I might take your statement more seriously, if it weren't in yet another AGW hysteria thread. Instead, I think it's the propensity of humans to indulge in irrational groupthink that will doom us all.
And they have a fair return on investment as well. That $5.4 billion (actually $9 billion now) increases its number of passengers per year from roughly 90 million per year to 120 million per year. It is already the highest volume airport by passengers per year. Looking at their annual budget from 2010, it looks like they turned a profit of roughly $100 million in 2010 and $200 million in 2009.
Yes, rail needs the equivalent of both of those, but they are a _lot_ cheaper.
Rails also need rails between those cheap train stations. That rail and the cost of the land, especially for high speed systems, is where their costs truly lie. For example, I wager for the cost bandied about for the California high speed rail ($68 billion at last check), they could have built half a dozen or more huge airports. And the ridership is expected to be around 120 million a year, which incidentally is what it is for the Hartsfield-Jackson airport (the Atlanta airport you mentioned).
The same number of passengers served, just for a modest multiple of the cost of the biggest airport in the world. And let us not forget that this airport is also a huge cargo airport as well. The high speed rail wouldn't be handling cargo aside from the baggage that passengers choose to carry on.
No offense, but the US is contributing in a saner and more beneficial way by resisting this lemming march. No one has found any near future evidence of harm from global warming. It's all hypothetical at this point.
And the far future harm is completely untested. So I see the viable solution being to wait a few decades while continuing to observe the Earth's climate. If there is near future harm from global warming, we should see it by then.
What lie? That is what happened. A lot of those guns wouldn't have been smuggled into Mexico and a large number, 30% as of last year, showed up at crime scenes including a large number of murders.
The people who conducted this operation failed to interdict the weapons and arrest the suspects in a timely manner.
This isn't about arresting suspects in a timely manner. They deliberately failed to interdict the weapons or halt Fast and Furious even when they knew those weapons were appearing at crime scenes. That is how they provided weapons to the Sinaloa Cartel. They didn't notify Mexican police to what was happening. They didn't keep track of the weapons except when they turn up at crime scenes.
And we should find out who knew what when. An internal investigation by the DoJ which didn't bother to find any evidence of wrongdoing isn't going to cut it, especially when coupled with efforts to protect the principals in the affair.
If you won't acknowledge that difference, I don't see a point in trying to discuss anything else.
I won't "acknowledge" that difference, because you are wrong here. It is remarkable how far people will go to forgive the actions of this administration. If this had been Dubya doing it (and the analogous operation during his administration got halted early when weapons started to go missing), I bet we'd have strung up some people by now.
It's the law of the hammer and the thief. Don't stick out and you won't get hammered down. Don't happen to live on property we want, and you won't get kicked off of it. There's no unwritten rules, there's just brutal force exercised by thugs who are usually aware that trouble will happen if they get too greedy.
The US has had concentration camps and currently has "free speech" zones. Yet, Americans rarely insist that the US has no rule of law. The laws and rules under them are understood.
Those concentration camps (established during several different eras of the US, with the Indians corralled into reservations, Germans detained during the First World War, and the Japanese during the Second World War) were established either by law or treaty. There's good reason to consider them grossly unjust, but not violations of the rule of law.
As to "free speech" zones, these can be and are contested in the court system and there's a legitimate case for them. One's ability to petition for redress is left intact despite not being able to legally shut down a city center. Again, I don't see a violation of the rule of law here.
Where's the evidence?. Note who issued that report. the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. That's not an independent body. All I see is the usual whitewash with a lot of people not recalling potentially incriminating conversations. For example,
Melson, Hoover, Chait, and McMahon told the OIG that by late summer
2010 they became increasingly frustrated with the failure of the U.S. Attorneyâ(TM)s
Office to bring an indictment in Operation Fast and Furious. ATF e-mails
beginning in July 2010 show multiple inquiries from its senior leadership
about the status of the indictment. For example, on July 14, 2010 Melson emailed Chait and Hoover and asked: âoeWhen will we be taking Fast and Furious
down? An awful lot of guns seem to be flowing south.â221 Melson told the OIG
that by the end of July 2010 he understood that apart from arrests, Operation
Fast and Furious was at its conclusion and he began asking about the
indictment âoepretty frequently.â Melson told us that he asked the Office of Field
Operations representatives about the status of the case at weekly staff
meetings and that the timing of the indictment kept moving from month to month.
Newell told the OIG that by October 2010 âoeHeadquarters [was] calling me
nonstopâ because the case had not been indicted. According to McMahon, the
U.S. Attorneyâ(TM)s Office was giving Newell âoeexcuse after excuseâ for why the
indictment had to be delayed.
Melson told the OIG that by the end of July 2010 he understood that apart from arrests, Operation
Fast and Furious was at its conclusion and he began asking about the
indictment âoepretty frequently.â Melson told us that he asked the Office of Field
Operations representatives about the status of the case at weekly staff
meetings and that the timing of the indictment kept moving from month to
month. When we asked Melson what steps he took to address the delays in the
indictment, he said that because the delays in bringing the indictment were a
âoesignificant frustrationâ to him, he probably raised his concerns about the U.S.
Attorneyâ(TM)s Office with Grindler. However, Melson also said that he did not have
a specific recollection of raising the issue with Grindler, and Grindler said he
did not recall discussions about Operation Fast and Furious other than at the
March 12, 2010, briefing that ATF provided him. Hoover said he did not recall
discussing with Melson the need to inform Grindler about delays with the case.
However, Hoover told us that he believed he raised the issue of the delay in the
indictments in late summer or early fall 2010 to Ed Siskel, the former Associate
Deputy Attorney General who handled the ATF portfolio during 2010. Siskel
stated that he did not recall discussions with Melson or Hoover concerning
Operation Fast and Furious other than at Grindlerâ(TM)s briefing, including any
discussions about delays in the case. We found no e-mails or other evidence
showing that Melson or Hoover raised the issue of delays caused by the U.S.
Note that this is prior to the death of agent Terry which closed down Fast and Furious. Supposedly there was all this butt-covering communicating going on, but no one remembers any of it. And it's worth noting again that no one has been providing weapons to Mexican gangs which supposedly turned up at several hundred murders.
The investigation seems remarkably disinterested in why peoples' stories seem to not agree with their recollections.
There's another explanation which fits what we know just as well. The Sinaloa Cartel and its then current allies bought a window of a year for smuggling high quality guns and who knows what else into Mexico from the US.
The Federal government did not sell, transfer, give, or transport weapons to anyone.
It merely aided in such criminal activities. About half a year before Fast and Furious ended, it was determined that about 15% of the
Well, if you're inserting political groups, you still have that the Democrats, the advocacy group for AGW, outspent the Republicans in the last election and far more of that was in small, untraceable donations.
Hasn't been the case in practice. Every one of the high speed rails in practice is highly subsidized. As I've said before, give us a few hundred million European or Chinese taxpayers and I'm sure we can make a really cheap high speed rail.
(In fact, the number of riders far outstrip the quality of the system, which ought to tell you something about what would be going on if we didn't have a shitty system.)
How do you measure "quality of system"? And what system are we speaking of and how heavily subsidized are they?
Apparently, the Acela line (from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, DC) is supposed to have good ridership numbers (and is one of the few Amtrak lines that turns a profit in any sense of the word) as are a few urban systems (like the New York City subways). And there's a lot of systems that don't come close.
In places with actual working high speed rail, or any working rail at all, the ridership numbers are quite good.
Would they be as good, if the riders had to pay what the service actually cost?
No, it doesn't. There are too many cases where something was made illegal just because some bureaucrat decided to make it so on the spur of the moment. Rule of law means that what is on the books is followed by the government. For example, rtfa-troll points out two parts of China's constitution associated with the exercise of speech and protest which are frequently violated by the government without consequence.
What's the business case for high speed rail? Airplanes are faster for long distances, cars more convenient and faster for short. So you have this iffy middle case with mediocre ridership numbers.
1. Assuming that what you see in money terms is what's actually going on, where's this money coming from? What's to be gained monetarily by shilling for climate change? Who would want to fund this, and for what gain?
There are three obvious groups. First, there's big money in renewables and mitigation strategies. A lot of this money comes from public sources. For example, I've seen proposals from the EU that expand public spending in these sectors to tens of billions of dollars a year just at the EU supergovernment level. And at the government levels, I think there's already many billions of dollars of spending rationalized via the AGW excuse.
I believe the trend is towards spending through the developed world that would dwarf all the profits to be had from fossil fuels. But whether or not society moves in that direction depends a lot on whether a case can be made for sufficiently harmful AGW.
The second group is the politicians and bureaucrats who will regulate this There's no power to be had in the status quo. But plenty to go around when carbon emissions are regulated and bureaucracies are set up to dole subsidies to related industries. I believe this is the group with the decisive vote, especially since they're primary funders of climate research.
Then there's the general public who seems all too willing to participate in this without giving it a second thought. A few years ago, I ran across someone on Slashdot who was convinced despite all evidence to the contrary, including that of the research he'd quote, that catastrophic climate change was at hand and that his grandchildren would likely die, if something wasn't done now. I can't explain this profound, hysterical ignorance, but I've seen more like it since.
Frankly, this thread while not as severe contains similar irrationality. The risk from minuscule anti-AGW groups are greatly exaggerated. IMHO, the real problems AGW advocates are having is self-inflicted. When you repeatedly make claims that can't be backed up by evidence, you'll eventually get blowback.
AGW advocates have made a lot of bad claims such as "extreme weather", catastrophic AGW (especially claims that we need to act now, even though it wouldn't be significant, if we waited a few decades), global temperature being the "highest" it's ever been (even though no one measured directly temperatures from before the 19th century and one has to use temperature proxy data with considerable uncertainties), the exaggerations about anti-AGW advocacy, and ridiculous claims that humans can't handle slight changes in climate over long periods of time.
I don't personally care that the oil industry or whatever is protecting its turf. They have interests and I'm quite aware of what those are. The other side has considerable interests and frankly, those stakes look a lot bigger than the fossil fuel side.
Heh, I never understood the need for some people to denigrate their own products. Does it really make you feel better that you think you'll pulling something over on your customers? And then they need to tell someone else about it. Well, he definitely falls in the "something wrong upstairs" category.
Again, where's the money? I see a claim that this group scoops in $7 million a year, That's less than the US branch of Greenpeace ($10 million a year). There are some huge climate change advocacy groups out there. There's no similarly huge anti-AGW advocacy group out there.
Contrary to these assertions, I see plenty of money for scientists and activists who shill for climate change and peanuts for their opponents.
And is the book any good? I don't want to bother with it, if it's going to be a waste of my time. Glancing through reviews of the book, it doesn't sound that impressive. A favorable review has this as the bold claim, Exxon Mobile spending millions, but not a lot of millions to protect its business.
The fossil fuel industry, who have poured millions of dollars into PR campaigns to confuse the public. Over 8 years, the most profitable company in history, Exxon Mobil, gave $16 million to think tanks that deny global warming science. Fossil fuel companies also give millions of dollars to politicians such as Joe Barton and James Inhofe, who vehemently oppose climate action.
- Greenpeace, for whatever their word is worth, claiming that the Koch brothers have donated over $61 million to the cause of denying global warming.
Doing that google thing, I see that $61 million is a mere six years funding of the US branch of Greenpeace. The World Wildlife Fund has $180 million in funding last year of which $44 million came from government sources. No anti-AGW group has that sort of funding.
So what we have is a "well-funded" campaign that is vastly outspent just by government contributions to a single non-profit. Ever wonder why the "climate denialists" get any traction at all? It's not the money they're spending. That's for sure.
An "independent" news agency which depends on the UK government to enforce its TV tax. And the information that the FOI request attempted to uncover shows a) that the conference in question was stacked with activitists and a token number of scientists. b) that all of the BBC advisers who appeared there apparently went on to bigger and better things, including resigning due to deep involvement in a defamation scandal involving a conservative UK politician.
What it looks like to me is that AGW advocates took over the BBC's ideological stance on climate matters at that conference.
The only place there's a serious debate is in the public imagination, and that's largely due to a very well-funded PR campaign funded by the oil and coal industries.
Show me the money. If there's a "well funded" PR campaign then someone has to be spending that money. In contrast there are vast sums being spent on pro-AGW PR. For example, whole government programs are devoted to this, such as UK's Met Office and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a department in US's NASA).
Spacetime could get curved via the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor.
Then you have to match the two. That creates a coupling between your model and your background. Not impossible, but also not something that's been done yet.
OTOH, if we can come up with a working model where spacetime is an emergent concept, then that would probably be a more fundamental description and also a model where the above problem of getting curvature to agree with the energy-momentum tensor happens naturally.
The oil goes into a central market and could be shipped anywhere if the costs are right.
What are you talking about? There's no central market for oil. And that's because shipping costs aren't "right". Sure, there's only so far the North American markets (there are several, such as West Texas crude, Alberta crude, New York Harbor regular gasoline, etc) can diverge from the rest of the world before it's more profitable to ship elsewhere. But higher local production does results in some noticeable degree of cheaper local oil.
Second, exporting oil does help with balance of trade which is a remarkably large outflow of wealth from the US. Keep in mind that oil consumption is a large part of the reason that the US has a huge trade deficit in the first place and the usual reason people complain about not being self-sufficient.
There is no single experiment ruling out such a model.
There are conceptual problems. Such as where did the space come from in your model? Or is space curved by your quantum effects (such as a non-zero vacuum energy)?
So I don't think gravity is a problem for the SM, it's rather our desire to find a unified description of all forces in nature. But of course, nobody knows whether such a unified theory will be correct in the end.
Any such description would be by definition unified. We have a number of unified descriptions now. They just don't work at the moment.
Your list is to first order. That creates a big flaw in your conclusions.
How much of that money stays in those states? The top states on that list all have businesses with considerable interstate reach. Money that goes to computer systems is probably going to benefit California sooner or later. Similarly finance and bond issues money will end up in New York or perhaps New Jersey. Agriculture money? Illinois is a good bet along with New York. Insurance payments? Connecticut.
One can't really understand the impact of such spending without considering where the money goes.
At least, they probably won't be shipping arms to violent Mexican gangs. It's worth noting that the federal government has with the notorious Fast and Furious operation participated in the killing of over a hundred Mexican citizens and some number of US citizens including two law enforcement officers.
Slashdot Mirror
I might take your statement more seriously, if it weren't in yet another AGW hysteria thread. Instead, I think it's the propensity of humans to indulge in irrational groupthink that will doom us all.
Sarcasm might be intended.
Airports are pretty damn expensive.
And they have a fair return on investment as well. That $5.4 billion (actually $9 billion now) increases its number of passengers per year from roughly 90 million per year to 120 million per year. It is already the highest volume airport by passengers per year. Looking at their annual budget from 2010, it looks like they turned a profit of roughly $100 million in 2010 and $200 million in 2009.
Yes, rail needs the equivalent of both of those, but they are a _lot_ cheaper.
Rails also need rails between those cheap train stations. That rail and the cost of the land, especially for high speed systems, is where their costs truly lie. For example, I wager for the cost bandied about for the California high speed rail ($68 billion at last check), they could have built half a dozen or more huge airports. And the ridership is expected to be around 120 million a year, which incidentally is what it is for the Hartsfield-Jackson airport (the Atlanta airport you mentioned).
The same number of passengers served, just for a modest multiple of the cost of the biggest airport in the world. And let us not forget that this airport is also a huge cargo airport as well. The high speed rail wouldn't be handling cargo aside from the baggage that passengers choose to carry on.
Yes, and it will be too late to do something about it.
Too late to do something about the hypothetical near future harm that no one can seem to show actually exists? I'm good with that.
No offense, but the US is contributing in a saner and more beneficial way by resisting this lemming march. No one has found any near future evidence of harm from global warming. It's all hypothetical at this point.
And the far future harm is completely untested. So I see the viable solution being to wait a few decades while continuing to observe the Earth's climate. If there is near future harm from global warming, we should see it by then.
The people who conducted this operation failed to interdict the weapons and arrest the suspects in a timely manner.
This isn't about arresting suspects in a timely manner. They deliberately failed to interdict the weapons or halt Fast and Furious even when they knew those weapons were appearing at crime scenes. That is how they provided weapons to the Sinaloa Cartel. They didn't notify Mexican police to what was happening. They didn't keep track of the weapons except when they turn up at crime scenes.
And we should find out who knew what when. An internal investigation by the DoJ which didn't bother to find any evidence of wrongdoing isn't going to cut it, especially when coupled with efforts to protect the principals in the affair.
If you won't acknowledge that difference, I don't see a point in trying to discuss anything else.
I won't "acknowledge" that difference, because you are wrong here. It is remarkable how far people will go to forgive the actions of this administration. If this had been Dubya doing it (and the analogous operation during his administration got halted early when weapons started to go missing), I bet we'd have strung up some people by now.
The US has had concentration camps and currently has "free speech" zones. Yet, Americans rarely insist that the US has no rule of law. The laws and rules under them are understood.
Those concentration camps (established during several different eras of the US, with the Indians corralled into reservations, Germans detained during the First World War, and the Japanese during the Second World War) were established either by law or treaty. There's good reason to consider them grossly unjust, but not violations of the rule of law.
As to "free speech" zones, these can be and are contested in the court system and there's a legitimate case for them. One's ability to petition for redress is left intact despite not being able to legally shut down a city center. Again, I don't see a violation of the rule of law here.
Melson, Hoover, Chait, and McMahon told the OIG that by late summer 2010 they became increasingly frustrated with the failure of the U.S. Attorneyâ(TM)s Office to bring an indictment in Operation Fast and Furious. ATF e-mails beginning in July 2010 show multiple inquiries from its senior leadership about the status of the indictment. For example, on July 14, 2010 Melson emailed Chait and Hoover and asked: âoeWhen will we be taking Fast and Furious down? An awful lot of guns seem to be flowing south.â221 Melson told the OIG that by the end of July 2010 he understood that apart from arrests, Operation Fast and Furious was at its conclusion and he began asking about the indictment âoepretty frequently.â Melson told us that he asked the Office of Field Operations representatives about the status of the case at weekly staff meetings and that the timing of the indictment kept moving from month to month.
Newell told the OIG that by October 2010 âoeHeadquarters [was] calling me nonstopâ because the case had not been indicted. According to McMahon, the U.S. Attorneyâ(TM)s Office was giving Newell âoeexcuse after excuseâ for why the indictment had to be delayed.
Melson told the OIG that by the end of July 2010 he understood that apart from arrests, Operation Fast and Furious was at its conclusion and he began asking about the indictment âoepretty frequently.â Melson told us that he asked the Office of Field Operations representatives about the status of the case at weekly staff meetings and that the timing of the indictment kept moving from month to month. When we asked Melson what steps he took to address the delays in the indictment, he said that because the delays in bringing the indictment were a âoesignificant frustrationâ to him, he probably raised his concerns about the U.S. Attorneyâ(TM)s Office with Grindler. However, Melson also said that he did not have a specific recollection of raising the issue with Grindler, and Grindler said he did not recall discussions about Operation Fast and Furious other than at the March 12, 2010, briefing that ATF provided him. Hoover said he did not recall discussing with Melson the need to inform Grindler about delays with the case. However, Hoover told us that he believed he raised the issue of the delay in the indictments in late summer or early fall 2010 to Ed Siskel, the former Associate Deputy Attorney General who handled the ATF portfolio during 2010. Siskel stated that he did not recall discussions with Melson or Hoover concerning Operation Fast and Furious other than at Grindlerâ(TM)s briefing, including any discussions about delays in the case. We found no e-mails or other evidence showing that Melson or Hoover raised the issue of delays caused by the U.S.
Note that this is prior to the death of agent Terry which closed down Fast and Furious. Supposedly there was all this butt-covering communicating going on, but no one remembers any of it. And it's worth noting again that no one has been providing weapons to Mexican gangs which supposedly turned up at several hundred murders.
The investigation seems remarkably disinterested in why peoples' stories seem to not agree with their recollections.
There's another explanation which fits what we know just as well. The Sinaloa Cartel and its then current allies bought a window of a year for smuggling high quality guns and who knows what else into Mexico from the US.
The Federal government did not sell, transfer, give, or transport weapons to anyone.
It merely aided in such criminal activities. About half a year before Fast and Furious ended, it was determined that about 15% of the
Well, if you're inserting political groups, you still have that the Democrats, the advocacy group for AGW, outspent the Republicans in the last election and far more of that was in small, untraceable donations.
What's the business case for high speed rail?
That it's a fuckton cheaper than flying?
Hasn't been the case in practice. Every one of the high speed rails in practice is highly subsidized. As I've said before, give us a few hundred million European or Chinese taxpayers and I'm sure we can make a really cheap high speed rail.
(In fact, the number of riders far outstrip the quality of the system, which ought to tell you something about what would be going on if we didn't have a shitty system.)
How do you measure "quality of system"? And what system are we speaking of and how heavily subsidized are they?
Apparently, the Acela line (from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, DC) is supposed to have good ridership numbers (and is one of the few Amtrak lines that turns a profit in any sense of the word) as are a few urban systems (like the New York City subways). And there's a lot of systems that don't come close.
In places with actual working high speed rail, or any working rail at all, the ridership numbers are quite good.
Would they be as good, if the riders had to pay what the service actually cost?
Archimedes != Aristotle. Just the same, the claim is bogus since doing calculus computations just isn't that hard.
But China does have rule of law
No, it doesn't. There are too many cases where something was made illegal just because some bureaucrat decided to make it so on the spur of the moment. Rule of law means that what is on the books is followed by the government. For example, rtfa-troll points out two parts of China's constitution associated with the exercise of speech and protest which are frequently violated by the government without consequence.
Sounds like they made a good decision here. How were you planning to pay back those loans?
Makes lots of JOBS!
Just give them spoons.
1. Assuming that what you see in money terms is what's actually going on, where's this money coming from? What's to be gained monetarily by shilling for climate change? Who would want to fund this, and for what gain?
There are three obvious groups. First, there's big money in renewables and mitigation strategies. A lot of this money comes from public sources. For example, I've seen proposals from the EU that expand public spending in these sectors to tens of billions of dollars a year just at the EU supergovernment level. And at the government levels, I think there's already many billions of dollars of spending rationalized via the AGW excuse.
I believe the trend is towards spending through the developed world that would dwarf all the profits to be had from fossil fuels. But whether or not society moves in that direction depends a lot on whether a case can be made for sufficiently harmful AGW.
The second group is the politicians and bureaucrats who will regulate this There's no power to be had in the status quo. But plenty to go around when carbon emissions are regulated and bureaucracies are set up to dole subsidies to related industries. I believe this is the group with the decisive vote, especially since they're primary funders of climate research.
Then there's the general public who seems all too willing to participate in this without giving it a second thought. A few years ago, I ran across someone on Slashdot who was convinced despite all evidence to the contrary, including that of the research he'd quote, that catastrophic climate change was at hand and that his grandchildren would likely die, if something wasn't done now. I can't explain this profound, hysterical ignorance, but I've seen more like it since.
Frankly, this thread while not as severe contains similar irrationality. The risk from minuscule anti-AGW groups are greatly exaggerated. IMHO, the real problems AGW advocates are having is self-inflicted. When you repeatedly make claims that can't be backed up by evidence, you'll eventually get blowback.
AGW advocates have made a lot of bad claims such as "extreme weather", catastrophic AGW (especially claims that we need to act now, even though it wouldn't be significant, if we waited a few decades), global temperature being the "highest" it's ever been (even though no one measured directly temperatures from before the 19th century and one has to use temperature proxy data with considerable uncertainties), the exaggerations about anti-AGW advocacy, and ridiculous claims that humans can't handle slight changes in climate over long periods of time.
I don't personally care that the oil industry or whatever is protecting its turf. They have interests and I'm quite aware of what those are. The other side has considerable interests and frankly, those stakes look a lot bigger than the fossil fuel side.
Heh, I never understood the need for some people to denigrate their own products. Does it really make you feel better that you think you'll pulling something over on your customers? And then they need to tell someone else about it. Well, he definitely falls in the "something wrong upstairs" category.
Again, where's the money? I see a claim that this group scoops in $7 million a year, That's less than the US branch of Greenpeace ($10 million a year). There are some huge climate change advocacy groups out there. There's no similarly huge anti-AGW advocacy group out there.
Contrary to these assertions, I see plenty of money for scientists and activists who shill for climate change and peanuts for their opponents.
- an entire book on the subject
And is the book any good? I don't want to bother with it, if it's going to be a waste of my time. Glancing through reviews of the book, it doesn't sound that impressive. A favorable review has this as the bold claim, Exxon Mobile spending millions, but not a lot of millions to protect its business.
The fossil fuel industry, who have poured millions of dollars into PR campaigns to confuse the public. Over 8 years, the most profitable company in history, Exxon Mobil, gave $16 million to think tanks that deny global warming science. Fossil fuel companies also give millions of dollars to politicians such as Joe Barton and James Inhofe, who vehemently oppose climate action.
- Greenpeace, for whatever their word is worth, claiming that the Koch brothers have donated over $61 million to the cause of denying global warming.
Doing that google thing, I see that $61 million is a mere six years funding of the US branch of Greenpeace. The World Wildlife Fund has $180 million in funding last year of which $44 million came from government sources. No anti-AGW group has that sort of funding.
So what we have is a "well-funded" campaign that is vastly outspent just by government contributions to a single non-profit. Ever wonder why the "climate denialists" get any traction at all? It's not the money they're spending. That's for sure.
An "independent" news agency which depends on the UK government to enforce its TV tax. And the information that the FOI request attempted to uncover shows a) that the conference in question was stacked with activitists and a token number of scientists. b) that all of the BBC advisers who appeared there apparently went on to bigger and better things, including resigning due to deep involvement in a defamation scandal involving a conservative UK politician.
What it looks like to me is that AGW advocates took over the BBC's ideological stance on climate matters at that conference.
The only place there's a serious debate is in the public imagination, and that's largely due to a very well-funded PR campaign funded by the oil and coal industries.
Show me the money. If there's a "well funded" PR campaign then someone has to be spending that money. In contrast there are vast sums being spent on pro-AGW PR. For example, whole government programs are devoted to this, such as UK's Met Office and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a department in US's NASA).
Spacetime could get curved via the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor.
Then you have to match the two. That creates a coupling between your model and your background. Not impossible, but also not something that's been done yet.
OTOH, if we can come up with a working model where spacetime is an emergent concept, then that would probably be a more fundamental description and also a model where the above problem of getting curvature to agree with the energy-momentum tensor happens naturally.
We won't stop pumping oil until every last drop is gone, even if we stop using it as a fuel.
And as we see, there's plenty left in the ground. So even if it gets too expensive to use as a fuel, it won't get too expensive to use for plastics.
The oil goes into a central market and could be shipped anywhere if the costs are right.
What are you talking about? There's no central market for oil. And that's because shipping costs aren't "right". Sure, there's only so far the North American markets (there are several, such as West Texas crude, Alberta crude, New York Harbor regular gasoline, etc) can diverge from the rest of the world before it's more profitable to ship elsewhere. But higher local production does results in some noticeable degree of cheaper local oil.
Second, exporting oil does help with balance of trade which is a remarkably large outflow of wealth from the US. Keep in mind that oil consumption is a large part of the reason that the US has a huge trade deficit in the first place and the usual reason people complain about not being self-sufficient.
There is no single experiment ruling out such a model.
There are conceptual problems. Such as where did the space come from in your model? Or is space curved by your quantum effects (such as a non-zero vacuum energy)?
So I don't think gravity is a problem for the SM, it's rather our desire to find a unified description of all forces in nature. But of course, nobody knows whether such a unified theory will be correct in the end.
Any such description would be by definition unified. We have a number of unified descriptions now. They just don't work at the moment.
Your list is to first order. That creates a big flaw in your conclusions.
How much of that money stays in those states? The top states on that list all have businesses with considerable interstate reach. Money that goes to computer systems is probably going to benefit California sooner or later. Similarly finance and bond issues money will end up in New York or perhaps New Jersey. Agriculture money? Illinois is a good bet along with New York. Insurance payments? Connecticut.
One can't really understand the impact of such spending without considering where the money goes.
At least, they probably won't be shipping arms to violent Mexican gangs. It's worth noting that the federal government has with the notorious Fast and Furious operation participated in the killing of over a hundred Mexican citizens and some number of US citizens including two law enforcement officers.