Reducing insolation is probably the biggest one. There are lots of options for that, ranging from space-based shades to attempting to adjust the albedo of large regions, plus I'm sure many others I haven't considered.... In a phrase: planetary climate engineering.
The scientists that Trump is asking about have little to do with that area. And the executive branch has no mandate to engage in "planetary climate engineering" anyway; that is something we would have to have a large political debate about, and it is something that requires international agreement. So, you may or may not think that "planetary climate engineering" is a good thing, but it has little to do with Trump's attempt at house cleaning at the agencies.
Science doesn't just stop. More research is always needed in virtually every area of research.
"Needed" for what? More beautiful scientific insights? Sure. But, concretely, what do you hope to gain from spending more money on climate change research? Where specifically are there uncertainties that are relevant to political decision making?
There's no real trade off. Don't start curbing CO2 emissions substantially now, and the cost to national and global economies in fifty years will be beyond astronomical.
We know what the costs are; several decades of research have worked that out. The question we're discussing here isn't whether we should curb CO2 emissions, but whether we need to keep thousands of climate change researchers on the government payroll, and for what purpose.
Figuring out what to do about it requires climate research. We need to understand the mechanisms in much greater detail, to be able to predict the effects of various actions,
Really? What "actions" are there besides reducing CO2 and methane emissions?
CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because Trump and his science-hating peons get rid of the scientists
And CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because we keep hiring more scientists that keep telling us the same thing over and over again. We don't need thousands of researchers researching something on which there is basically broad consensus.
Where there isn't broad consensus is what to do about it. That's a tradeoff between economic growth and carbon emissions. Climate scientists are not qualified to speak to that, and their beliefs, opinions, or research results are irrelevant to that question.
cause last time I checked it wasn't [...] progressives who first people into those categories.
I didn't say they did it "first", I said they have been "doing it for decades". Since the 1960's, American institutions keep track of "racial" classifications of employees, customers, debtors, renters, students, etc.
did slavery and the systematic persecution of blacks and other minorities never happen in your world or something?
While progressives like to confound the two, slavery and 20th century racism are quite distinct phenomena. Since the beginning of the 20th century, racial classification, segregation, persecution of racial minorities, and eugenics have been driven primarily by progressivism, both in the US and in Europe. Pre 20th century, these modern political categorizations make less sense, but it was still Democrats that favored slavery and racial categorization and Republicans that opposed slavery and racial categorization.
Democrats like to maintain the myth that party labels magically switched due to the "Southern Strategy", but in reality, both Democratic and Republican policies have been fairly consistent throughout US history, with Democrats making racial distinctions and Republicans advocating for equality under the law regardless of race. What changed was that Democrats figured out how to sell their racial discrimination as a supposed benefit to minorities.
liberals or progressives
The people who call themselves "liberals" in the US are not actually politically liberal, but instead are either progressives or democratic socialists. So, it's best to avoid using the term "liberal" altogether.
That's true. But stocks and pork bellies are different from each other when it comes to fungibility and elasticity. There are distinct markets in fossil fuels and pork bellies, but there is no distinct market in fossil fuel stocks, just the stock market.
Fear and greed, supply and demand, gluts, panics, quants, HVTs, it's all there in both.
Well, yes, and the same kind of people who believe that stock market prices are a fiction based on irrational investors, and that people who make their livelihood with investments are useless parasites living off unearned income,those are the people who believe that divestment works for reducing stock prices. That group strongly overlaps with progressives, which is why they often engage in these divestment campaigns.
The New Yorker, right wing rag that it is(*), explains it pretty well:
However, if the aim of divestment campaigns is to reduce companies’ profitability by directly reducing their share prices, then these campaigns are misguided. An example: suppose that the market price for a share in ExxonMobil is ten dollars, and that, as a result of a divestment campaign, a university decides to divest from ExxonMobil, and it sells the shares for nine dollars each. What happens then?
Well, what happens is that someone who doesn’t have ethical concerns will snap up the bargain. They’ll buy the shares for nine dollars apiece, and then sell them for ten dollars to one of the other thousands of investors who don’t share the university’s moral scruples. The market price stays the same; the company loses no money and notices no difference. As long as there are economic incentives to invest in a certain stock, there will be individuals and groups—most of whom are not under any pressure to act in a socially responsible way—willing to jump on the opportunity. These people will undo the good that socially conscious investors are trying to do
There is an important difference, therefore, between divestment and product boycotts. If a group of people believes that the Coca-Cola Company is harming the world, whereas PepsiCo isn’t, and accordingly switch their consumption from Coke to Pepsi, the Coca-Cola Company is harmed. Their sales decrease, and they make less profit. By contrast, if the same group of people stop investing in Coca-Cola, and invest instead in Pepsi, things will quickly balance out, and neither company will notice much difference. As soon as an ethical investor sells a share, a neutral or unethical investor will buy it..
Seems to have eluded all my mates who work in the City, are distinguished economists, etc. [...] You appear to think you have a point that is very obvious. You are deluding yourself.
Your mates don't understand basic economics very well, but they don't have to. Neither success as an investor nor success as a "distinguished economist" depends on actually understanding much economics.
(*) That was sarcasm; I know you Brits often don't know much about the US, so I thought I'd mention that.
If Facebook Twitter, Reddit and other leftist dominated companies run all the communications mediums, how are those who disagree to compete in the arena of ideas?
By creating new platforms. It's a good business opportunity. And it's already happening.
Steve Huffman has a net worth of many millions at age 33, based on nothing more than a mediocre ability for web design (judging by Reddit). He certainly doesn't seem like he is ready for a CEO position. He should count his blessings, resign, and spend the rest of his life bird watching, picking up women, or whatever strikes his fancy.
Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.
Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.
Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):
It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.
I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.
Wrong. White nationalist relates the Hitler cultivated groups in Germany.
No, they don't. Hitler divided people into Germanic vs everybody else. US "white nationalists" like Spencer relate to the racial categories American progressives have been putting Americans into for decades: "Caucasian", "African American", "Native American", "Asian", etc.
They deserve only destruction.
Nobody deserves "destruction". But the racism pushed on Americans by progressives and Democrats certainly deserves strong rebuke. It is fundamentally wrong and evil to attempt to categorize people by race or treat them differently based on their race.
I think the Pew data shows that a significant majority is against that collection of data, even when the questions are heavily tilted in favor of it. The fact that Democrats are disproportionately in favor of surveillance suggests that there is a good deal of partisanism involved as well.
In any case, fundamentally, this is a constitutional issue and the fundamental mandate of we, the people, is for our government to comply with the US Constitution, no matter what daily polls may say. After all, protection of minorities and unpopular opinions is essential for a free society.
People over here in Europa defended the NSA spying on the basis that it isn't a dictatorship, but a democracy doing it. So it's all good.
The NSA did what the BND, the DGSI, and every other European spy agency have been doing forever: it spied on both citizens and foreigners. The only thing that was noteworthy about the NSA is that, unlike Europe, US spy agencies are not supposed to spy on Americans. That's something Americans can get upset about; it is of no relevance to Europeans.
So, please spare us your misguided and misinformed "defense". If you want to advance the cause of privacy and fight the surveillance state, start at home.
It's not just the NSA, morale (and pay) at other technology based agencies is at rock bottom. This will end up damaging the USA far longer than Trump is around.
They started leaving long before Trump.
Furthermore, I think skilled people leaving government for the private sector is a net benefit to the USA.
It takes a certain disconnect from reality for Mr. Alexander to believe that Americans are going to feel much pity for government employees getting only six figure salaries (with good benefits and retirement plans) when a few of them could be making seven figure salaries in the private sector; or when he thinks that "you all wanted to be spied on by us" is going to get much agreement from the public. In any case, I suspect that some of those employees are leaving not because of the money, but because of conscience and purpose: they have recognized that the NSA is a fairly useless institution and an institution with questionable ethics.
The reason I asked the as yet unanswerable question regarding amounts is because we don't know how much there might be needed.
You need a little over 1 mol of lithium to produce 1 mol of tritium.
But statements like "essentially free" are irresponsible hubris. You might disagree.
I certainly do disagree. My back of the envelope calculation suggests that the cost of fuel (deuterium, lithium) for fusion power plants is a tiny fraction of that for fossil fuel power plants. That's true even if the calculation is off by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, there is no scarcity of either lithium or deuterium.
That doesn't mean that fusion power is cheap (as you naively believe I implied), it means that the cost of fusion power is in the engineering and operation. Long term, that means we can decrease the cost of fusion power through better engineering and design, instead of being limited by the vagaries of nature and scarce resources.
At current prices high-purity deuterium oxide costs about $1/gram,
Yes, and deuterium is about $7/gram. Oh the marvels of high school chemistry!
Oh, and we can't even do a D-T reactor at a sustainable level yet, much less the much higher temperatures and pressures required for a D-D reaction.
The question was assuming a working fusion reactor and asking how much the fuel costs, and the answer is: not much. That answer remains true even if your estimates were correct: deuterium and lithium are just dirt cheap compared to fossil fuels. The cost in a fusion power plant is the engineering and operation, not the fuel.
You need to understand that when using words like "essentially free", you are saying that it is a trivial matter.
AC was asking about the cost of the fuel, not the cost of construction or engineering. And, yes, the cost and amount of lithium consumed as fuel is a trivial matter compared to the cost of the deuterium, which itself isn't very expensive in the amounts used by a fusion plant.
I wouldn't hire you as part of the process,
Well, luckily, I'm not applying for work designing nuclear power plants, and even more luckily, it is unlikely that you are in charge of hiring people for critical positions.
To be honest breeder reactors work, but there are safety issues. All fast breeders with reasonable ratio use liquid metal as coolant, typically Sodium. They are expensive and difficult to maintain, see here [wikipedia.org]. A small leak could produce a Sodium fire with dire consequences.
And D-T fusion reactors need liquid lithium for breeding tritium.
Also there are weapon proliferation risks since producing fissible Plutonium from a breeding reactor is very easy.
That argument is b.s., since anybody with the technology to build regular nuclear power plants can already build bombs.
Essentially breeders are a very dirty and dangerous business.
Why don't you save your breath and look at the question I actually answered, which is how much the hydrogen costs?
First off, the lithium you breed tritium from is very much not free,
Lithium costs a fraction of the deuterium, hence "essentially free". And D-D fusion reactors don't need either tritium or lithium.
The other obvious thing is that getting all of the Tritium out of a hunk of Lithium is probably...
There is no need to guess: the process and the chemical engineering are well understood, since there have been several sodium cooled reactors in the past. There are several fairly straightforward technologies for separating out the LiT as well (I posted a link to a patent).
Slashdot Mirror
The scientists that Trump is asking about have little to do with that area. And the executive branch has no mandate to engage in "planetary climate engineering" anyway; that is something we would have to have a large political debate about, and it is something that requires international agreement. So, you may or may not think that "planetary climate engineering" is a good thing, but it has little to do with Trump's attempt at house cleaning at the agencies.
"Needed" for what? More beautiful scientific insights? Sure. But, concretely, what do you hope to gain from spending more money on climate change research? Where specifically are there uncertainties that are relevant to political decision making?
We know what the costs are; several decades of research have worked that out. The question we're discussing here isn't whether we should curb CO2 emissions, but whether we need to keep thousands of climate change researchers on the government payroll, and for what purpose.
Really? What "actions" are there besides reducing CO2 and methane emissions?
And CO2 won't stop magically absorbing solar radiation and heating the lower atmosphere just because we keep hiring more scientists that keep telling us the same thing over and over again. We don't need thousands of researchers researching something on which there is basically broad consensus.
Where there isn't broad consensus is what to do about it. That's a tradeoff between economic growth and carbon emissions. Climate scientists are not qualified to speak to that, and their beliefs, opinions, or research results are irrelevant to that question.
I didn't say they did it "first", I said they have been "doing it for decades". Since the 1960's, American institutions keep track of "racial" classifications of employees, customers, debtors, renters, students, etc.
While progressives like to confound the two, slavery and 20th century racism are quite distinct phenomena. Since the beginning of the 20th century, racial classification, segregation, persecution of racial minorities, and eugenics have been driven primarily by progressivism, both in the US and in Europe. Pre 20th century, these modern political categorizations make less sense, but it was still Democrats that favored slavery and racial categorization and Republicans that opposed slavery and racial categorization.
Democrats like to maintain the myth that party labels magically switched due to the "Southern Strategy", but in reality, both Democratic and Republican policies have been fairly consistent throughout US history, with Democrats making racial distinctions and Republicans advocating for equality under the law regardless of race. What changed was that Democrats figured out how to sell their racial discrimination as a supposed benefit to minorities.
The people who call themselves "liberals" in the US are not actually politically liberal, but instead are either progressives or democratic socialists. So, it's best to avoid using the term "liberal" altogether.
That's true. But stocks and pork bellies are different from each other when it comes to fungibility and elasticity. There are distinct markets in fossil fuels and pork bellies, but there is no distinct market in fossil fuel stocks, just the stock market.
Well, yes, and the same kind of people who believe that stock market prices are a fiction based on irrational investors, and that people who make their livelihood with investments are useless parasites living off unearned income,those are the people who believe that divestment works for reducing stock prices. That group strongly overlaps with progressives, which is why they often engage in these divestment campaigns.
The New Yorker, right wing rag that it is(*), explains it pretty well:
Your mates don't understand basic economics very well, but they don't have to. Neither success as an investor nor success as a "distinguished economist" depends on actually understanding much economics.
(*) That was sarcasm; I know you Brits often don't know much about the US, so I thought I'd mention that.
You'll have to work that out for yourself. It's not that hard.
Unfortunately, it's not going to work. Stocks don't respond like pork bellies to supply and demand.
By creating new platforms. It's a good business opportunity. And it's already happening.
Steve Huffman has a net worth of many millions at age 33, based on nothing more than a mediocre ability for web design (judging by Reddit). He certainly doesn't seem like he is ready for a CEO position. He should count his blessings, resign, and spend the rest of his life bird watching, picking up women, or whatever strikes his fancy.
Anybody who claims that they are "unbiased" is lying. I'm biased, you're biased, and so is everybody else. What you can do is listen to people's arguments and look at their data and draw your own conclusion.
You might look at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even there, there doesn't seem to be a lot of arguments for agricultural subsidies and a lot of negative effects.
Having said that, a good place to start is probably Econlib; they have a free market bias, but their papers and their speakers/authors are good (and reputable if you care about that):
http://www.econlib.org/library...
http://www.econlib.org/library...
http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...
The Heritage foundation, of course, has a "conservative bias", whatever that is, but they also make a good argument:
http://www.heritage.org/resear...
For the harm that farm subsidies cause to third world countries, you can listen to both representatives from those countries and even the Guardian:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
https://www.theguardian.com/su...
Americans couldn't care less, however:
http://econlog.econlib.org/arc...
As for what farmers actually can do to mitigate risk, that's part of Farming 101:
https://www.extension.purdue.e...
It's such a big part of education because the dirty truth is that farm subsidies go to politically well connected groups, while most farmers actually must manage their risks themselves.
I'm afraid I can't supply you with links that make arguments for agricultural subsidies that I consider credible.
I would think many gay Muslims become very religious, just like many gay Catholics become priests.
In my experience, the most vociferous homophobes are people with homosexual tendencies.
Likewise, in my experience, the most vociferous anti-racists are people with racist tendencies.
Look in the mirror.
No, they don't. Hitler divided people into Germanic vs everybody else. US "white nationalists" like Spencer relate to the racial categories American progressives have been putting Americans into for decades: "Caucasian", "African American", "Native American", "Asian", etc.
Nobody deserves "destruction". But the racism pushed on Americans by progressives and Democrats certainly deserves strong rebuke. It is fundamentally wrong and evil to attempt to categorize people by race or treat them differently based on their race.
I think the Pew data shows that a significant majority is against that collection of data, even when the questions are heavily tilted in favor of it. The fact that Democrats are disproportionately in favor of surveillance suggests that there is a good deal of partisanism involved as well.
In any case, fundamentally, this is a constitutional issue and the fundamental mandate of we, the people, is for our government to comply with the US Constitution, no matter what daily polls may say. After all, protection of minorities and unpopular opinions is essential for a free society.
The NSA did what the BND, the DGSI, and every other European spy agency have been doing forever: it spied on both citizens and foreigners. The only thing that was noteworthy about the NSA is that, unlike Europe, US spy agencies are not supposed to spy on Americans. That's something Americans can get upset about; it is of no relevance to Europeans.
So, please spare us your misguided and misinformed "defense". If you want to advance the cause of privacy and fight the surveillance state, start at home.
They started leaving long before Trump.
Furthermore, I think skilled people leaving government for the private sector is a net benefit to the USA.
It takes a certain disconnect from reality for Mr. Alexander to believe that Americans are going to feel much pity for government employees getting only six figure salaries (with good benefits and retirement plans) when a few of them could be making seven figure salaries in the private sector; or when he thinks that "you all wanted to be spied on by us" is going to get much agreement from the public. In any case, I suspect that some of those employees are leaving not because of the money, but because of conscience and purpose: they have recognized that the NSA is a fairly useless institution and an institution with questionable ethics.
You need a little over 1 mol of lithium to produce 1 mol of tritium.
I certainly do disagree. My back of the envelope calculation suggests that the cost of fuel (deuterium, lithium) for fusion power plants is a tiny fraction of that for fossil fuel power plants. That's true even if the calculation is off by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, there is no scarcity of either lithium or deuterium.
That doesn't mean that fusion power is cheap (as you naively believe I implied), it means that the cost of fusion power is in the engineering and operation. Long term, that means we can decrease the cost of fusion power through better engineering and design, instead of being limited by the vagaries of nature and scarce resources.
Yes, and deuterium is about $7/gram. Oh the marvels of high school chemistry!
The question was assuming a working fusion reactor and asking how much the fuel costs, and the answer is: not much. That answer remains true even if your estimates were correct: deuterium and lithium are just dirt cheap compared to fossil fuels. The cost in a fusion power plant is the engineering and operation, not the fuel.
Yes.
AC was asking about the cost of the fuel, not the cost of construction or engineering. And, yes, the cost and amount of lithium consumed as fuel is a trivial matter compared to the cost of the deuterium, which itself isn't very expensive in the amounts used by a fusion plant.
Well, luckily, I'm not applying for work designing nuclear power plants, and even more luckily, it is unlikely that you are in charge of hiring people for critical positions.
And D-T fusion reactors need liquid lithium for breeding tritium.
That argument is b.s., since anybody with the technology to build regular nuclear power plants can already build bombs.
That is, essentially, wrong.
Why don't you save your breath and look at the question I actually answered, which is how much the hydrogen costs?
Lithium costs a fraction of the deuterium, hence "essentially free". And D-D fusion reactors don't need either tritium or lithium.
There is no need to guess: the process and the chemical engineering are well understood, since there have been several sodium cooled reactors in the past. There are several fairly straightforward technologies for separating out the LiT as well (I posted a link to a patent).
Really? In what way "doesn't it support my points"?
AC asked how much "the hydrogen" was. I answered the question. Nowhere did I claim that this was the final cost of electricity.
However, both Deuterium and Lithium are abundant enough that economies of scale kick in if demand increases.
As for safety and non-proliferation, fusion reactors can't be turned into fusion bombs, either deliberately or spontaneously.