It would get put into either the pockets of bigwigs at outfits like Solyndra http://fortune.com/2015/08/27/... [fortune.com]
Interestingly enough, while Solyndra did fail, the government department that made the loan to Solyndra is actually expected to generate about $5 billion in revenue (even when including the costs of Solyndra and their other failed loans). As I understand it, the entire program has not only encouraged the develop of new high technology companies, they directly earned a profit while doing so (which is doubly good for Americans, because the government also collects taxes from the companies they sponsored and the people who work for those companies, but that isn't counted as revenue for this department).
Don't be fooled by the gibbering monkeys, Solyndra represents part of a lower than expected failure rate by a very successful policy initiative.
I'm not a big fan of nuclear or coal, but I'm always amused by a story I heard from an acquaintance who worked at an English nuclear plant:
The plant had a great safety track record until, because of new safety regulations, they had to put radiation sensors at even intervals around the perimeter fence at the plant. About a week after the new detectors were up and running, they detected anomalous radiation levels that exceed the acceptable levels for the nuclear plant, but only along one section of fence, and none of the monitors near the actual reactors were picking anything significant up. The event last a few hours than ended. The operations people were confused, they sent people out to check and couldn't find a reason for the event, and they decided that the monitors might be broken and replaced them and sent the previous monitors off to be tested for faults. The following week, a similar event occurred then disappeared just a mysteriously. More of the monitors were replaced and they started checking to see there was some type of signal problem. Then it happened for a fourth time, and one of the operations guys noticed something when looking at all four events. Each time the events occurred the wind was blowing from the same direction, and several miles away in that direction was... a coal power plant. The radiation from the coal ash was triggering the radiation sensors at the nuclear plant when the wind blew towards the plant because coal power plants were allowed to have a much higher level of radioactive emissions than nuclear plants.
But no one seems interested in that part of the debate.
You can't have a rational debate about the relative cost of action and inaction when half the audience is loudly claiming that action is entirely useless because the problem doesn't exist and any evidence that it does is part of a conspiracy to raise taxes.
On the other hand, there has been plenty of analysis on the estimated cost of action and inaction, and in general inaction has always been found to be a much more expensive course than action*, which shouldn't be particularly surprising. After all, there are many reasons the aphorism "A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" exists...
* The only analysis where adaptation is less expensive than prevention, is the the analysis that assumes no climate change will actually happen, which to the best of our knowledge, has approximately a 0% chance of actually occurring.
Again, why do huge expensive taxes when we just need to come up with an inexpensive engineering solution to cool the planet?
How do taxes qualify as expensive?
I'd recommend reading the article.
I skimmed it, because it's not that terribly interesting.
Reducing C02 is not going to stop global warming at this point.
That's true, but it would stop making the problem worse, or at the very least slow down the problem. The solution proposed in the article that you linked doesn't solve the problem, either. It's a plan to temporarily reflect some of the sun's light back into space before it reaches the earth, and the treatments need to be continued on an ongoing basis. Effectively, you're asking why we can't ignore the disease and only treat half the symptoms (since the atmospheric treatments would only cut the effect of global warming in half).
So you're doing an expensive "solution" that isn't going to solve your problem, at least not for a long time.
Again, a carbon tax, cap and trade or legislation are actually relatively inexpensive solutions, especially compared to that proposed solution that requires us to fly dozens (eventually hundreds) of specially designed tankers planes that spay the sulphuric acid into the upper atmosphere year round, and which will require years of study to determine if it's even feasible, and if it is, there will need to be international geo-engineering agreements and treaties, public relations efforts to convince the public that the activity is needed and not inherently evil (the chemtrail people are going to go ballistic), the construction of the materials and a yearly budget of over a trillion dollars to run the program that will need to constantly grow as the need to dim the sun grows with terrestrial CO2 emissions.
So why aren't we starting to do the R&D?
Because that's only one of many ideas for how to counter-act the increased greenhouse effect, plus it looks like someone's already doing research on it. His name's David Keith, I believe he may have been mentioned in the article...
Oh, because then people wouldn't want to do the big government bureaucracy high taxes approach then.
Every government that I know of already has a tax collecting bureaucracy. Asking them to collect one more tax isn't going to have much effect on them, and the revenue from a carbon tax could be used to offset taxes from other activity that is less worthy of being taxed, for example, it could be used to decrease income taxes. Whether or not the government spends the money on services or on tax reduction is ultimately up to the voters.
On the other hand, establishing the United Nations department of climate engineering, which would presumably be responsible for running this global dimming operation, would represent an new and expensive bureaucracy. How do we pay for the dimming service? Do we give the United Nations the ability to collect taxes from all the member nations? Is it funded by voluntary contributions? What happens if they don't raise enough money to handle the warming?
A cheap engineering solution would give us time to try and avoid knee-jerk responses driven by dubious agendas.
When it comes to engineering the planetary climate, there are no cheap solutions. The one you're currently championing is most likely over $100 trillion dollars over the rest of the century and doesn't solve the problem, it merely mitigates the effects of climate change by effectively dimming the sun.
Plus that wouldn't generate big headlines and lots of eyeballs, or scare voters into continuing to vote for parties that are no longer interested in real solutions, just getting re-elected and remaining in political power.
Kid, getting elected (or re-elected) is the primary goal of every democratic
Can you at least admit that it just MIGHT be what Trump says all this is?
Oh sure, and monkeys just might come flying out my butt. Frankly, I think my thing is more likely than yours.
BTW... Remember the "I was Wiretapped" Trump claim? Did anybody hear the congressional testimony this week, the parts where they admitted that Trump's campaign WAS under surveillance??? (Of course you didn't, but it happened.)
Wait, so does the Trump campaign count as being under-surveillance because they hired people who were under investigation for espionage?
Well, taxes are a tried-and-true method of implementing market correction by taking advantage of market forces. As we all know the cheaper solution usually wins in the marketplace, so taxing CO2 emitting energy sources either as a revenue-neutral behaviour modification or to pay for the externalized costs of CO2 emissions is an approach that is known to work and has only a few known, unintended consequences (mostly tax-avoiding black market activity).
We do not know what will happen if we try to modify the entire earth's atmosphere by spraying it with sulfuric acid, for example. Maybe it would work, but if it failed or there were unexpected side effects, the result could be worse than the problem we're trying to solve (for example, over-dimming the planet could trigger a new glacial period). So geo-engineering is a huge risk, even if everything works perfectly. And, of course, we also have to consider what happens if the geo-engineering malfunctions or is sabotaged.
It really doesn't matter if 99 out of 100 people see climate change as a real threat. As long as the top 1% keep earning billions of dollars off the status quo, and understand they will be protected from the effects, nothing is going to change.
You know, that only works as long as that 1% can convince enough of the 99% that it's not really a problem. And really, I don't think the top 1% are actually aligned on doing nothing. Of course, they're divided over the whether to take action, often based on whether or not they are invested in the industries that will be hurt by taking action.
One of the problems of some of this anti-climate change lobbying that people like Rupert Murdoch (owner of coal mines) have engaged in, is that they've spawned groups they can't really control. Trump is the end result of trying to stir up opposition to reasonable policies. If you can't trust the government, can't trust science and can't trust the media, who are people supposed to trust? They set the stage for the rise of Trump and we can only hope that they live to reap the bitter fruits of their labours.
Look, If Trump *really* fired Comey to stop an investigation into something, it was a really, really stupid blundering attempt to do so and would have been obviously doomed to failure. If you hold Trump in *that* much distain and think he is *really* that stupid and clueless, I don't see how you can believe he would be smart enough to be colluding with the Russians to throw the election, yet manage to not leave a smoking gun at the crime scene for some reporter to find.
Of course, Trump actually said he fired Comey because he refused to stop the investigation... So have you considered that maybe Trump is really that stupid and clueless? I mean maybe Trump's covering up an even worse reason to fire Comey, but I'm hard pressed to imagine what that could be.
Trump may be brash, braggart and a rich white guy from New York, but he's obviously NOT that stupid or he'd lost his money a long time ago...
Did you even stop to think maybe he just has good lawyers? I mean he's lost a lot of money over the years, and his companies have gone bankrupt many times, but he's been shielded from the consequences of those bankruptcies, by contracts and money. He even managed to escape most of the consequences of running a fraudulent university...
Also, if you stop and look at what you wrote, you might notice that you wrote that Trump must be smart because rich people can't be stupid or they wouldn't be rich. Do you really believe that?
Lastly, you're obviously discounting the possibilities that Trump may be losing his faculties because of disease, drug abuse, or age.
Are you ok? Because Jimmy Carter really ripped you a new one there. I can't believe he actually said that were some people in the American south that were racist. Oh boy. He really put the boot to you, personally, right there. I mean, how dare he suggest that you were personally racist by saying there exist some Americans who are racist...
Seriously, if you're that sensitive to the mere mention of the existence of racism, it's probably because you actually are a racist.
Michael, Michael, Michael, if you're going to lie, try to at least make your lie believable. In this case, Clinton didn't personally approve the sale, and the state department was only one of nine U.S. agencies that did approve the sale, only Obama, himself, could have vetoed the sale unilaterally and it also received approval from Canadian regulators.
Hey anonymous coward, you're a lying little bitch. You are a hard core Trump supporter pretending to not be one, and you pile the lies on. The only question is whether you are being paid to post this bullshit.
The media treats Trump far more fairly than he actually deserves. Trump, however, behaves like a whinny child and constantly complains about how the media is treating him so unfairly by reporting the truth about him.
You obviously don't understand American politics, because while many people want Trump gone, the ones who want him gone the most have no hope of ever getting "their guy" to replace him. For example, there are no Democrats in presidential line of succession, and the first independent is 6th in line. That would mean that Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Orrin Hatch, Rex Tillerson and Steven Mnuchin would all have to resign or be impeached before someone who's not a Republican could become President.
The investigations haven't produced anything because they're not done yet. Generally speaking, unless there are leaks, investigations provide their findings when they are done. Idiots should take note of that fact.
Yes Clinton supporters wanted Comey fired in January for his actions in November, actions which Trump praised and refused to fire Comey over. If you've got a half brain you'd realize that only a fool would believe that Trump fired Comey because he was too unfair to Clinton. It's blindingly obvious that Comey was fired because he refused to abort the Russia investigation, not in the least because Trump himself said that's why he fired Comey in a TV interview, after he let his staff lie about the reasons for a full day.
Trump has a below average record of achievement in his first 100 days, and he has done little of note other than sign a lot of executive orders.
Trump did not finance his own campaign, it was mostly financed by a few large conservative billionaires and he is completely beholden to them.
The rest of your braying is just endless wishful thinking from a die-hard-trump-lover.
I think the point was that those staunch defenders of Trump's freedom to say anything he damn well pleases seem to get their free-speech-panties in a knot as soon as someone else says something not nice about Trump. The complaint should never have been submitted to the FCC in the first place, but apparently there were a lot of Trump supporters who couldn't stand the fact that someone might criticise their Dear Leader.
The linked article reads: "10 to 20 cm of sea-level rise expected no later than 2050."
No, it doesn't, it reads:
A 10-to-20 centimetre (four-to-eight inch) jump in the global ocean watermark by 2050—a conservative forecast—would double flood risk in high-latitude regions, they reported in the journal Scientific Reports.
Basically they're saying that if we get far less ocean level rise than we expect, the rate of major flooding incidents will still double. If we get something closer to what we expect to get, once-a-century flooding incidents may become once-a-year flooding incidents.
... and that includes the climate scientists. I imagine it would be hard to find a climate scientist who would be willing to bet his house on a measurable and non-trivial prediction about the future -- one that he would make from his climate models in the span of a few years.
Of course by the time that happens, it'll be too late to avoid some of the worst effects. Meaning that "plan ahead for likely disasters" should be part of any sensible climate change strategy. Regardless of political developments or 'greening' efforts already underway.
Ironically, climate change deniers would use the effectiveness of the preparations to argue that climate change isn't a thing. After all, if the predicted flooding didn't happen, then the scientists must have been wrong...
Yes, there are 99 references on the Climate Change page, and 293 references on the Global Warming page, so you don't have to trust a single "fucking thing" actually written on wikipedia, and you can actually read the source material yourself.
he's admitted in absolutely no uncertain terms that he interfered with Comey's investigation. That's obstruction of justice. Full Stop. Am I missing something where that's _not_ an impeachable offense? Whatever happened to the rule of law? Even Hilary got an investigation (that concluded with no charges being filed, I might add). What do you think would've happened if Obama fired Comey during that investigation? What possible reason could there be _not_ to impeach him? I'm waiting...
Oh, that's easy. The reason Trump isn't facing impeachment right now is that the Republican party thinks impeaching him now would alienate his voter base which they need to win the 2018 midterms, and perhaps they may be even more worried that Trump would be able to carry through on his threats to back a challenger in the nomination process of any congressman who opposes him. Since over 400 seats in Congress are safely gerrymandered, the nomination process is far more dangerous for the vast majority of incumbents than the actual election.
Slashdot Mirror
It would get put into either the pockets of bigwigs at outfits like Solyndra http://fortune.com/2015/08/27/... [fortune.com]
Interestingly enough, while Solyndra did fail, the government department that made the loan to Solyndra is actually expected to generate about $5 billion in revenue (even when including the costs of Solyndra and their other failed loans). As I understand it, the entire program has not only encouraged the develop of new high technology companies, they directly earned a profit while doing so (which is doubly good for Americans, because the government also collects taxes from the companies they sponsored and the people who work for those companies, but that isn't counted as revenue for this department).
Don't be fooled by the gibbering monkeys, Solyndra represents part of a lower than expected failure rate by a very successful policy initiative.
I'm not a big fan of nuclear or coal, but I'm always amused by a story I heard from an acquaintance who worked at an English nuclear plant:
But no one seems interested in that part of the debate.
You can't have a rational debate about the relative cost of action and inaction when half the audience is loudly claiming that action is entirely useless because the problem doesn't exist and any evidence that it does is part of a conspiracy to raise taxes.
On the other hand, there has been plenty of analysis on the estimated cost of action and inaction, and in general inaction has always been found to be a much more expensive course than action*, which shouldn't be particularly surprising. After all, there are many reasons the aphorism "A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" exists...
* The only analysis where adaptation is less expensive than prevention, is the the analysis that assumes no climate change will actually happen, which to the best of our knowledge, has approximately a 0% chance of actually occurring.
I don't know why these global warming idiots just don't do their own research before opening their mouths.
Did you ever think that maybe we did?
Again, why do huge expensive taxes when we just need to come up with an inexpensive engineering solution to cool the planet?
How do taxes qualify as expensive?
I'd recommend reading the article.
I skimmed it, because it's not that terribly interesting.
Reducing C02 is not going to stop global warming at this point.
That's true, but it would stop making the problem worse, or at the very least slow down the problem. The solution proposed in the article that you linked doesn't solve the problem, either. It's a plan to temporarily reflect some of the sun's light back into space before it reaches the earth, and the treatments need to be continued on an ongoing basis. Effectively, you're asking why we can't ignore the disease and only treat half the symptoms (since the atmospheric treatments would only cut the effect of global warming in half).
So you're doing an expensive "solution" that isn't going to solve your problem, at least not for a long time.
Again, a carbon tax, cap and trade or legislation are actually relatively inexpensive solutions, especially compared to that proposed solution that requires us to fly dozens (eventually hundreds) of specially designed tankers planes that spay the sulphuric acid into the upper atmosphere year round, and which will require years of study to determine if it's even feasible, and if it is, there will need to be international geo-engineering agreements and treaties, public relations efforts to convince the public that the activity is needed and not inherently evil (the chemtrail people are going to go ballistic), the construction of the materials and a yearly budget of over a trillion dollars to run the program that will need to constantly grow as the need to dim the sun grows with terrestrial CO2 emissions.
So why aren't we starting to do the R&D?
Because that's only one of many ideas for how to counter-act the increased greenhouse effect, plus it looks like someone's already doing research on it. His name's David Keith, I believe he may have been mentioned in the article...
Oh, because then people wouldn't want to do the big government bureaucracy high taxes approach then.
Every government that I know of already has a tax collecting bureaucracy. Asking them to collect one more tax isn't going to have much effect on them, and the revenue from a carbon tax could be used to offset taxes from other activity that is less worthy of being taxed, for example, it could be used to decrease income taxes. Whether or not the government spends the money on services or on tax reduction is ultimately up to the voters.
On the other hand, establishing the United Nations department of climate engineering, which would presumably be responsible for running this global dimming operation, would represent an new and expensive bureaucracy. How do we pay for the dimming service? Do we give the United Nations the ability to collect taxes from all the member nations? Is it funded by voluntary contributions? What happens if they don't raise enough money to handle the warming?
A cheap engineering solution would give us time to try and avoid knee-jerk responses driven by dubious agendas.
When it comes to engineering the planetary climate, there are no cheap solutions. The one you're currently championing is most likely over $100 trillion dollars over the rest of the century and doesn't solve the problem, it merely mitigates the effects of climate change by effectively dimming the sun.
Plus that wouldn't generate big headlines and lots of eyeballs, or scare voters into continuing to vote for parties that are no longer interested in real solutions, just getting re-elected and remaining in political power.
Kid, getting elected (or re-elected) is the primary goal of every democratic
Can you at least admit that it just MIGHT be what Trump says all this is?
Oh sure, and monkeys just might come flying out my butt. Frankly, I think my thing is more likely than yours.
BTW... Remember the "I was Wiretapped" Trump claim? Did anybody hear the congressional testimony this week, the parts where they admitted that Trump's campaign WAS under surveillance??? (Of course you didn't, but it happened.)
Wait, so does the Trump campaign count as being under-surveillance because they hired people who were under investigation for espionage?
Well, taxes are a tried-and-true method of implementing market correction by taking advantage of market forces. As we all know the cheaper solution usually wins in the marketplace, so taxing CO2 emitting energy sources either as a revenue-neutral behaviour modification or to pay for the externalized costs of CO2 emissions is an approach that is known to work and has only a few known, unintended consequences (mostly tax-avoiding black market activity).
We do not know what will happen if we try to modify the entire earth's atmosphere by spraying it with sulfuric acid, for example. Maybe it would work, but if it failed or there were unexpected side effects, the result could be worse than the problem we're trying to solve (for example, over-dimming the planet could trigger a new glacial period). So geo-engineering is a huge risk, even if everything works perfectly. And, of course, we also have to consider what happens if the geo-engineering malfunctions or is sabotaged.
Look up the sunspot cycle and you'll have your answer, if, you are willing to be open minded and believe it!
It sure likes you are ready to believe just about anything.
It really doesn't matter if 99 out of 100 people see climate change as a real threat. As long as the top 1% keep earning billions of dollars off the status quo, and understand they will be protected from the effects, nothing is going to change.
You know, that only works as long as that 1% can convince enough of the 99% that it's not really a problem. And really, I don't think the top 1% are actually aligned on doing nothing. Of course, they're divided over the whether to take action, often based on whether or not they are invested in the industries that will be hurt by taking action.
One of the problems of some of this anti-climate change lobbying that people like Rupert Murdoch (owner of coal mines) have engaged in, is that they've spawned groups they can't really control. Trump is the end result of trying to stir up opposition to reasonable policies. If you can't trust the government, can't trust science and can't trust the media, who are people supposed to trust? They set the stage for the rise of Trump and we can only hope that they live to reap the bitter fruits of their labours.
Some Canadians won't, but the evidence is already in that a significant minority are cancelling (or rather redirecting) their trips.
Look, If Trump *really* fired Comey to stop an investigation into something, it was a really, really stupid blundering attempt to do so and would have been obviously doomed to failure. If you hold Trump in *that* much distain and think he is *really* that stupid and clueless, I don't see how you can believe he would be smart enough to be colluding with the Russians to throw the election, yet manage to not leave a smoking gun at the crime scene for some reporter to find.
Of course, Trump actually said he fired Comey because he refused to stop the investigation... So have you considered that maybe Trump is really that stupid and clueless? I mean maybe Trump's covering up an even worse reason to fire Comey, but I'm hard pressed to imagine what that could be.
Trump may be brash, braggart and a rich white guy from New York, but he's obviously NOT that stupid or he'd lost his money a long time ago...
Did you even stop to think maybe he just has good lawyers? I mean he's lost a lot of money over the years, and his companies have gone bankrupt many times, but he's been shielded from the consequences of those bankruptcies, by contracts and money. He even managed to escape most of the consequences of running a fraudulent university...
Also, if you stop and look at what you wrote, you might notice that you wrote that Trump must be smart because rich people can't be stupid or they wouldn't be rich. Do you really believe that?
Lastly, you're obviously discounting the possibilities that Trump may be losing his faculties because of disease, drug abuse, or age.
One that shows you don't know what the fuck a nation is? A nation is its people, not its government.
Who are led by the government they elected?
Are you ok? Because Jimmy Carter really ripped you a new one there. I can't believe he actually said that were some people in the American south that were racist. Oh boy. He really put the boot to you, personally, right there. I mean, how dare he suggest that you were personally racist by saying there exist some Americans who are racist...
Seriously, if you're that sensitive to the mere mention of the existence of racism, it's probably because you actually are a racist.
Michael, Michael, Michael, if you're going to lie, try to at least make your lie believable. In this case, Clinton didn't personally approve the sale, and the state department was only one of nine U.S. agencies that did approve the sale, only Obama, himself, could have vetoed the sale unilaterally and it also received approval from Canadian regulators.
Why are you telling lies?
Moron, click the link and then be ashamed of your reactionary idiocy.
Hey anonymous coward, you're a lying little bitch. You are a hard core Trump supporter pretending to not be one, and you pile the lies on. The only question is whether you are being paid to post this bullshit.
Exactly. Its not hate speech when it comes from a liberal, and there should be no accountability.
Wait, are you saying that Trump is actually in a homosexual relationship with Putin?
I think the point was that those staunch defenders of Trump's freedom to say anything he damn well pleases seem to get their free-speech-panties in a knot as soon as someone else says something not nice about Trump. The complaint should never have been submitted to the FCC in the first place, but apparently there were a lot of Trump supporters who couldn't stand the fact that someone might criticise their Dear Leader.
The linked article reads: "10 to 20 cm of sea-level rise expected no later than 2050."
No, it doesn't, it reads:
Basically they're saying that if we get far less ocean level rise than we expect, the rate of major flooding incidents will still double. If we get something closer to what we expect to get, once-a-century flooding incidents may become once-a-year flooding incidents.
You are mistaken.
... and that includes the climate scientists. I imagine it would be hard to find a climate scientist who would be willing to bet his house on a measurable and non-trivial prediction about the future -- one that he would make from his climate models in the span of a few years.
I don't think anyone has bet a house, but a scientist and economist did bet £1000 against some of the GWPF advisors, (spoiler: the GWPF people lost)
Of course, Bill Nye offered to bet $20,000 against Marc Morano's predictions of cooling but Morano turned him down. He offered a similar bet to Joe Bastardi who also turned him down.
Of course by the time that happens, it'll be too late to avoid some of the worst effects. Meaning that "plan ahead for likely disasters" should be part of any sensible climate change strategy. Regardless of political developments or 'greening' efforts already underway.
Ironically, climate change deniers would use the effectiveness of the preparations to argue that climate change isn't a thing. After all, if the predicted flooding didn't happen, then the scientists must have been wrong...
What would be alarming is if Antarctica melted. That's something everyone can understand.
I sense that you think the stable door being open isn't alarming until after all the horses have bolted...
Seriously?
Wiki- anyone can say any fucking thing - pedia?
Yes, there are 99 references on the Climate Change page, and 293 references on the Global Warming page, so you don't have to trust a single "fucking thing" actually written on wikipedia, and you can actually read the source material yourself.
he's admitted in absolutely no uncertain terms that he interfered with Comey's investigation. That's obstruction of justice. Full Stop. Am I missing something where that's _not_ an impeachable offense? Whatever happened to the rule of law? Even Hilary got an investigation (that concluded with no charges being filed, I might add). What do you think would've happened if Obama fired Comey during that investigation? What possible reason could there be _not_ to impeach him? I'm waiting...
Oh, that's easy. The reason Trump isn't facing impeachment right now is that the Republican party thinks impeaching him now would alienate his voter base which they need to win the 2018 midterms, and perhaps they may be even more worried that Trump would be able to carry through on his threats to back a challenger in the nomination process of any congressman who opposes him. Since over 400 seats in Congress are safely gerrymandered, the nomination process is far more dangerous for the vast majority of incumbents than the actual election.