates of various remediation actions, ordered them by cost per ton, and basically showed that the ones that the money saved by the cash-positive remediation steps very nearly balanced out the money spent on cost-negative remediation steps.
Transmission costs are tiny. You can carry electricity 600 miles, and only lose 3-5%. This is not a valid objection.
The wind is generally more reliable offshore than it is on land, and I really doubt that a calm spell could beset an entire coast at the same time. The studies I've noticed indicate that wind could provide 70% of all power, without much overcapacity or reliability issues. All that is required is a nationwide grid system.
In order to claim that you need a 1:1 backup system, you have to ignore that. You also need to ignore all of the following:
1) The potential for high-capacity energy storage. A small fleet of electric cars would be able to store and sell electricity. Energy could be used to produce hydrogen, which could generate electricity in the down times.
2) The ability to predict the weather days in advance, well enough to predict serious shortfalls in supply and make adjustments.
3) The future ability to make the grid (and the appliances connected to it) aware of current energy prices.
You also claim that this backup system -- which we don't actually need -- would necessarily be running 24/7 anyways, which is wrong. Natural gas plants have a much shorter spin-up time. Solar thermal plants could double as grid backup, just by burning, well, any damned thing. As long as its reservoir is hot, it can produce electricity.
Please, find me one reputable source for this "100% backup" claim of yours.
They had the chance to come up with a great name, something inspiring and noble, something that touched all our better natures.
Instead, they called it The International Space Station! Who the hell decided on that name, Microsoft's Marketing Department?
They blew their big chance, so don't lament that the module is named after one popular culture item rather than another.
So, we name the pod after Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and everybody is mostly happy.
But the point the GP was making was, after Colbert lost the bid to be on the ballot, he didn't pursue a write-in campaign. He never asked anyone to write his name on any ballot. So it's a bit pointless to diss him for not rocking the vote.
You're getting off topic.
I love that so many people are having success with the less stringent approach to copyright, and I do think that copyright protections have gone off the rails. But I have mixed feelings about forcing a zero-copyright approach on all twits. It's insane to try and enforce copyright on a single message, but I figure the feed as a whole is as worthy of copyright protection as any other creative work.
Actually, let me rethink that. Twitter is a lot messier than other copyrighted works, because feeds are (by design) meant to be split up, mashed together, filtered, and republished to other websites. There's no perfect way to map 17th-century concepts on the 21st-century world. So maybe public domain would make some sense in this case.
How the hell did you get my Facebook password?
Not a good idea. You're going to inadvertently publish every state secret that can be described in 140 chars. Off to Guantanamo!
Public domain might be a good solution for individual twits, tweets, tweens, whatever. But I can imagine someone doing something elaborate and creative with Twitter over the course of months and hundreds of posts. They might want to eventually publish it as a book, which is harder to do if they've lost all copyright claim to their work.
It's a concern, but not an insurmountable one. There was a proposal floating about for campaign finance reform. All donation limits would be eliminated. However, the money would have to be routed through the FEC. The money gets directed to the candidates, but in such a way that donors can't prove to the candidate that they'd made the contribution.
The plan both curtails government's ability to rig the system, and makes it difficult for donations to garner any sort of quid pro quo.
You could have a system where every citizen in the U.S. gets, say, $100 to direct to any qualified* news outlet. FOX News, Democracy Now, a local newspaper, a prominent blogger, wouldn't matter. Anyone doing reporting in the public interest could accept the individual donations. The government would be funding it, but they would have relatively little say over who got funded.
Sure, they could revoke an organization's news org status, but it would be a Big Deal, like revoking the charitable status of a church today.**
* Yeah, this is going to cause no end of debate. But I shouldn't be able to pocket the money just by pointing to my own blog.
** Some people argue that the non-profit rules do muzzle churches to some extent.
A few things to remember:
* The protests against the Republican convention were far more extensive.
* The RNC protests were preceded by a wave of "pre-emptive" arrests, complete with hyperventilating (and ultimately wrong) reports of urine stockpiles. It was heavy-handed and anti-democratic.
* Long and short of it: Republican's can't protest worth crap. Democrats have been honing their skills since the sixties. Small, lame protests are inherently less newsworthy than large, disruptive protests.