If only a bombing site were closer to me. Perhaps we could drop some more bombs so that more people can witness the destructive power they hold. That way people won't have to travel all the way to Japan.
This is stupid, IMHO, and sounds like a means to guilt people into visiting Japan and spend some money there.
I made a trip to Germany some years ago to visit a friend stationed there while in the US Army. We took a look at some old castles, churches, drank some German beer and ate some German food. We also saw Hitler's "eagles nest", the remains of the Berlin wall, a memorial to the Jews killed, and a concentration camp museum. A memorable experience but not near as memorable as seeing films on the concentration camps, or Youtube videos of talks on the subject, or just listening to my grandparents talk about what World War II meant to them. There are ways to relate the horrors of war to people besides a viewing of where it happened. I admit that we should not destroy these sites, or prevent people from visiting them, but visiting the sites is not the only way to understand what happened there.
What is also lost is how "mutually assured destruction" may have kept the Cold War from becoming a one that burned at a million degrees over Manhattan.
I think that the USA should keep it's nuclear weapons. Even if we never use them again in anger I do believe that their mere presence keeps us safer than if we got rid of them.
I think the sarcasm in the GPP was lost on you. Or perhaps I read more into it than was there. Separate but equal was shown to be a failure. Segregated buses are what brought about the beginning of the end of this separate but equal nonsense.
I'm reminded of when I got a new dentist. I called a local dentist office for an appointment and I was asked if it was okay with be to be seen by a female dentist. I didn't think much of it at the time but imagine if I was asked what I thought if my dentist was black, or gay, or Muslim, or married, or whatever.
If it's socially acceptable to ask if I prefer a male or female dentist then I'd think it would be acceptable to ask if I prefer a female or male driver.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. A very bad situation is a women getting raped, the scum getting away, and the woman reporting the attack to the police. A lethal situation is the woman reporting the death of that scum to the police. While I will not wish death upon anyone I hope God may forgive me if I don't shed a tear for one more rapist killed.
Everyone on Slashdot keeps saying things like this. But in the real world, the degree everyone actually doing software engineering gets is... Computer Science.
Oh really? Have you actually read job postings lately? I have. I did a quick search for jobs available at the university I attend and for a position listed as "Senior Application Developer" I see as the education required: "A Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science or Management Information Systems or an equivalent combination of education and experience."
That's pretty much boilerplate for any software development position. I've seen some where computer science isn't listed but instead in the field in which the software will be used, such as a biology lab looking for bio-statistics majors to write software.
I've seen people with degrees in mechanical engineering, mathematics, and physics that write better code than me. They might not know as many programming languages as I do, and they might not be as proficient on as many computer platforms as me, but the code they write does what they need it to do and does it well.
What you are complaining about is that people understand the problem but you are tired of hearing it. Computer science is no longer the only means by which a person can become a software developer. It is also no longer the BEST means by which one can become a software developer. The people that hire developers, and are good at their job, have likely already found this out. We don't fix this by making computer science something it is not. We fix this by making college programs that create the kind of person that they'd want to hire.
I saw this change happening years ago and only now has it reached a sort of tipping point. Not only do we see software engineering develop into it's own separate field but we see other specialties also arise. We see "management information systems", "informatics", "actuarial science", and for those interested in cyber security one can major in "information assurance". I even saw a degree granting program called "BS Software Development".
This complaint of computer science programs graduating people that cannot write good code is something that has existed for a very long time. The market has seen this. They are taking the path that I describe rather than yours. They are creating new degree granting programs with the intent of teaching people to write good code rather than trying to shoehorn software engineering into a computer science curriculum. I see this as a good thing.
This may take some education on the part of the HR idiots that would throw away a CV because it does not contain the magic words "computer science" and I think we will get there very soon. Given that schools will grant a degrees in "software development" and "software engineering" we may already be there except for idiots like those that did this "study" of computer science curricula. The fact that they confined their search to that is likely much of the problem. A school that offers "information assurance" as a degree, certificate, or minor is not likely to require a person going to school to study to be a computer historian to take a class on cyber security.
As a side note I will say that seeing "computer historian" is a reminder of how far we've come in computer development that the history of computers is more than just a class in the computer science department, it is also a reminder of how old I've become.
The legal back and forth on this will be interesting. I think I'll grab a beer and some popcorn and watch the carnage unfold.
As someone that leans heavily towards leaving the government out of my business and letting the market decide I will say that this is a brilliant business move and the government should just leave this alone.
I'm reminded of a an incident in my own personal experience. Due to a failing on my part to renew my license to drive in a timely manner I was required to take a driving test to get my license back. I scheduled a time for the test and went for a walk until it was my time. The "test" included a female DOT agent taking a ride in my car with me while I drove around the block. I had to make a proper lane change, follow signage and lights, and generally not screw up for maybe 15 minutes of driving. Now I was alone with this person and excepting that they had my name and address on file I wondered just how much they actually knew about me. Did they run a criminal background check? I mean convicted rapists get licenses to drive after getting out of prison. My test was near the end of the day and so if I just drove off with her in my car would they even notice until the next day?
I didn't even think of this until I had the woman in my rear view mirror. While driving I was more concerned about keeping both hands on the wheel at 3 and 9 while not screwing up to the point I wouldn't get my license. I also had to wonder if the woman even considered the threat of taking a ride in a stranger's car. I did think that if I had asked her this after my test just how creepy that might have sounded.
As a male in reasonably good physical condition, at 6' 5" tall, and about 200 pounds, I realize that I have much less to fear in the world than the typical female. I also realize how imposing I may appear to others. If a woman doesn't want to share a car ride with me then whatever, I'm fairly certain that someone will come in to make up for it since that is how a free market works.
At the university I was e-mailed a flyer on how the US Navy is recruiting students in computer science and related fields into an officer program in their cyber warfare division. This indicates to me that they will offer training in cyber security to those that qualify.
This also indicates to me that many other employers understand that cyber security is not part of a typical undergraduate CS program, and will teach those people on the job if that is a required skill. I recall talking to recruiters for big businesses on what they look for in software developers, and they want engineers. A computer science major might know a lot of programming languages and so on but learning another programming language is something that can be done easily on the job. What is difficult for recruiters is finding people with a good grasp of proper engineering and enough math to understand how to make a computer do what needs to be done efficiently.
Seems to me that cyber security should lie in the realm of on the job training and/or graduate school. Also, students that learn good programming technique should be writing inherently secure software. Things like good memory management, properly protecting variables, and well documented code should make a program secure.
Another thing is that there is a lot of code written to perform relatively trivial tasks where security is simply not a concern. Code on embedded systems just don't have any attack vectors, or if they do it's a matter of things like you have to "reboot" a child's toy because it got stuck in an infinite loop. Code written for industry will be used by people which one would hope are trained in its use. This code may have to allow for things that might be "insecure" for work to get done. If the person using "insecure" code ends up making a welding robot weld it's own arm to the floor then it's the operator to blame.
I believe that many misunderstand what computer science is and has been in the past. A "science" is a organized study of a field, typically the behavior and structure of the elements in that field. Therefore computer science is a rigorous study of how computers work, should work, could work in the future, and the physics and mathematics behind it. It's a field of applied math and physics. This also means many specializations within that field. One may want to study the mathematical difficulty of an encryption algorithm, or the ability to detect the information transmitted down a data path by an outside observer, both with implications on security but not necessarily a "cybersecurity" study.
Software engineering is the application of the engineering process to develop quality software. This includes a background in computer science to some extent but not to the rigor that a computer scientist might get. This would include the study of possible failure points and the means to mitigate them. In this field one might think that a class on "cybersecurity" should be taken since a quality software product should be secure, or one might assume that people would be taught that checking data inputs and outputs, and moving data in a way that could not be seen and/or altered by an outside entity as a basic premise of writing software correctly.
I took computer engineering in college some time ago. I'm now back in college part time because I realized that my education from then did not include a lot of things that have changed since then. One big change is that "software engineering" was not a common term or even a field of study then. My first time through college I had a lot of computer science students in my classes because there was a lot of crossover in course requirements between computer engineering and computer science. I realized real quick that while I was taking classes on the engineering process the computer science people were taking a foreign language. While I was taking a math course on numerical calculus the computer science students were taking history.
Computer science is a liberal arts program, or at least is in most every university I've seen, and therefore it meets the requirements of a typical liberal arts program. They study a wide variety of fields with an emphasis on the ways a computer works. If you want to see people learn how to write quality software then they need to get an engineering education.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen computer science majors write very good software, and I've seen engineers fail badly. I'm saying let computer science be computer science. If we make computer scientists take cybersecurity courses then we distract from people that take computer science to become historians, algorithm gurus, professors, and mathematicians. Roll cybersecurity into every software engineering class in a university. If a student declares a variable as globally accessible when it should not then that student should lose points on their assignment. If a student does not check the bounds of an input then dock points. If a student doesn't allocate and clear memory properly, points lost. Properly engineered software is inherently secure.
I think that a lack of a cybersecurity course requirement in computer science programs is not a bug, it's a feature. If you want to discuss the lack of cybersecurity in software engineering programs then I'll listen.
What we should be discussing is whether we know enough about how this planet works (and have the technology) to attempt some kind of active intervention, such as carbon sequestration or actually blocking sunlight from space.
How about instead of wondering if we can develop the technology to avert this we use technology we developed 70 years ago, brought to near perfection 40 years ago, and do what's left to work out the minor problems it had. I'm talking about molten salt fission reactors. We can use the plentiful thorium resources we have to produce carbon free energy. While sequestration is fine, I suppose, I do recall the first thing one should do when they find themselves in a hole. Stop digging.
Thorium fission would allow us to stop burning so much coal and oil which is making this problem worse. The problems of nuclear waste that come with solid fuel reactors do not exist with liquid fuel reactors. The fission poisons like xenon just bubble out of the mix instead of sticking around like in solid fuel. Just this one aspect can mean keeping a lot of fuel from turning into waste. Even better it can use the "waste" from solid fueled reactors as fuel, further reducing the nuclear waste problem.
This technology was abandoned in the 1970s for purely political reasons. The Cold War was starting and thorium reactors cannot be used to make weapons. Since the federal government wanted to make sure that they could make as much plutonium as possible in the case of a shooting war with the Soviets the Department of Energy would approve only uranium fueled reactors for power plants.
We've proven molten salt reactors work, unlike sun shades from space. They produce near limitless energy and no carbon dioxide. They are useless for weapons, and in fact make nuclear weapons start to look like fuel.
I agree, we should stop talking and start doing. I also think we should try the much simpler solutions before we start launching parasols into orbit.
I'd think that comparing 40+ year old nuclear reactors to brand new wind and solar is not a fair fight. That's also one nuclear reactor out of nearly 100 in the USA. Many of those are also 40+ years old and recently got 20 year renewals on their operation license. That means the utility believes the reactor will produce power at a competitive price for another two decades.
I've seen presentations from nuclear engineers that say the materials, labor, and engineering for a modern nuclear power plant is the same or lower than that of a coal fired plant. The problem with costs in the USA is largely regulatory. If nuclear power was regulated like any other power source, including it's radiation output, then we'd be building nuclear power almost exclusively. The radioactive waste that coal produces alone would shut them down if they were a nuclear power plant.
So what we see are nuclear reactor designers in the USA going overseas to build reactors because the USA has insane restrictions on getting them built.
Good luck convincing the public to support nuclear energy.
At least I'm trying. I bring it up here on Slashdot and on other forums I subscribe to. When politicians call me or knock on my door I ask them about nuclear energy. I've e-mailed politicians, not just the ones I voted for. What have you done?
I'd like to do more but I must still work and go to school.
t's called the Tragedy of the Commons.... The only effective solution is to impose mandatory controls for everybody.
I see you misunderstand the concept.
The tragedy of the commons is that people do not see ownership and therefore do not see a need to care for a common good. The solution to the tragedy of the commons is to put people in control. People need to see the personal benefit or they will not put in the personal effort to get the rewards.
Imposing government controls is the government removing ownership and placing something in the commons, creating the very problem you wish to prevent.
An example. A common garden for which everyone works and everyone eats will not be productive since someone that works hard will not see a proportional gain. If the garden is divided up so that everyone has their own garden to eat from then you will find that people will work very hard to get more produce, because that is what they themselves must live upon.
Now a society needs a government and government needs resources. So a portion of the produce should go to the government. If this tax is too high then you get the tragedy of the commons again because people don't see ownership any more. Tax to little and the government cannot function. There is a balance that must be struck.
It's not just taxes either. Mandating what people may grow can create this impression of a loss of ownership. If someone wants to grow flowers in their garden then they should be allowed to do so. They won't get any food from the garden but the neighbors will likely be willing to trade some food for the flowers and everyone wins.
I'm probably a but too old to be a millennial. At a minimum I am on the older end of the millennial spectrum. I can recall seeing the shift in teaching about global warming. Now that I've gone back to college I find myself surrounded by the younger end of the millennial spectrum I find the difference in my earlier education quite profound.
Way back then I remember people openly mocking global warming and no one would say a word. Now you have people, seemingly seriously, calling openly for punishment of deniers. Some say the global warming deniers are such a threat that the death penalty should be imposed. I did not expect a Spanish Inquisition.
I'm studying mathematics in college (or rather a narrow branch of it) and I find my computer science professors taking class time to lecture on global warming. In statistics class I find nearly half of the class examples being about temperature, snowfall, ice sheet mass, rainfall, or some other climate phenomenon. (Much of the rest is on some racial, gender, social status, or something else to feed social justice warriors. A small portion of the class examples are on things like material strength, rock composition, or something else politically neutral.)
I'm in my fourth semester and I find that only the math professors seem content to keep their political beliefs to themselves. Oh, and the music instructors but that's an elective, not required for my course plan.
It's no wonder that millennials think global warming is a problem, they've been told it is in every class they took from kindergarten to graduate school. With the possible exception of courses like math and music like I've seen.
Oh, wait, I do recall politics coming up in music class. We got on the topic of old musical instruments and that lead to the discussion of certain woods being a problem politically and things like ivory and bone which may have come from endangered species.
Now that I say this I may have jinxed myself and politics will come up in math class tomorrow.
Also, way back when the problems were acid rain, polluted waters, deforestation, ozone layer depletion, and other such problems that rarely come up any more since we've basically solved those problems. I have to wonder if the people that fought for those things back then feel a need to keep fighting and will cling to anything, even if that something doesn't exist.
Bill Nye is an engineer and an entertainer. As an engineer myself, and as someone that has contact with other engineers regularly, I tend to trust the opinion of engineers on scientific topics. Not only do I trust the opinion of an engineer because of their education to get to be an engineer but I also trust them because if they did not understand science then they would not be an engineer for long.
That said I don't trust Bill Nye's opinion on climate change because his education and experience is in mechanical engineering. While mechanical engineers must understand thermodynamics and such which would be helpful in understanding weather it appears he's placed too much faith in the opinion of others rather than doing the math himself. Had he done so then perhaps he'd have come up with a better argument than just a bandwagon argument.
I mean if his argument is 9 out of 10 twenty-somethings agree then it must be right then perhaps he needs to think a bit more about what he's saying.
He brought the snowball inside because he noted that it was not that long ago that another senator that I do not recall said that if trends continued that we would not see snow in DC by that date. Time passed, the snow fell, and the other senator was proven wrong. Senator Inhofe showed that the climate models used to predict climate change did not predict correctly.
While past performance does not assure future results that is the wise way to bet. If the climate models predicted no snow, and snow fell, then how much faith can we put in future predictions of this kind?
Carbon neutral means that they don't add carbon to the atmosphere. Since the carbon they emit comes from the air and is returned to the air after being burned it is carbon neutral. If that is not carbon neutral then bio-fuels are not carbon neutral.
Perhaps you don't understand how the carbon gets in the water, it dissolves in the water from contact with the air.
And you failed to understand what a Hybrid Electric System is. It's a Combination of Internal Combustion engine with an Electric Drive Motor
A true hybrid allows for power from more than one energy source. An internal combustion engine driving a generator, and the generator driving a motor, is not a hybrid. That would make an electric drive train.
The Fucking Chevy Volt uses such a setup.
No the fucking Chevy Volt has a battery pack and a mechanical transmission. While it might not be able to go in reverse or slow speeds without the electric drive train it is capable of going highway speeds without it. These proposed aircraft do not claim to have a mechanical link from the on board internal combustion engine to the ducted fans. If they did then I might be impressed since that would be an engineering feat.
Locomotives are also Hybrids
Very few trains are true hybrids. Some are capable of using a "third rail" for power, those are hybrids. Even using capacitors or batteries on board would not make them hybrids since all the energy to drive the train comes from the fuel oil.
many of the latest cruise ships are using the same tech
Yes they do, but unless those ships use under water extension cables to power the ship at sea they are still just diesel powered with electric drives.
so why in hell can't you get it through your tiny little mind that Hybrid does not mean Fuel Cells and Batteries.
There are other advantages to hydrogen as a transport fuel besides the tree-hugger appeal.
There are also many disadvantages. Hydrogen eats steel and aluminum. It has a much poorer energy density by weight and volume than jet fuel. I could come up with more if I wasn't so tired right now but those two alone really kills hydrogen as aviation fuel, especially if derived from a very useful fuel like natural gas (which is mostly just methane) or propane.
Since the entire goal of using this system is to improve the efficiency of burning the jet fuel then producing hydrogen from a fossil fuel sounds like you'd be going backwards. Part of the energy of the fuel is in the carbon hydrogen bonds, if you break those bonds on the ground to make the hydrogen then it is not contributing to the movement of the plane in the air.
Unless you can show me where I've gone wrong, or something I missed, I still think that hydrogen fuel for airplanes is a very bad idea with the possible exception of hydrogen derived from cracking water with power derived from nuclear fission. I won't even consider wind, solar, or geothermal good alternatives since they currently cost more than nuclear power.
Nope. When you burn anything in an internal combustion engine, more than half of the energy from the reaction is lost as exhaust heat.
That would be relevant if the aircraft in question did not have an internal combustion engine. What they want to do is run a generator with an internal combustion engine, then use that electricity to run a motor that drives a ducted fan. While you caught me on the thermal efficiency angle since they claim to reduce fuel consumption by 25% with this system they also hope to gain on efficiency by having batteries be part of the airplane structure. That is not a simple task and they know it.
Their claim of these efficiency gains comes from the hope that they can develop an electric storage system suited to power an aircraft. Since we have not even found a suitable storage system for the much simpler problem of electric cars and trains I believe they are not going to find that solution soon. If they do then perhaps we can see internal combustion cars get beat out by pure electric and electric hybrid cars on every price point, not just luxury cars and tree hugger magnets.
If I use the definition of efficiency to refer to it's cost and complexity, and not it's ability to convert fuel to forward motion, then a common jet engine is more efficient than the hybrid. For an airline this is a make or break matter, they run on total cost of ownership. For a personal vehicle this might not be so critical since a hybrid might offer other advantages such as comfort, performance, or just bragging rights, that a common jet engine would not have.
If the hydrogen is from a carbon neutral source, which I assume it must or it's a waste of time, then would it not be more efficient to just burn the hydrogen in a traditional jet engine? Looking to Rube Goldberg for hints on aircraft design does not sound like a good idea to me.
The US Navy has been experimenting with the technology that can extract carbon and hydrogen from seawater, connect those elements together in long hydrocarbon chains, with heat and electricity from nuclear fission. They've shown it works. This technology makes aircraft carbon neutral without any modifications to the aircraft itself.
The use of an electric hybrid aircraft would still require hydrocarbon fuels. If that fuel is dug from the ground then it is still adding carbon to the air. I suppose we could combine the two technologies, synthetic hydrocarbons and hybrid planes, but it would still require that we invest in synthetic hydrocarbons.
These electric planes are interesting I suppose but they would not solve the problem like synthesized fuels would.
Instead of pointing out the problem I suggest we start pointing out solutions.
Why are coal miners even in business? I mean if global warming is a problem, and burning coal makes it worse, then shouldn't we see coal miners find something else to do? We see coal miners in business because people want cheap electricity. Without something that can provide electricity as cheap as coal we will burn coal.
We don't burn coal because we want global warming. We burn coal because we like hot pizza in the winter, ice cream in the summer, air conditioned movie theaters, computers, cell phones, and all the other things that cheap electricity can bring us. What alternatives do we have? Wind is cheap but we can't rely on the wind to blow. Solar power costs double or quadruple what coal power costs. If we burned wood for electricity then we'd have made the land barren long ago.
Bill Nye is an engineer, he's studied this stuff in school and for his job. For a product to sell it must be on time, on budget, meet fit/form/function, and be better than the other guys' products. Do we have anything that can do that? Yes, nuclear fission.
Instead of saying the same thing over and over again about how climate change is "undeniable" I say we start talking about how to fix this. Barring some leap in technology the only solution we have is nuclear fission. So I say we need to talk about how we are going to build nuclear power plants at a rate sufficient to replace coal and meet future demand.
Do you realize how easy it would be to bankrupt the oil and gas companies? I mean these companies are in business because people buy their products. They'd go bankrupt almost over night if people just stopped buying their stuff.
But why do people buy their stuff? Don't they know the damage they are doing to the environment? I'm quite certain that they do. Or at least I'm quite certain that they've been told numerous times by now, unless they live under a rock. I don't place the blame on the oil and gas companies, I place the blame on the people that buy their stuff. Did you buy and oil or gas lately? I'm quite certain you did since about 1/4th of the electricity in the USA comes from natural gas, and almost half comes from coal. If you drive a car, take a bus, ride a train, or fly in an airplane then you've burned oil.
Unless you heat your house with corn cobs and light it with beeswax candles then this is your fault. Unless you walk or pedal to wherever you go this is your fault. If you buy food at a grocery store instead of grow it yourself then this is your fault.
Instead of placing the blame on the oil and gas companies then I suggest you lead by example. Show me how to live a better life free from petroleum products.
You are a hypocrite. You lecture to everyone about how oil and gas companies are ruining the world while sitting in a home heated with natural gas, lit by coal, and eating food brought to you with petroleum. It is because of oil, gas, and coal you are living the life you live. If you want people to stop buying oil and gas then show them a better path. But a better path is not easy.
We've tried wind power but the wind doesn't always blow. We tried sun but it costs four times what electricity from natural gas, coal, or nuclear would cost. We tried bio-fuels but it became apparent very quickly that we don't have enough land to both fill our bellies and our fuel tanks. Algae fuels, wave power, fusion reactors, and so on are just theories right now. If we had those figured out then we'd see them as more than just science fair exhibitions.
Where can we turn? What do we have that can light our homes but not foul the air? Nuclear fission? Yes, nuclear fission. I guess you don't like anything "nukular", do you?
When I bring up nuclear power I get people that talk about Fukushima and Chernobyl while ignoring the dozens (hundreds?) of nuclear power plants that are operating safely on Earth right now. Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest, and most reliable energy source we have today. It's also one of the cheapest. Even with a reactor that blows it's top every 30 or 40 years the number of people that dies from nuclear power is orders of magnitude less than those that die from wind and sun on a per kWh basis. As safe as it is now we can make it safer. We can make it cheaper. Why don't we have more of it?
I suspect we have not solved this problem of burning oil and gas because we have hypocrites like you that demand they eat cake and have it too.
You are picking on one power plant in particular and saying it would be gone if people cared, which is being ridiculously specific.
It would be ridiculous if that was the last remaining coal plant, and all others have been gone. Point is that they can quite likely see this plant from their windows, they know it exists because it has been brought up before, they must budget for its operation, and so forth.
Now I was mistaken that it burns only coal. It was converted to burn coal, oil, and natural gas a few years ago. Still not very green. If Democrats were concerned about reducing carbon output and seeing nuclear power increase in use then the power plant within their sight would be an obvious place to start since they own the power plant, the land, and (again) they very likely see this power plant every day.
A bit of looking tells me that there is more than one power plant in DC to give heat, light, and cooling for federal buildings. The other one I didn't know about before is also partially fueled by coal. What seems to keep them from moving completely away from coal are some senators (from both parties) that are from coal mining states that hold up an bill that would stop them from burning coal. If it was only Republicans holding this up then you could blame them but it is a few highly placed Democrats that kill anything that would stop the DC power plants from burning coal.
It seems that not all Democrats are on the bandwagon to stop the burning of coal.
It is true that the Democrats aren't out to stop global warming ASAP regardless of costs, but that isn't realistic anyway.
But I thought global warming was the greatest threat to the health and security of the USA! If so then shouldn't the small cost of replacing a couple of old coal fired plants in DC be something that they could fund? Or, at a minimum, allow new nuclear power plants to be built somewhere, anywhere, in the USA?
From where I sit it does not appear that they are all that concerned about global warming at all. Because if they were then we'd see nuclear power plants getting built. Turns out the Democrats only allowed that to happen after the Republicans gained control of the House.
You are right, reducing global warming at all costs is not realistic, but they won't do it even when it costs them nothing. Nuclear power would actually mean a net gain for them. There would be more jobs, more tax income, more energy, and less carbon. But we can't have that because that might mean some Democrat might lose their next election in coal mining states.
I suspect that quite a few might say they've been largely successful.
I went to a private Catholic school while many of my cousins went to the local public schools. I remember a few family reunions where we'd hear stories of the shenanigans that they'd let the student get away with. One memorable story was of some students that stole some dry cleaning and wore some of the work uniforms they found to school. Turns out that those uniforms were from the welding shop my brother worked at over the summer. What kind of kid think that they can wear stolen property to school and get away with it? I guess kids that get away with bringing pillows to study hall so they can take a nap. Or kids that set off "MacGyver bombs" in the parking lot.
Parents are now tending to home school, or use private schools. Then the government seeing enrollment go down want to take those choices from parents.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather have a record made from X-ray film.
http://www.npr.org/2016/01/09/...
If only a bombing site were closer to me. Perhaps we could drop some more bombs so that more people can witness the destructive power they hold. That way people won't have to travel all the way to Japan.
This is stupid, IMHO, and sounds like a means to guilt people into visiting Japan and spend some money there.
I made a trip to Germany some years ago to visit a friend stationed there while in the US Army. We took a look at some old castles, churches, drank some German beer and ate some German food. We also saw Hitler's "eagles nest", the remains of the Berlin wall, a memorial to the Jews killed, and a concentration camp museum. A memorable experience but not near as memorable as seeing films on the concentration camps, or Youtube videos of talks on the subject, or just listening to my grandparents talk about what World War II meant to them. There are ways to relate the horrors of war to people besides a viewing of where it happened. I admit that we should not destroy these sites, or prevent people from visiting them, but visiting the sites is not the only way to understand what happened there.
What is also lost is how "mutually assured destruction" may have kept the Cold War from becoming a one that burned at a million degrees over Manhattan.
I think that the USA should keep it's nuclear weapons. Even if we never use them again in anger I do believe that their mere presence keeps us safer than if we got rid of them.
I think the sarcasm in the GPP was lost on you. Or perhaps I read more into it than was there. Separate but equal was shown to be a failure. Segregated buses are what brought about the beginning of the end of this separate but equal nonsense.
I'm reminded of when I got a new dentist. I called a local dentist office for an appointment and I was asked if it was okay with be to be seen by a female dentist. I didn't think much of it at the time but imagine if I was asked what I thought if my dentist was black, or gay, or Muslim, or married, or whatever.
If it's socially acceptable to ask if I prefer a male or female dentist then I'd think it would be acceptable to ask if I prefer a female or male driver.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. A very bad situation is a women getting raped, the scum getting away, and the woman reporting the attack to the police. A lethal situation is the woman reporting the death of that scum to the police. While I will not wish death upon anyone I hope God may forgive me if I don't shed a tear for one more rapist killed.
Everyone on Slashdot keeps saying things like this. But in the real world, the degree everyone actually doing software engineering gets is... Computer Science.
Oh really? Have you actually read job postings lately? I have. I did a quick search for jobs available at the university I attend and for a position listed as "Senior Application Developer" I see as the education required:
"A Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science or Management Information Systems or an equivalent combination of education and experience."
That's pretty much boilerplate for any software development position. I've seen some where computer science isn't listed but instead in the field in which the software will be used, such as a biology lab looking for bio-statistics majors to write software.
I've seen people with degrees in mechanical engineering, mathematics, and physics that write better code than me. They might not know as many programming languages as I do, and they might not be as proficient on as many computer platforms as me, but the code they write does what they need it to do and does it well.
What you are complaining about is that people understand the problem but you are tired of hearing it. Computer science is no longer the only means by which a person can become a software developer. It is also no longer the BEST means by which one can become a software developer. The people that hire developers, and are good at their job, have likely already found this out. We don't fix this by making computer science something it is not. We fix this by making college programs that create the kind of person that they'd want to hire.
I saw this change happening years ago and only now has it reached a sort of tipping point. Not only do we see software engineering develop into it's own separate field but we see other specialties also arise. We see "management information systems", "informatics", "actuarial science", and for those interested in cyber security one can major in "information assurance". I even saw a degree granting program called "BS Software Development".
This complaint of computer science programs graduating people that cannot write good code is something that has existed for a very long time. The market has seen this. They are taking the path that I describe rather than yours. They are creating new degree granting programs with the intent of teaching people to write good code rather than trying to shoehorn software engineering into a computer science curriculum. I see this as a good thing.
This may take some education on the part of the HR idiots that would throw away a CV because it does not contain the magic words "computer science" and I think we will get there very soon. Given that schools will grant a degrees in "software development" and "software engineering" we may already be there except for idiots like those that did this "study" of computer science curricula. The fact that they confined their search to that is likely much of the problem. A school that offers "information assurance" as a degree, certificate, or minor is not likely to require a person going to school to study to be a computer historian to take a class on cyber security.
As a side note I will say that seeing "computer historian" is a reminder of how far we've come in computer development that the history of computers is more than just a class in the computer science department, it is also a reminder of how old I've become.
The legal back and forth on this will be interesting. I think I'll grab a beer and some popcorn and watch the carnage unfold.
As someone that leans heavily towards leaving the government out of my business and letting the market decide I will say that this is a brilliant business move and the government should just leave this alone.
I'm reminded of a an incident in my own personal experience. Due to a failing on my part to renew my license to drive in a timely manner I was required to take a driving test to get my license back. I scheduled a time for the test and went for a walk until it was my time. The "test" included a female DOT agent taking a ride in my car with me while I drove around the block. I had to make a proper lane change, follow signage and lights, and generally not screw up for maybe 15 minutes of driving. Now I was alone with this person and excepting that they had my name and address on file I wondered just how much they actually knew about me. Did they run a criminal background check? I mean convicted rapists get licenses to drive after getting out of prison. My test was near the end of the day and so if I just drove off with her in my car would they even notice until the next day?
I didn't even think of this until I had the woman in my rear view mirror. While driving I was more concerned about keeping both hands on the wheel at 3 and 9 while not screwing up to the point I wouldn't get my license. I also had to wonder if the woman even considered the threat of taking a ride in a stranger's car. I did think that if I had asked her this after my test just how creepy that might have sounded.
As a male in reasonably good physical condition, at 6' 5" tall, and about 200 pounds, I realize that I have much less to fear in the world than the typical female. I also realize how imposing I may appear to others. If a woman doesn't want to share a car ride with me then whatever, I'm fairly certain that someone will come in to make up for it since that is how a free market works.
At the university I was e-mailed a flyer on how the US Navy is recruiting students in computer science and related fields into an officer program in their cyber warfare division. This indicates to me that they will offer training in cyber security to those that qualify.
This also indicates to me that many other employers understand that cyber security is not part of a typical undergraduate CS program, and will teach those people on the job if that is a required skill. I recall talking to recruiters for big businesses on what they look for in software developers, and they want engineers. A computer science major might know a lot of programming languages and so on but learning another programming language is something that can be done easily on the job. What is difficult for recruiters is finding people with a good grasp of proper engineering and enough math to understand how to make a computer do what needs to be done efficiently.
Seems to me that cyber security should lie in the realm of on the job training and/or graduate school. Also, students that learn good programming technique should be writing inherently secure software. Things like good memory management, properly protecting variables, and well documented code should make a program secure.
Another thing is that there is a lot of code written to perform relatively trivial tasks where security is simply not a concern. Code on embedded systems just don't have any attack vectors, or if they do it's a matter of things like you have to "reboot" a child's toy because it got stuck in an infinite loop. Code written for industry will be used by people which one would hope are trained in its use. This code may have to allow for things that might be "insecure" for work to get done. If the person using "insecure" code ends up making a welding robot weld it's own arm to the floor then it's the operator to blame.
I believe that many misunderstand what computer science is and has been in the past. A "science" is a organized study of a field, typically the behavior and structure of the elements in that field. Therefore computer science is a rigorous study of how computers work, should work, could work in the future, and the physics and mathematics behind it. It's a field of applied math and physics. This also means many specializations within that field. One may want to study the mathematical difficulty of an encryption algorithm, or the ability to detect the information transmitted down a data path by an outside observer, both with implications on security but not necessarily a "cybersecurity" study.
Software engineering is the application of the engineering process to develop quality software. This includes a background in computer science to some extent but not to the rigor that a computer scientist might get. This would include the study of possible failure points and the means to mitigate them. In this field one might think that a class on "cybersecurity" should be taken since a quality software product should be secure, or one might assume that people would be taught that checking data inputs and outputs, and moving data in a way that could not be seen and/or altered by an outside entity as a basic premise of writing software correctly.
I took computer engineering in college some time ago. I'm now back in college part time because I realized that my education from then did not include a lot of things that have changed since then. One big change is that "software engineering" was not a common term or even a field of study then. My first time through college I had a lot of computer science students in my classes because there was a lot of crossover in course requirements between computer engineering and computer science. I realized real quick that while I was taking classes on the engineering process the computer science people were taking a foreign language. While I was taking a math course on numerical calculus the computer science students were taking history.
Computer science is a liberal arts program, or at least is in most every university I've seen, and therefore it meets the requirements of a typical liberal arts program. They study a wide variety of fields with an emphasis on the ways a computer works. If you want to see people learn how to write quality software then they need to get an engineering education.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen computer science majors write very good software, and I've seen engineers fail badly. I'm saying let computer science be computer science. If we make computer scientists take cybersecurity courses then we distract from people that take computer science to become historians, algorithm gurus, professors, and mathematicians. Roll cybersecurity into every software engineering class in a university. If a student declares a variable as globally accessible when it should not then that student should lose points on their assignment. If a student does not check the bounds of an input then dock points. If a student doesn't allocate and clear memory properly, points lost. Properly engineered software is inherently secure.
I think that a lack of a cybersecurity course requirement in computer science programs is not a bug, it's a feature. If you want to discuss the lack of cybersecurity in software engineering programs then I'll listen.
What we should be discussing is whether we know enough about how this planet works (and have the technology) to attempt some kind of active intervention, such as carbon sequestration or actually blocking sunlight from space.
How about instead of wondering if we can develop the technology to avert this we use technology we developed 70 years ago, brought to near perfection 40 years ago, and do what's left to work out the minor problems it had. I'm talking about molten salt fission reactors. We can use the plentiful thorium resources we have to produce carbon free energy. While sequestration is fine, I suppose, I do recall the first thing one should do when they find themselves in a hole. Stop digging.
Thorium fission would allow us to stop burning so much coal and oil which is making this problem worse. The problems of nuclear waste that come with solid fuel reactors do not exist with liquid fuel reactors. The fission poisons like xenon just bubble out of the mix instead of sticking around like in solid fuel. Just this one aspect can mean keeping a lot of fuel from turning into waste. Even better it can use the "waste" from solid fueled reactors as fuel, further reducing the nuclear waste problem.
This technology was abandoned in the 1970s for purely political reasons. The Cold War was starting and thorium reactors cannot be used to make weapons. Since the federal government wanted to make sure that they could make as much plutonium as possible in the case of a shooting war with the Soviets the Department of Energy would approve only uranium fueled reactors for power plants.
We've proven molten salt reactors work, unlike sun shades from space. They produce near limitless energy and no carbon dioxide. They are useless for weapons, and in fact make nuclear weapons start to look like fuel.
I agree, we should stop talking and start doing. I also think we should try the much simpler solutions before we start launching parasols into orbit.
I'd think that comparing 40+ year old nuclear reactors to brand new wind and solar is not a fair fight. That's also one nuclear reactor out of nearly 100 in the USA. Many of those are also 40+ years old and recently got 20 year renewals on their operation license. That means the utility believes the reactor will produce power at a competitive price for another two decades.
I've seen presentations from nuclear engineers that say the materials, labor, and engineering for a modern nuclear power plant is the same or lower than that of a coal fired plant. The problem with costs in the USA is largely regulatory. If nuclear power was regulated like any other power source, including it's radiation output, then we'd be building nuclear power almost exclusively. The radioactive waste that coal produces alone would shut them down if they were a nuclear power plant.
So what we see are nuclear reactor designers in the USA going overseas to build reactors because the USA has insane restrictions on getting them built.
Good luck convincing the public to support nuclear energy.
At least I'm trying. I bring it up here on Slashdot and on other forums I subscribe to. When politicians call me or knock on my door I ask them about nuclear energy. I've e-mailed politicians, not just the ones I voted for. What have you done?
I'd like to do more but I must still work and go to school.
t's called the Tragedy of the Commons. ...
The only effective solution is to impose mandatory controls for everybody.
I see you misunderstand the concept.
The tragedy of the commons is that people do not see ownership and therefore do not see a need to care for a common good. The solution to the tragedy of the commons is to put people in control. People need to see the personal benefit or they will not put in the personal effort to get the rewards.
Imposing government controls is the government removing ownership and placing something in the commons, creating the very problem you wish to prevent.
An example. A common garden for which everyone works and everyone eats will not be productive since someone that works hard will not see a proportional gain. If the garden is divided up so that everyone has their own garden to eat from then you will find that people will work very hard to get more produce, because that is what they themselves must live upon.
Now a society needs a government and government needs resources. So a portion of the produce should go to the government. If this tax is too high then you get the tragedy of the commons again because people don't see ownership any more. Tax to little and the government cannot function. There is a balance that must be struck.
It's not just taxes either. Mandating what people may grow can create this impression of a loss of ownership. If someone wants to grow flowers in their garden then they should be allowed to do so. They won't get any food from the garden but the neighbors will likely be willing to trade some food for the flowers and everyone wins.
I'm probably a but too old to be a millennial. At a minimum I am on the older end of the millennial spectrum. I can recall seeing the shift in teaching about global warming. Now that I've gone back to college I find myself surrounded by the younger end of the millennial spectrum I find the difference in my earlier education quite profound.
Way back then I remember people openly mocking global warming and no one would say a word. Now you have people, seemingly seriously, calling openly for punishment of deniers. Some say the global warming deniers are such a threat that the death penalty should be imposed. I did not expect a Spanish Inquisition.
I'm studying mathematics in college (or rather a narrow branch of it) and I find my computer science professors taking class time to lecture on global warming. In statistics class I find nearly half of the class examples being about temperature, snowfall, ice sheet mass, rainfall, or some other climate phenomenon. (Much of the rest is on some racial, gender, social status, or something else to feed social justice warriors. A small portion of the class examples are on things like material strength, rock composition, or something else politically neutral.)
I'm in my fourth semester and I find that only the math professors seem content to keep their political beliefs to themselves. Oh, and the music instructors but that's an elective, not required for my course plan.
It's no wonder that millennials think global warming is a problem, they've been told it is in every class they took from kindergarten to graduate school. With the possible exception of courses like math and music like I've seen.
Oh, wait, I do recall politics coming up in music class. We got on the topic of old musical instruments and that lead to the discussion of certain woods being a problem politically and things like ivory and bone which may have come from endangered species.
Now that I say this I may have jinxed myself and politics will come up in math class tomorrow.
Also, way back when the problems were acid rain, polluted waters, deforestation, ozone layer depletion, and other such problems that rarely come up any more since we've basically solved those problems. I have to wonder if the people that fought for those things back then feel a need to keep fighting and will cling to anything, even if that something doesn't exist.
Bill Nye is an engineer and an entertainer. As an engineer myself, and as someone that has contact with other engineers regularly, I tend to trust the opinion of engineers on scientific topics. Not only do I trust the opinion of an engineer because of their education to get to be an engineer but I also trust them because if they did not understand science then they would not be an engineer for long.
That said I don't trust Bill Nye's opinion on climate change because his education and experience is in mechanical engineering. While mechanical engineers must understand thermodynamics and such which would be helpful in understanding weather it appears he's placed too much faith in the opinion of others rather than doing the math himself. Had he done so then perhaps he'd have come up with a better argument than just a bandwagon argument.
I mean if his argument is 9 out of 10 twenty-somethings agree then it must be right then perhaps he needs to think a bit more about what he's saying.
He brought the snowball inside because he noted that it was not that long ago that another senator that I do not recall said that if trends continued that we would not see snow in DC by that date. Time passed, the snow fell, and the other senator was proven wrong. Senator Inhofe showed that the climate models used to predict climate change did not predict correctly.
While past performance does not assure future results that is the wise way to bet. If the climate models predicted no snow, and snow fell, then how much faith can we put in future predictions of this kind?
Carbon neutral means that they don't add carbon to the atmosphere. Since the carbon they emit comes from the air and is returned to the air after being burned it is carbon neutral. If that is not carbon neutral then bio-fuels are not carbon neutral.
Perhaps you don't understand how the carbon gets in the water, it dissolves in the water from contact with the air.
And you failed to understand what a Hybrid Electric System is. It's a Combination of Internal Combustion engine with an Electric Drive Motor
A true hybrid allows for power from more than one energy source. An internal combustion engine driving a generator, and the generator driving a motor, is not a hybrid. That would make an electric drive train.
The Fucking Chevy Volt uses such a setup.
No the fucking Chevy Volt has a battery pack and a mechanical transmission. While it might not be able to go in reverse or slow speeds without the electric drive train it is capable of going highway speeds without it. These proposed aircraft do not claim to have a mechanical link from the on board internal combustion engine to the ducted fans. If they did then I might be impressed since that would be an engineering feat.
Locomotives are also Hybrids
Very few trains are true hybrids. Some are capable of using a "third rail" for power, those are hybrids. Even using capacitors or batteries on board would not make them hybrids since all the energy to drive the train comes from the fuel oil.
many of the latest cruise ships are using the same tech
Yes they do, but unless those ships use under water extension cables to power the ship at sea they are still just diesel powered with electric drives.
so why in hell can't you get it through your tiny little mind that Hybrid does not mean Fuel Cells and Batteries.
Because I actually looked up what "hybrid" means.
There are other advantages to hydrogen as a transport fuel besides the tree-hugger appeal.
There are also many disadvantages. Hydrogen eats steel and aluminum. It has a much poorer energy density by weight and volume than jet fuel. I could come up with more if I wasn't so tired right now but those two alone really kills hydrogen as aviation fuel, especially if derived from a very useful fuel like natural gas (which is mostly just methane) or propane.
Since the entire goal of using this system is to improve the efficiency of burning the jet fuel then producing hydrogen from a fossil fuel sounds like you'd be going backwards. Part of the energy of the fuel is in the carbon hydrogen bonds, if you break those bonds on the ground to make the hydrogen then it is not contributing to the movement of the plane in the air.
Unless you can show me where I've gone wrong, or something I missed, I still think that hydrogen fuel for airplanes is a very bad idea with the possible exception of hydrogen derived from cracking water with power derived from nuclear fission. I won't even consider wind, solar, or geothermal good alternatives since they currently cost more than nuclear power.
Nope. When you burn anything in an internal combustion engine, more than half of the energy from the reaction is lost as exhaust heat.
That would be relevant if the aircraft in question did not have an internal combustion engine. What they want to do is run a generator with an internal combustion engine, then use that electricity to run a motor that drives a ducted fan. While you caught me on the thermal efficiency angle since they claim to reduce fuel consumption by 25% with this system they also hope to gain on efficiency by having batteries be part of the airplane structure. That is not a simple task and they know it.
Their claim of these efficiency gains comes from the hope that they can develop an electric storage system suited to power an aircraft. Since we have not even found a suitable storage system for the much simpler problem of electric cars and trains I believe they are not going to find that solution soon. If they do then perhaps we can see internal combustion cars get beat out by pure electric and electric hybrid cars on every price point, not just luxury cars and tree hugger magnets.
If I use the definition of efficiency to refer to it's cost and complexity, and not it's ability to convert fuel to forward motion, then a common jet engine is more efficient than the hybrid. For an airline this is a make or break matter, they run on total cost of ownership. For a personal vehicle this might not be so critical since a hybrid might offer other advantages such as comfort, performance, or just bragging rights, that a common jet engine would not have.
How are they suddenly going to start REDUCING Co2 emissions?
Nuclear fission?
No, wait, that should not have been a question...
Nuclear fission. The answer is nuclear fission.
If the hydrogen is from a carbon neutral source, which I assume it must or it's a waste of time, then would it not be more efficient to just burn the hydrogen in a traditional jet engine? Looking to Rube Goldberg for hints on aircraft design does not sound like a good idea to me.
The US Navy has been experimenting with the technology that can extract carbon and hydrogen from seawater, connect those elements together in long hydrocarbon chains, with heat and electricity from nuclear fission. They've shown it works. This technology makes aircraft carbon neutral without any modifications to the aircraft itself.
The use of an electric hybrid aircraft would still require hydrocarbon fuels. If that fuel is dug from the ground then it is still adding carbon to the air. I suppose we could combine the two technologies, synthetic hydrocarbons and hybrid planes, but it would still require that we invest in synthetic hydrocarbons.
These electric planes are interesting I suppose but they would not solve the problem like synthesized fuels would.
Instead of pointing out the problem I suggest we start pointing out solutions.
Why are coal miners even in business? I mean if global warming is a problem, and burning coal makes it worse, then shouldn't we see coal miners find something else to do? We see coal miners in business because people want cheap electricity. Without something that can provide electricity as cheap as coal we will burn coal.
We don't burn coal because we want global warming. We burn coal because we like hot pizza in the winter, ice cream in the summer, air conditioned movie theaters, computers, cell phones, and all the other things that cheap electricity can bring us. What alternatives do we have? Wind is cheap but we can't rely on the wind to blow. Solar power costs double or quadruple what coal power costs. If we burned wood for electricity then we'd have made the land barren long ago.
Bill Nye is an engineer, he's studied this stuff in school and for his job. For a product to sell it must be on time, on budget, meet fit/form/function, and be better than the other guys' products. Do we have anything that can do that? Yes, nuclear fission.
Instead of saying the same thing over and over again about how climate change is "undeniable" I say we start talking about how to fix this. Barring some leap in technology the only solution we have is nuclear fission. So I say we need to talk about how we are going to build nuclear power plants at a rate sufficient to replace coal and meet future demand.
Do you realize how easy it would be to bankrupt the oil and gas companies? I mean these companies are in business because people buy their products. They'd go bankrupt almost over night if people just stopped buying their stuff.
But why do people buy their stuff? Don't they know the damage they are doing to the environment? I'm quite certain that they do. Or at least I'm quite certain that they've been told numerous times by now, unless they live under a rock. I don't place the blame on the oil and gas companies, I place the blame on the people that buy their stuff. Did you buy and oil or gas lately? I'm quite certain you did since about 1/4th of the electricity in the USA comes from natural gas, and almost half comes from coal. If you drive a car, take a bus, ride a train, or fly in an airplane then you've burned oil.
Unless you heat your house with corn cobs and light it with beeswax candles then this is your fault. Unless you walk or pedal to wherever you go this is your fault. If you buy food at a grocery store instead of grow it yourself then this is your fault.
Instead of placing the blame on the oil and gas companies then I suggest you lead by example. Show me how to live a better life free from petroleum products.
You are a hypocrite. You lecture to everyone about how oil and gas companies are ruining the world while sitting in a home heated with natural gas, lit by coal, and eating food brought to you with petroleum. It is because of oil, gas, and coal you are living the life you live. If you want people to stop buying oil and gas then show them a better path. But a better path is not easy.
We've tried wind power but the wind doesn't always blow. We tried sun but it costs four times what electricity from natural gas, coal, or nuclear would cost. We tried bio-fuels but it became apparent very quickly that we don't have enough land to both fill our bellies and our fuel tanks. Algae fuels, wave power, fusion reactors, and so on are just theories right now. If we had those figured out then we'd see them as more than just science fair exhibitions.
Where can we turn? What do we have that can light our homes but not foul the air? Nuclear fission? Yes, nuclear fission. I guess you don't like anything "nukular", do you?
When I bring up nuclear power I get people that talk about Fukushima and Chernobyl while ignoring the dozens (hundreds?) of nuclear power plants that are operating safely on Earth right now. Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest, and most reliable energy source we have today. It's also one of the cheapest. Even with a reactor that blows it's top every 30 or 40 years the number of people that dies from nuclear power is orders of magnitude less than those that die from wind and sun on a per kWh basis. As safe as it is now we can make it safer. We can make it cheaper. Why don't we have more of it?
I suspect we have not solved this problem of burning oil and gas because we have hypocrites like you that demand they eat cake and have it too.
You are picking on one power plant in particular and saying it would be gone if people cared, which is being ridiculously specific.
It would be ridiculous if that was the last remaining coal plant, and all others have been gone. Point is that they can quite likely see this plant from their windows, they know it exists because it has been brought up before, they must budget for its operation, and so forth.
Now I was mistaken that it burns only coal. It was converted to burn coal, oil, and natural gas a few years ago. Still not very green. If Democrats were concerned about reducing carbon output and seeing nuclear power increase in use then the power plant within their sight would be an obvious place to start since they own the power plant, the land, and (again) they very likely see this power plant every day.
A bit of looking tells me that there is more than one power plant in DC to give heat, light, and cooling for federal buildings. The other one I didn't know about before is also partially fueled by coal. What seems to keep them from moving completely away from coal are some senators (from both parties) that are from coal mining states that hold up an bill that would stop them from burning coal. If it was only Republicans holding this up then you could blame them but it is a few highly placed Democrats that kill anything that would stop the DC power plants from burning coal.
It seems that not all Democrats are on the bandwagon to stop the burning of coal.
It is true that the Democrats aren't out to stop global warming ASAP regardless of costs, but that isn't realistic anyway.
But I thought global warming was the greatest threat to the health and security of the USA! If so then shouldn't the small cost of replacing a couple of old coal fired plants in DC be something that they could fund? Or, at a minimum, allow new nuclear power plants to be built somewhere, anywhere, in the USA?
From where I sit it does not appear that they are all that concerned about global warming at all. Because if they were then we'd see nuclear power plants getting built. Turns out the Democrats only allowed that to happen after the Republicans gained control of the House.
You are right, reducing global warming at all costs is not realistic, but they won't do it even when it costs them nothing. Nuclear power would actually mean a net gain for them. There would be more jobs, more tax income, more energy, and less carbon. But we can't have that because that might mean some Democrat might lose their next election in coal mining states.
I suspect that quite a few might say they've been largely successful.
I went to a private Catholic school while many of my cousins went to the local public schools. I remember a few family reunions where we'd hear stories of the shenanigans that they'd let the student get away with. One memorable story was of some students that stole some dry cleaning and wore some of the work uniforms they found to school. Turns out that those uniforms were from the welding shop my brother worked at over the summer. What kind of kid think that they can wear stolen property to school and get away with it? I guess kids that get away with bringing pillows to study hall so they can take a nap. Or kids that set off "MacGyver bombs" in the parking lot.
Parents are now tending to home school, or use private schools. Then the government seeing enrollment go down want to take those choices from parents.
They are "thinking of the children" I'm sure.