There's some truth in what he's saying, but he's over-exagerated the problem.
In Bonaire the coral used to pretty much reach up to the shoreline where there were rocks upto the shoreline, but as agriculture has increased, the reef has died back probably around 20m - 40m. It's less about pesticides though and more about fertiliser runoff, the fertiliser feeds the algae, which in turn overwhelms the coral and kills it - that's why when you see images of coral dead from bleeching, it often ends up covered in algae, because when the coral is weakened the algae can take over and finish the job.
But, however, one of the things you'll also notice is that Bonaire also has the largest fucking parrot fish you've ever seen in those areas where algae is rife, because there's now an abundance of food for them to get fat on. Better than that though, now that fertiliser runoff has been reduced because of political efforts to reduce and restrict it's use, the fat parrot fish have been keeping the algae in check sufficiently enough to allow the coral to grow back a bit.
Now there are areas where the fertiliser is causing dangerous algae blooms, such as the gulf of Mexico, but it becomes a wet dream for algae eating pelagics such as whale sharks there too.
So whilst he's right that even if you fix the bleaching issue from heat, you'll still have other problems, the good news is that those problems are WAY easier to fix, and that nature is WAY better at recovering from those problems than it is from severe bleaching. So he's wrong to say if we fix the bleaching issue it wont matter - it will, if we fix that one, everything else is child's play to fix, nature is happy to do most of that for us, with great big fat fucking parrot fish and the like.
When Trump threatened tariffs against steel/aluminium, Juncker in the EU being the absolute clueless corrupt prat he is made the same claim about waiting to see if it's worth applying sanctions against US brands like Harley Davidson and Levis.
Levis slipped off the list of possible companies a few days later, presumably because someone pointed out to him that sanctioning an American company that employs quite a few people in Europe (it has a factory in Italy, and stores Europe wide) and that shares European values, pays taxes without avoidance/evasions and disagrees with Trump's tarrifs as much as they do was probably going to be a massive own goal, when instead there are plenty of American companies that sell to Europe but don't have quite as high an employment footprint here which would've been way better targets - US agriculture, raw materials, and such would have made better targets for a counter response to steel/aluminium tariffs.
Still, Trump appears to have rowed back on applying the sanctions to Europe, so there's no need for a trade war between the US and Europe now anyway at least. That in itself is an example of a reason to wait though - the threat alone can sometimes be sufficient for action, what if Kaspersky offered to relocate key elements of it's business out of Russia to the US for example? Actually imposing sanctions would almost certainly never trigger that because it would be too late, threats might.
I wouldn't get too focused on it being dead or not, we can do coral reintroduction, and the healthiest and most biodiverse reefs in the world sit just north of Australia in places like Indonesia, so if we can restore things to the point at which they can sustain reef life, there's a reasonable chance it can recover.
There's this kind of mystique around reefs when we see claims about how incredibly biodiverse they are, and how they're home to millions of unique species. That's true, but the diversity doesn't change drastically across large regions - sure different areas do have unique species, but the common species that build the reefs are continent wide, or even global.
I've recently participated in a coral conservation programme in the Caribbean helping to restore the exact same staghorn spoken about in the article. It's a species of coral that's struggling globally, but the good news is that it's also pretty damn easy to repopulate it, because you can just cut bits off, and grow them for a bit in ocean based nurseries, then just plant them with marine grade putty and similar things and within a few years they'll restore an area to it's natural state. The same is true of many corals.
As someone whose dived globally, one thing you start to realise is that for all those millions of species, there are certain ones you see time and time again - from Florida all the way down the chain of Caribbean islands to Curacao and all the way back up the mainland past Costa Rica, Yucatan and Mexico and back to Florida, you'll see the same species time and time again - the same fish, the same turtles, the same morays, the barracudas, the sharks, the puffers, the rays. Cozumel has it's distinct splendid toadfish, St Lucia has "the thing" and so on, but ultimately, it's clear that there are key species that prop up the reefs and sit widespread. If you go over to Asia the same applies, places like Lembeh like to tout their access to things like the Blue Ringed Octopus, and their nudibranchs and stuff, but you can see these all across tropical Asia - Thailand, the Philipines, Indonesia, Australia Some of those species are common all the way up through the Indian ocean into Egypt and Jordan's Red Sea reefs. Even in the colder regions, you see the same species along Norway's coastline as you do around the UK, and around Greenland and Iceland and to North America's northern coasts.
So even if we can't save say, the barrier reef in time to solve the warming problem, if we can at least keep some reefs going we can restore others to productivity. We will lose some localised distinctive species, which may mean we lose unique treatments for cancers and so forth, so it's not cost free for us as a species, but it needn't also be catastrophic for the oceans, because if we do lose the reefs, with lose the hatcheries and nurseries, and if we lose them, we lose 20%+ of the world's global food supply.
Ideally therefore, we want to limit the impact as fast as we can to protect food supplies, and to protect unique species that have led to groundbreaking medical research and other scientific advancement, but if we can't, there's still at least some hope. As with everything though - your backup plan should be just that, your backup plan, because if you don't even bother to try your primary plan, and fall straight through to the backup, then what happens if that fails? The harder we try for plan A - saving the reefs as they are, the easier and more likely it'll be we can succeed with plan B, if we absolutely end up having to fall back on it, so giving up because we might fail most definitely should not be an option we even begin to consider.
It's compromised because the data was given to Facebook, therefore the contract exists between the user and Facebook. Some users also gave permission for their data to be given to an app created by Alexsandr Kogan in his capacity as a researcher, but some of the data that Alexsandr Kogan took was from friends of people who gave permission for their data to be given to the app.
There's two issues here, one is a bit of a grey area, the other is clearly illegal, and hence reasonable to class as a breach.
The first issue, the one that's a grey area is the fact that Kogan gathered the data as an academic, but then used it commercially - even if this was hidden in a contract upon use of his app, there's a requirement in most European countries to get explicit consent for use of the data for marketing purposes. He didn't do that, he merely sold the data on for (political) marketing purposes without obtaining explicit consent.
The second issue, that isn't a grey area, and is clearly illegal, is that he harvested data of friends of people who used his app - those people NEVER gave consent for him or his app to gather that data, and this is illegal in all EU countries. There's no clause to allow friends to give consent on your behalf to hand your data away under EU data protection law and their never has been, thus to harvest data not just of the person who signed up to your app, but of their friends as well who didn't sign up, is completely illegal in the EU.
As Kogan is British, and performed these acts in the EU under British implementation of EU law, he's therefore clearly obtained data illegally, and that is why it's reasonable to call it a breach. He took data he had no legal basis to acquire and then profited from selling it on - that's no different to anyone else taking data they have no legal access to and selling it on like many cyber criminals do for a living.
Now I'm not absolving Facebook - the fact Facebook made that friend data available in the first place even though there was no legal way for anyone to ever access or consume it in Europe is in itself something that has been known to be in breach of European law for some time, but the argument goes that it's an American company so it's fine to break European law, even at it's European subsidiaries operating in Europe with European staff. It's not of course, which is why Facebook is in so much shit now. When you have a presence and staff in a country or jurisdiction, then you have to play by their rules, else you get the fuck out, just as Google did when China tried to make them adhere to Chinese authoritarianism rather than have a search presence in the country.
I agree the term "compromised" is classically tied to theft of data through technical exploitation of vulnerabilities, but I don't think it has to be. This is the equivalent of someone leaving a top secret file on a bus accidentally only for someone to steal it - no exploit was required, but the top secret data is still compromised in such a scenario, so I think use of the term is reasonable, even if it's not what we're used to.
As a counterpoint to their crocodile argument, turtles which first arose in the Jurassic period, and are largely herbivorous can recognise and deal with toxic plants (and coral and much other poisonous sea life) and are about as closely related to dinos as crocs are.
And is there an actual definition of what is covered by the right to bare arms or is it entirely arbitrary? Do people using that argument accept that or is there a dependency on hypocrisy?
Curious to know whether it's a question of simply where people draw the line, whether people have a logically consistent argument, or whether the whole argument is based on outright inconsistency. For me which one of those it is really defines the legitimacy of the argument - if someone has to resort to the latter, though they wont explicitly admit it, they've already lost the argument on a logical level. If the GP however is at least consistent then fair play to him, if that's his view that all arms are fair game then so be it, at least he's consistent. If it's a debate simply about where the line should be drawn then that's really fine too as long as such arguments are rational - i.e. what constitutes an acceptable weapon based on how many people it could kill, i.e. some may argue a weapon that can kill 1,000s in one go is unacceptable, but a kill rate of upto 100 or so with a fully automatic rifle is an acceptable price.
That's really what I'm interested in, to understand what the actual reasoning is behind supporting ownership of weapons, and whether people base it on rationality, and if so what they view the acceptable price of ownership of arms as.
Curious to know how far you take your argument, are you suggesting you'd have no qualms with your neighbor building a nuclear weapon, or biological or chemical weapons lab in their house because they're all just inanimate objects even though they could intentionally or accidentally kill you at any moment?
That is, do you apply your logic consistently to everything, that anyone should be able to own anything in the world no matter how high the potential for harm?
"After taking my corporate training on the European privacy law"
Oh dear, it sounds awfully like your employer bought the services of one of those parasite companies that has been fear mongering over GDPR in their training sessions so that they can sell you their other services to help you be GDPR compliant.
I had the misfortune of trying to find out what our obligations were in a few areas under GDPR, I read various articles online all contradicting each other, then I went and just read the legislation. Turns out my obligations are minimal compared to what the shit peddlers are trying to flog with their fear mongering.
If you're not collecting any PII you don't need a dedicated privacy officer. If people send you personal info all you have to do is make sure you delete it after an appropriate amount of time (which most major mail clients support), store it securely, such as in an encrypted mail store (which most major mail clients support), provide people the data you have on them whilst being able to charge them for the privilege and can be as simple as forwarding their e-mails with PII in right back at them whilst making a profit on the effort, and being able to tell people their data has been stolen if you are hacked, which is just a case of loading up your mailbox backup after the fact and bulk mailing everyone in your PII folder to let them know.
This is hardly a burden, this isn't far removed from how the vast majority of people manage their e-mail day to day anyway.
If you're only making $100 a year in Europe it doesn't sound like you actually have a European presence anyway, so if it's that much of a burden it's hardly a loss anyway, so I don't really see the problem. The cost of complying with GDPR for small businesses is clearly negligible though either way beyond the negligible time cost of setting up a few filters and automatic backup in Outlook or whatever - again, something any sane business owner is likely to be doing anyway.
Yes, the reason Private Eye dresses it up in humour is because when the lawsuits come flying they can pass it off as parody - they've probably been sued, and one more cases than almost any other publication.
They effectively use parody laws to expose things the mainstream papers wont touch through fear of being sued.
This is somewhat a factor of our harsh libel laws, because it's easy to sue people for libel and slander even if what they're saying is actually true because our laws favour protection against libel/slander way above free speech, we're probably one of the most imbalanced countries on those laws in that respect..
There's no tax on income under £11500, and only 20% up to £45,000, the national average salary is £26,000, so yes basically anyone earning less than the national average only pays 9% of their income on tax, which is, by definition, half the population. Some of those unsurprisingly live in London.
So the Silicon Valley housing market is like the housing market in much of the rest of the developed world then?
This hardly screams of a crisis, this scenario is basically standard for the UK in general for example, but way better than the situation in London. In some European countries renting is the norm, you're deemed to be quite rich if you can buy.
Having to give up 33% - 50% of your income to pay for a mortgage is hardly shocking, a problem, or any kind of crisis. I don't see how this equates to "Can't afford" - in places like London many people are spending as much or even sometimes more than 80% of their income on rent alone so aren't even accruing any kind of asset as you do with a mortgage.
There are of course other factors that might mean this is worse than it sounds though - at what point in their career are people paying 50%? What are the mortgage terms? Obviously someone paying 50% of their income on a 50 year mortgage towards the end of their career is a little more troubling than someone paying 33% of their income on a 5 year mortgage at their first year at work. I don't know what typical terms look like in the US much less silicon valley so maybe this is a factor? I'd like to think US banks have also learnt the lessons of the financial crisis and to no longer offer absurd mortgages that people will never be able to pay, but perhaps that's wishful thinking?
Because they too have to set their alarm clocks to wake up an hour earlier, but as they don't have jobs to go to suffer from higher levels of depression as a result and so are more likely to commit suicide.
This is why you see more roadkill around the time the clocks change.
"I think the problem with our discussion is we are talking about two different things. I am talking about economic and human costs of power generation in the United States and you are talking about the entire world. The United States is not subsidizing fossil fuels, even considering the cost of externalities. Some industrially developing nations may be."
Nope, again, let's stick to the science rather than making arbitrary assertions - take your pick of the links I provided or any of the many others Google can find for you - the US is still blowing at minimum hundreds of millions on subsidising fossil fuels through externalising the costs onto members of the public.
I do not believe there's a country in the world right now that doesn't hold fossil fuel power plants to far lower standards than just about every other type of power generation. You can't simply whitewash the problem in the US by saying "India and China are worse".
"The life expectancy in those southeast countries with high air pollution is remarkably still going up and the mortality rates going down... (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2015&locations=CN&start=1960&view=chart)"
You're suggesting correlation implies causation, obviously that's a flagrant affront to scientific argument. I get that you have a vested interest in fossil fuels but come on, let's not go full retard here.
If you want to argue that you feel that it's valid that offloading the costs of fossil fuels through implicit subsidies is acceptable then fine, go for it - you're more than welcome to make this argument. But you can't just simply deny the evidence and start resorting to logical fallacies like implying correlation equals causation to make a false narrative reality - reality isn't something that's in your power to change no matter what you might say, so the fact still stands that fossil fuels have massive hidden costs that are paid indirectly, and hence massive defacto subsidies that dwarf anything given to any other methods of power generation. I've provided more than sufficient evidence to highlight this, and arguing correlation equals causation is somehow a counter to that is very obviously farcical.
"Literal trillions of dollars as calculated by whom? You magnify the "subsidies" of fossil fuels while handwaving over alternatives."
If you're going to persistently refuse to understand the subject whilst insisting you're right regardless I'm going to stop wasting my time. As I said - a simple Google search will find you hundreds of results, so to answer your question in terms of whom, literally every journalist and scientist that's ever objectively studied the subject. As Google is apparently way too confusing for you though, I'll make it easier:
Side note on the above: "The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress." - you argue oil is better than coal, it's really not, presumably when you say you like fossil fuels what you really mean is that you're an oil man if you believe what you said.
How long do you want me to keep going before you decide to stop being in denial? You can't pretend this is bias or partisanism - as I've said all along, there's a reason why left and right come to the same conclusions when they study this. You cannot pretend the likes of Forbes to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the US government to the IMF, and Cambridge University to the World Nuclear Association are somehow bedfellows that all sit on the exact same end of the political spectrum - they don't, that's nonsense - they all agree because it's true, and if you disagree it's because you're being irrational.
I did as you said regarding earthquakes from dams, and yes, whilst I'm willing to admit I hadn't appreciated quite how harmful some of them had been, I think you still fundamentally fail to understand the differences in scale - we're talking less than a million deaths from them across all time, and yet fossil fuels kill tens (possibly squeezing into hundreds) of millions globally not just in one off incidents, but on an ongoing basis every year. There's still not even a remotely equivalent comparison - the externalities of fossil fuels are still many orders of magnitude higher on healthcare alone - even if you reject the global warming argument, and ignore the geopolitical strife caused by fighting over fossil fuels, you're still seeing orders of magnitude more externalities (and deaths) on fossil fuels based just on the topic of healthcare and nothing more alone. When you factor in the other realities - war, climate change and so forth, it's like comparing a spec of sand to the size of the plant and saying the two are equivalent.
I've Google'd the shit out of trying to find any kind of study showing that other fuels externalities are equivalent to fossil fuels. Guess what? Nothing, whilst it's consistently poss
No, I just want us to pay for fossil fuels what the actual cost is - I want companies that use fossil fuels to pay the full externalities like every other power source has to.
Sure, my energy bill will rocket, but my tax bill will plummet to match due to reduced healthcare costs. The difference is, within short order afterwards my energy bill will also plummet because market competitiveness will force them to fight on price by moving towards cleaner and cheaper energy sources.
We don't even have to do it directly, we could just make the energy companies pay their relative share of the health bill outright and watch it go down as health costs significantly decrease.
What I don't want is to keep paying for it through stealth subsidies that cause countless other problems (health and environmental) in the process, because that's just pointless and stupid. Out of curiosity, why do you want that? why do you prefer to stick with the status quo of paying through stealth subsidies and all the other negative issues associated with the status quo when you could just pay directly? You're paying either way - no one escapes that, it's just a question of how directly you pay, and hence how accurately and quickly the markets can correct the problem, I'm not sure why people take issue with that other than because they either don't understand the issue, have some irrational love of the fossil fuel industry, or just like to be argumentative for the sake of it.
And since when did arguing to allow the market to sort it out rather than fudging things with subsidies become a SJW thing? I'm pretty centrist to be honest, but this is an area where I lean right because I genuinely think it's a problem that can be fixed by the markets, and that is being prevented from being fixed by anti-market defacto state backed subsidies.
But you're arguing that because micro-externalities exist for those sources, that it's okay for fossil fuels to receive literally trillions of dollars in externality subsidies, that's obviously an entirely non-factual argument - the fundamental point is that even if you take all externalities for all fuel sources that oil, and coal are still subsidised so far beyond the others that they're not price competitive. The only reason they are is because the externalities are so large, and yet offloaded - you mention relocation from flooded areas with hydro, and yet people get compensated for this (okay maybe not in dodgy 3rd world backwaters, but we're not talking about fringe cases, we're talking about the general case). Creating lakes doesn't cause earthquakes, fracking for fossil fuels however, does.
"Powerplants in the US that the EPA regulates as far as their emissions limits based on safety considerations for the public? Not really as applicable."
So you don't think somewhere between $500million to $4tn a year (depending on which estimates you trust) is a subsidy that's applicable?
It's still fairly clear you don't actually grasp the scale of fossil fuel externalities, nor do you grasp the effects of the pollutants even with EPA emissions regulations (in fact, even with the much cleaner standards in Western European nations even). As I said - there are more papers than you could read in a reasonable time on Google, go pick some, from disparate sources across the political spectrum to get a balanced view. The idea that the odd of a hydro dam creating a lake that causes an earthquake is a thing that's both as likely to happen and even remotely as costly as hundreds of millions in healthcare costs is a farcical argument and reeks of desperation - you might as well admit outright you're just a massive fan of the the fossil fuel industry and cut the bullshit if you can't even be remotely objective about the topic.
To a degree sure, it's a similar problem with plastics in many ways too which is another challenge.
But you're wrong about the latter, I'm not sure why anyone would pretend nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and so on and so forth just don't exist. Obviously they do, and many countries are hitting greater milestones with them each year - some countries even managing to power themselves entirely from non-fossil fuel sources. Even for plastics we don't have to use fossil fuels, there are alternatives.
But I am a realist, I fully appreciate we wont get rid of them altogether, but the only reason we're not eliminating them at a faster rate than we are is precisely because they're so heavily subsidised to keep their prices artificially low which is exactly the point of my original post.
I fully advocate making them compete on their natural market rate without the subsidies, because that way we'll reach a natural balance of their usage far faster than we are now, and without the complexity of having to give other energy source direct subsidies also just to let them try and compete - that kind of thing is a waste of everyone's time, and it's just a fudge to mask over the real fundamental problem.
I'm not talking about tax breaks, you've failed to understand the problem. In fact, had you Google'd as I'd suggest you'd have seen why you have no idea what you're talking about.
The defacto subsidies in question are the fact that there are effects of the actions of fossil fuel companies that they do not pay for - if a nuclear power company causes cancer because of a radiation leak then they've been consistently held liable for the costs of healthcare stemming from that. Whilst some fossil fuel companies have been held liable for some incidents - i.e. BP for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, there is constant release of harmful pollutants such as way above natural levels of mercury released in both extraction of the fossil fuels by companies like BP and in burning of them for energy by power companies - these too cause cancer but the companies do not pay those costs.
Instead, they rely on useful idiots like you to blindly pay far higher costs for healthcare insurance (or tax if you're in a socialised healthcare country) than you would otherwise have to if they were picking up the tab - so if they cause someone cancer through excessive pollutant release, then unlike the case where the nuclear power companies consistently pick up the tab, instead you pick up the tab for that person's cancer through higher healthcare costs even though they were at fault for causing it.
So people like YOU are subsidising them for paying for the effects of their actions, and in turn they can offer their product cheaper than is otherwise warranted, hence fossil fuels are only competitive because of that defacto subsidy. Again, read up on fossil fuel externalities before commenting further if you want to comment and actually understand what you're talking about. It literally has nothing to do with tax breaks, I don't know why you'd even assume that unless you're just jumping to conclusions and posting without understanding the problem, which I presume is the case.
Pick a different more right wing source if you prefer, or find a more left wing source if that's your flavour, but in case you can't actually be bothered to Google I'm going to offer up this one, because it has a nice simple bullet pointed list highlighting the things that people like you subsidise for fossil fuel industries:
Again, this is not a partisan issue, it's not about tax breaks, I'm making the point that you and everyone else in this thread are subsidising fossil fuels in real terms to keep their price artificially low. The only way you avoid it is if you don't pay taxes, don't pay healthcare and so on and so forth.
No, that seems to be a common misconception, until the court rules whether they're legally liable for damages in this court case then we don't know if they've broken the law or not. That's really the point of courts - to decide those things - not random people on Slashdot.
Even if there's no criminal liability that doesn't remove the possibility of civil liability and that still has to be based on the breach of some law, which is really the point of cases like this, to test whether they can be held civilly liable for damages due to negligence or similar.
"That's illegal. Providing gasoline for sale is not. The difference should be obvious, even to NYS politicians, but I guess stupidity has no limits."
Erm, that's exactly the point - we hold nuclear waste to far higher standards even though it kills literally many orders of magnitude less people than fossil fuel pollutants have. The point is precisely that when we discover something is bad we take action - we make things illegal, we seek compensation for damage done through the courts, or do you think the illegality of nuclear waste is some kind of universal declaration generated by nature itself when the universe first popped into existence at the moment of the big bang?
But then, I guess that's the risk you run of shitting verbal diarrhea into a conversation when you post drivel without actually reading the content of the thread in question.
I don't think you understand what's emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, I'll give you a hint, it's not just CO2, and yes, it does contain pollutants. If you think the problem with burning fossil fuels is merely a battle between global warming believers and unbelievers then you're rather missing the point - fossil fuels cause health problems, are finite in nature and have consistently been triggers for war, extraction of them has a higher casualty rate than most other power sources, and yes, they cause substantial environmental damage even outside of the burning of them - mining of them alone is damaging.
There have been literally hundreds of studies on the costs of fossil fuel externalities from countless organisations covering just about every end of the political spectrum, feel free to Google "Fossil fuel externalities" for any number of example papers, articles, and so on. The reason it's not a partisan issue is because even the most right leaning free market libertarians who understand the topic can see the stupidity of trillions of dollars of defacto fossil fuel subsidies as well as even the most left leaning hippy environmentalist.
We're using them out of habit and nothing more, call it politics if you want, it doesn't really matter, it's still a fundamentally good thing to do.
Actually it makes complete sense unless you're just trying to irrationally defend fossil fuel companies.
Consider this, say you use nuclear power to power your home, and you find out after years of research that the nuclear power plant has just been dumping it's nuclear waste in the environment where it's been seeping into water supplies and the food chain and causing massive damage.
The region responsible for governing that area of the environment realises from the research what's going on, we can criticise them for acting to slowly but does that:
a) Mean they should sue you instead because your home was powered by the nuclear power provided by the company dumping the waste in a damaging manner and you knew about it in the news and continued to power your home before the city got round to acting?
b) Make it any less valid to sue the company?
We have double standards when it comes to waste left over by power companies, for some reason we have people like you defending companies that produce and burn coal for power generation who dump the waste into the environment on a continuous daily basis, but if a company dealing with nuclear waste dumps their waste in the environment, absolutely no one defends it and it's treated like the gravest crime known to man, so we hold those companies to drastically higher standards.
Yet, the death toll for people killed from disease caused by fossil fuel burning such as asthma, the impacts of it on the environment in terms of both direct pollution, and longer term affects like global warming, is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions.
So I ask again, why is it so wrong to hold those profiting from it and their companies to account? We'd do it with nuclear waste without question so why not the waste generated by fossil fuel?
Besides, most people are already held accountable for fossil fuel use, my biggest expense in life is far and away the cost of petrol, and the cost of gas and electricity. Everything else - water, phone, internet, food, costs peanuts in comparison to the cost of using fossil fuels, yet I'm given no other practical option. I have no problem with the companies themselves paying up too, because whilst it'll hit me in the pocket by increasing my expenses even more it'll open the door for much cheaper suppliers to storm the market, like wind, solar, and nuclear suppliers (and yes, nuclear IS far cheaper than oil and gas when externalities are taken into account).
By not making fossil fuel companies pay for their total costs (i.e. including externalities - the costs they push onto others through their actions such as increased costs of healthcare insurance/tax) we're basically just subsidising them, and whilst I don't believe in absolute free markets (I believe there needs to be controls) I do believe that the defacto subsidies paid by the tax payer to cover the costs of fossil fuel externalities to the tune of trillions of dollars across the globe shouldn't be a thing - even a small subsidy to prop up an industry that would otherwise fall into the history books due to not being economically viable is too much, let alone the trillions of dollars in subsidies these industries get by offloading their costs onto everyone else and who cause substantial physical harm to millions of people in the process.
Statistically, the benefits the fossil fuel industries are given over anyone else are insane. The freedom from prosecution for harm and pollution, the subsidies they receive, and so on and so forth wouldn't even remotely be entertained by any other industry, there'd be substantial uproar and for good reason. The challenge is because they do receive trillions in subsidies they can afford to PR the shit out of the problem so that people like you think they're not the issue making it a self-sustaining problem. We need to break the cycle and stop giving these companies a free ride, they need to compete in the free market like everyone else, and when they do, they'll lose, because everyone else is far cheaper and cleane
Slashdot Mirror
There's some truth in what he's saying, but he's over-exagerated the problem.
In Bonaire the coral used to pretty much reach up to the shoreline where there were rocks upto the shoreline, but as agriculture has increased, the reef has died back probably around 20m - 40m. It's less about pesticides though and more about fertiliser runoff, the fertiliser feeds the algae, which in turn overwhelms the coral and kills it - that's why when you see images of coral dead from bleeching, it often ends up covered in algae, because when the coral is weakened the algae can take over and finish the job.
But, however, one of the things you'll also notice is that Bonaire also has the largest fucking parrot fish you've ever seen in those areas where algae is rife, because there's now an abundance of food for them to get fat on. Better than that though, now that fertiliser runoff has been reduced because of political efforts to reduce and restrict it's use, the fat parrot fish have been keeping the algae in check sufficiently enough to allow the coral to grow back a bit.
Now there are areas where the fertiliser is causing dangerous algae blooms, such as the gulf of Mexico, but it becomes a wet dream for algae eating pelagics such as whale sharks there too.
So whilst he's right that even if you fix the bleaching issue from heat, you'll still have other problems, the good news is that those problems are WAY easier to fix, and that nature is WAY better at recovering from those problems than it is from severe bleaching. So he's wrong to say if we fix the bleaching issue it wont matter - it will, if we fix that one, everything else is child's play to fix, nature is happy to do most of that for us, with great big fat fucking parrot fish and the like.
Because they have to judge the impacts.
When Trump threatened tariffs against steel/aluminium, Juncker in the EU being the absolute clueless corrupt prat he is made the same claim about waiting to see if it's worth applying sanctions against US brands like Harley Davidson and Levis.
Levis slipped off the list of possible companies a few days later, presumably because someone pointed out to him that sanctioning an American company that employs quite a few people in Europe (it has a factory in Italy, and stores Europe wide) and that shares European values, pays taxes without avoidance/evasions and disagrees with Trump's tarrifs as much as they do was probably going to be a massive own goal, when instead there are plenty of American companies that sell to Europe but don't have quite as high an employment footprint here which would've been way better targets - US agriculture, raw materials, and such would have made better targets for a counter response to steel/aluminium tariffs.
Still, Trump appears to have rowed back on applying the sanctions to Europe, so there's no need for a trade war between the US and Europe now anyway at least. That in itself is an example of a reason to wait though - the threat alone can sometimes be sufficient for action, what if Kaspersky offered to relocate key elements of it's business out of Russia to the US for example? Actually imposing sanctions would almost certainly never trigger that because it would be too late, threats might.
I wouldn't get too focused on it being dead or not, we can do coral reintroduction, and the healthiest and most biodiverse reefs in the world sit just north of Australia in places like Indonesia, so if we can restore things to the point at which they can sustain reef life, there's a reasonable chance it can recover.
There's this kind of mystique around reefs when we see claims about how incredibly biodiverse they are, and how they're home to millions of unique species. That's true, but the diversity doesn't change drastically across large regions - sure different areas do have unique species, but the common species that build the reefs are continent wide, or even global.
I've recently participated in a coral conservation programme in the Caribbean helping to restore the exact same staghorn spoken about in the article. It's a species of coral that's struggling globally, but the good news is that it's also pretty damn easy to repopulate it, because you can just cut bits off, and grow them for a bit in ocean based nurseries, then just plant them with marine grade putty and similar things and within a few years they'll restore an area to it's natural state. The same is true of many corals.
As someone whose dived globally, one thing you start to realise is that for all those millions of species, there are certain ones you see time and time again - from Florida all the way down the chain of Caribbean islands to Curacao and all the way back up the mainland past Costa Rica, Yucatan and Mexico and back to Florida, you'll see the same species time and time again - the same fish, the same turtles, the same morays, the barracudas, the sharks, the puffers, the rays. Cozumel has it's distinct splendid toadfish, St Lucia has "the thing" and so on, but ultimately, it's clear that there are key species that prop up the reefs and sit widespread. If you go over to Asia the same applies, places like Lembeh like to tout their access to things like the Blue Ringed Octopus, and their nudibranchs and stuff, but you can see these all across tropical Asia - Thailand, the Philipines, Indonesia, Australia Some of those species are common all the way up through the Indian ocean into Egypt and Jordan's Red Sea reefs. Even in the colder regions, you see the same species along Norway's coastline as you do around the UK, and around Greenland and Iceland and to North America's northern coasts.
So even if we can't save say, the barrier reef in time to solve the warming problem, if we can at least keep some reefs going we can restore others to productivity. We will lose some localised distinctive species, which may mean we lose unique treatments for cancers and so forth, so it's not cost free for us as a species, but it needn't also be catastrophic for the oceans, because if we do lose the reefs, with lose the hatcheries and nurseries, and if we lose them, we lose 20%+ of the world's global food supply.
Ideally therefore, we want to limit the impact as fast as we can to protect food supplies, and to protect unique species that have led to groundbreaking medical research and other scientific advancement, but if we can't, there's still at least some hope. As with everything though - your backup plan should be just that, your backup plan, because if you don't even bother to try your primary plan, and fall straight through to the backup, then what happens if that fails? The harder we try for plan A - saving the reefs as they are, the easier and more likely it'll be we can succeed with plan B, if we absolutely end up having to fall back on it, so giving up because we might fail most definitely should not be an option we even begin to consider.
"Facebook already stated that they will afford the same EU type level of protection for ALL the user base."
They also said that they wouldn't.
I guess we just have to decide which of their contradictory claims is most likely. Based on this move, I know where I'd hedge my bet.
There's a pretty good explainer on the BBC here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/t...
It's compromised because the data was given to Facebook, therefore the contract exists between the user and Facebook. Some users also gave permission for their data to be given to an app created by Alexsandr Kogan in his capacity as a researcher, but some of the data that Alexsandr Kogan took was from friends of people who gave permission for their data to be given to the app.
There's two issues here, one is a bit of a grey area, the other is clearly illegal, and hence reasonable to class as a breach.
The first issue, the one that's a grey area is the fact that Kogan gathered the data as an academic, but then used it commercially - even if this was hidden in a contract upon use of his app, there's a requirement in most European countries to get explicit consent for use of the data for marketing purposes. He didn't do that, he merely sold the data on for (political) marketing purposes without obtaining explicit consent.
The second issue, that isn't a grey area, and is clearly illegal, is that he harvested data of friends of people who used his app - those people NEVER gave consent for him or his app to gather that data, and this is illegal in all EU countries. There's no clause to allow friends to give consent on your behalf to hand your data away under EU data protection law and their never has been, thus to harvest data not just of the person who signed up to your app, but of their friends as well who didn't sign up, is completely illegal in the EU.
As Kogan is British, and performed these acts in the EU under British implementation of EU law, he's therefore clearly obtained data illegally, and that is why it's reasonable to call it a breach. He took data he had no legal basis to acquire and then profited from selling it on - that's no different to anyone else taking data they have no legal access to and selling it on like many cyber criminals do for a living.
Now I'm not absolving Facebook - the fact Facebook made that friend data available in the first place even though there was no legal way for anyone to ever access or consume it in Europe is in itself something that has been known to be in breach of European law for some time, but the argument goes that it's an American company so it's fine to break European law, even at it's European subsidiaries operating in Europe with European staff. It's not of course, which is why Facebook is in so much shit now. When you have a presence and staff in a country or jurisdiction, then you have to play by their rules, else you get the fuck out, just as Google did when China tried to make them adhere to Chinese authoritarianism rather than have a search presence in the country.
I agree the term "compromised" is classically tied to theft of data through technical exploitation of vulnerabilities, but I don't think it has to be. This is the equivalent of someone leaving a top secret file on a bus accidentally only for someone to steal it - no exploit was required, but the top secret data is still compromised in such a scenario, so I think use of the term is reasonable, even if it's not what we're used to.
As a counterpoint to their crocodile argument, turtles which first arose in the Jurassic period, and are largely herbivorous can recognise and deal with toxic plants (and coral and much other poisonous sea life) and are about as closely related to dinos as crocs are.
And is there an actual definition of what is covered by the right to bare arms or is it entirely arbitrary? Do people using that argument accept that or is there a dependency on hypocrisy?
Curious to know whether it's a question of simply where people draw the line, whether people have a logically consistent argument, or whether the whole argument is based on outright inconsistency. For me which one of those it is really defines the legitimacy of the argument - if someone has to resort to the latter, though they wont explicitly admit it, they've already lost the argument on a logical level. If the GP however is at least consistent then fair play to him, if that's his view that all arms are fair game then so be it, at least he's consistent. If it's a debate simply about where the line should be drawn then that's really fine too as long as such arguments are rational - i.e. what constitutes an acceptable weapon based on how many people it could kill, i.e. some may argue a weapon that can kill 1,000s in one go is unacceptable, but a kill rate of upto 100 or so with a fully automatic rifle is an acceptable price.
That's really what I'm interested in, to understand what the actual reasoning is behind supporting ownership of weapons, and whether people base it on rationality, and if so what they view the acceptable price of ownership of arms as.
Curious to know how far you take your argument, are you suggesting you'd have no qualms with your neighbor building a nuclear weapon, or biological or chemical weapons lab in their house because they're all just inanimate objects even though they could intentionally or accidentally kill you at any moment?
That is, do you apply your logic consistently to everything, that anyone should be able to own anything in the world no matter how high the potential for harm?
"After taking my corporate training on the European privacy law"
Oh dear, it sounds awfully like your employer bought the services of one of those parasite companies that has been fear mongering over GDPR in their training sessions so that they can sell you their other services to help you be GDPR compliant.
I had the misfortune of trying to find out what our obligations were in a few areas under GDPR, I read various articles online all contradicting each other, then I went and just read the legislation. Turns out my obligations are minimal compared to what the shit peddlers are trying to flog with their fear mongering.
If you're not collecting any PII you don't need a dedicated privacy officer. If people send you personal info all you have to do is make sure you delete it after an appropriate amount of time (which most major mail clients support), store it securely, such as in an encrypted mail store (which most major mail clients support), provide people the data you have on them whilst being able to charge them for the privilege and can be as simple as forwarding their e-mails with PII in right back at them whilst making a profit on the effort, and being able to tell people their data has been stolen if you are hacked, which is just a case of loading up your mailbox backup after the fact and bulk mailing everyone in your PII folder to let them know.
This is hardly a burden, this isn't far removed from how the vast majority of people manage their e-mail day to day anyway.
If you're only making $100 a year in Europe it doesn't sound like you actually have a European presence anyway, so if it's that much of a burden it's hardly a loss anyway, so I don't really see the problem. The cost of complying with GDPR for small businesses is clearly negligible though either way beyond the negligible time cost of setting up a few filters and automatic backup in Outlook or whatever - again, something any sane business owner is likely to be doing anyway.
Yes, the reason Private Eye dresses it up in humour is because when the lawsuits come flying they can pass it off as parody - they've probably been sued, and one more cases than almost any other publication.
They effectively use parody laws to expose things the mainstream papers wont touch through fear of being sued.
This is somewhat a factor of our harsh libel laws, because it's easy to sue people for libel and slander even if what they're saying is actually true because our laws favour protection against libel/slander way above free speech, we're probably one of the most imbalanced countries on those laws in that respect..
There's no tax on income under £11500, and only 20% up to £45,000, the national average salary is £26,000, so yes basically anyone earning less than the national average only pays 9% of their income on tax, which is, by definition, half the population. Some of those unsurprisingly live in London.
So the Silicon Valley housing market is like the housing market in much of the rest of the developed world then?
This hardly screams of a crisis, this scenario is basically standard for the UK in general for example, but way better than the situation in London. In some European countries renting is the norm, you're deemed to be quite rich if you can buy.
Having to give up 33% - 50% of your income to pay for a mortgage is hardly shocking, a problem, or any kind of crisis. I don't see how this equates to "Can't afford" - in places like London many people are spending as much or even sometimes more than 80% of their income on rent alone so aren't even accruing any kind of asset as you do with a mortgage.
There are of course other factors that might mean this is worse than it sounds though - at what point in their career are people paying 50%? What are the mortgage terms? Obviously someone paying 50% of their income on a 50 year mortgage towards the end of their career is a little more troubling than someone paying 33% of their income on a 5 year mortgage at their first year at work. I don't know what typical terms look like in the US much less silicon valley so maybe this is a factor? I'd like to think US banks have also learnt the lessons of the financial crisis and to no longer offer absurd mortgages that people will never be able to pay, but perhaps that's wishful thinking?
Well at least the Taliban wont get sued for patent infringement next time they hack predator drone feeds, so there's that.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
Because they too have to set their alarm clocks to wake up an hour earlier, but as they don't have jobs to go to suffer from higher levels of depression as a result and so are more likely to commit suicide.
This is why you see more roadkill around the time the clocks change.
"I think the problem with our discussion is we are talking about two different things. I am talking about economic and human costs of power generation in the United States and you are talking about the entire world. The United States is not subsidizing fossil fuels, even considering the cost of externalities. Some industrially developing nations may be."
Nope, again, let's stick to the science rather than making arbitrary assertions - take your pick of the links I provided or any of the many others Google can find for you - the US is still blowing at minimum hundreds of millions on subsidising fossil fuels through externalising the costs onto members of the public.
I do not believe there's a country in the world right now that doesn't hold fossil fuel power plants to far lower standards than just about every other type of power generation. You can't simply whitewash the problem in the US by saying "India and China are worse".
"The life expectancy in those southeast countries with high air pollution is remarkably still going up and the mortality rates going down... (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2015&locations=CN&start=1960&view=chart)"
You're suggesting correlation implies causation, obviously that's a flagrant affront to scientific argument. I get that you have a vested interest in fossil fuels but come on, let's not go full retard here.
If you want to argue that you feel that it's valid that offloading the costs of fossil fuels through implicit subsidies is acceptable then fine, go for it - you're more than welcome to make this argument. But you can't just simply deny the evidence and start resorting to logical fallacies like implying correlation equals causation to make a false narrative reality - reality isn't something that's in your power to change no matter what you might say, so the fact still stands that fossil fuels have massive hidden costs that are paid indirectly, and hence massive defacto subsidies that dwarf anything given to any other methods of power generation. I've provided more than sufficient evidence to highlight this, and arguing correlation equals causation is somehow a counter to that is very obviously farcical.
"Literal trillions of dollars as calculated by whom? You magnify the "subsidies" of fossil fuels while handwaving over alternatives."
If you're going to persistently refuse to understand the subject whilst insisting you're right regardless I'm going to stop wasting my time. As I said - a simple Google search will find you hundreds of results, so to answer your question in terms of whom, literally every journalist and scientist that's ever objectively studied the subject. As Google is apparently way too confusing for you though, I'll make it easier:
The IMF: https://www.wsj.com/articles/i...
National Academy of Sciences: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10...
Side note on the above: "The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress." - you argue oil is better than coal, it's really not, presumably when you say you like fossil fuels what you really mean is that you're an oil man if you believe what you said.
Forbes Journalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
MIT Economics Prof: http://news.mit.edu/2016/carbo...
World Nuclear Association: http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Union of Concerns Scientists: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-e...
Skeptical Science: https://skepticalscience.com/p...
Cambridge University: https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/bus...
How long do you want me to keep going before you decide to stop being in denial? You can't pretend this is bias or partisanism - as I've said all along, there's a reason why left and right come to the same conclusions when they study this. You cannot pretend the likes of Forbes to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the US government to the IMF, and Cambridge University to the World Nuclear Association are somehow bedfellows that all sit on the exact same end of the political spectrum - they don't, that's nonsense - they all agree because it's true, and if you disagree it's because you're being irrational.
I did as you said regarding earthquakes from dams, and yes, whilst I'm willing to admit I hadn't appreciated quite how harmful some of them had been, I think you still fundamentally fail to understand the differences in scale - we're talking less than a million deaths from them across all time, and yet fossil fuels kill tens (possibly squeezing into hundreds) of millions globally not just in one off incidents, but on an ongoing basis every year. There's still not even a remotely equivalent comparison - the externalities of fossil fuels are still many orders of magnitude higher on healthcare alone - even if you reject the global warming argument, and ignore the geopolitical strife caused by fighting over fossil fuels, you're still seeing orders of magnitude more externalities (and deaths) on fossil fuels based just on the topic of healthcare and nothing more alone. When you factor in the other realities - war, climate change and so forth, it's like comparing a spec of sand to the size of the plant and saying the two are equivalent.
I've Google'd the shit out of trying to find any kind of study showing that other fuels externalities are equivalent to fossil fuels. Guess what? Nothing, whilst it's consistently poss
No, I just want us to pay for fossil fuels what the actual cost is - I want companies that use fossil fuels to pay the full externalities like every other power source has to.
Sure, my energy bill will rocket, but my tax bill will plummet to match due to reduced healthcare costs. The difference is, within short order afterwards my energy bill will also plummet because market competitiveness will force them to fight on price by moving towards cleaner and cheaper energy sources.
We don't even have to do it directly, we could just make the energy companies pay their relative share of the health bill outright and watch it go down as health costs significantly decrease.
What I don't want is to keep paying for it through stealth subsidies that cause countless other problems (health and environmental) in the process, because that's just pointless and stupid. Out of curiosity, why do you want that? why do you prefer to stick with the status quo of paying through stealth subsidies and all the other negative issues associated with the status quo when you could just pay directly? You're paying either way - no one escapes that, it's just a question of how directly you pay, and hence how accurately and quickly the markets can correct the problem, I'm not sure why people take issue with that other than because they either don't understand the issue, have some irrational love of the fossil fuel industry, or just like to be argumentative for the sake of it.
And since when did arguing to allow the market to sort it out rather than fudging things with subsidies become a SJW thing? I'm pretty centrist to be honest, but this is an area where I lean right because I genuinely think it's a problem that can be fixed by the markets, and that is being prevented from being fixed by anti-market defacto state backed subsidies.
But you're arguing that because micro-externalities exist for those sources, that it's okay for fossil fuels to receive literally trillions of dollars in externality subsidies, that's obviously an entirely non-factual argument - the fundamental point is that even if you take all externalities for all fuel sources that oil, and coal are still subsidised so far beyond the others that they're not price competitive. The only reason they are is because the externalities are so large, and yet offloaded - you mention relocation from flooded areas with hydro, and yet people get compensated for this (okay maybe not in dodgy 3rd world backwaters, but we're not talking about fringe cases, we're talking about the general case). Creating lakes doesn't cause earthquakes, fracking for fossil fuels however, does.
"Powerplants in the US that the EPA regulates as far as their emissions limits based on safety considerations for the public? Not really as applicable."
So you don't think somewhere between $500million to $4tn a year (depending on which estimates you trust) is a subsidy that's applicable?
It's still fairly clear you don't actually grasp the scale of fossil fuel externalities, nor do you grasp the effects of the pollutants even with EPA emissions regulations (in fact, even with the much cleaner standards in Western European nations even). As I said - there are more papers than you could read in a reasonable time on Google, go pick some, from disparate sources across the political spectrum to get a balanced view. The idea that the odd of a hydro dam creating a lake that causes an earthquake is a thing that's both as likely to happen and even remotely as costly as hundreds of millions in healthcare costs is a farcical argument and reeks of desperation - you might as well admit outright you're just a massive fan of the the fossil fuel industry and cut the bullshit if you can't even be remotely objective about the topic.
To a degree sure, it's a similar problem with plastics in many ways too which is another challenge.
But you're wrong about the latter, I'm not sure why anyone would pretend nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and so on and so forth just don't exist. Obviously they do, and many countries are hitting greater milestones with them each year - some countries even managing to power themselves entirely from non-fossil fuel sources. Even for plastics we don't have to use fossil fuels, there are alternatives.
But I am a realist, I fully appreciate we wont get rid of them altogether, but the only reason we're not eliminating them at a faster rate than we are is precisely because they're so heavily subsidised to keep their prices artificially low which is exactly the point of my original post.
I fully advocate making them compete on their natural market rate without the subsidies, because that way we'll reach a natural balance of their usage far faster than we are now, and without the complexity of having to give other energy source direct subsidies also just to let them try and compete - that kind of thing is a waste of everyone's time, and it's just a fudge to mask over the real fundamental problem.
I'm not talking about tax breaks, you've failed to understand the problem. In fact, had you Google'd as I'd suggest you'd have seen why you have no idea what you're talking about.
The defacto subsidies in question are the fact that there are effects of the actions of fossil fuel companies that they do not pay for - if a nuclear power company causes cancer because of a radiation leak then they've been consistently held liable for the costs of healthcare stemming from that. Whilst some fossil fuel companies have been held liable for some incidents - i.e. BP for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, there is constant release of harmful pollutants such as way above natural levels of mercury released in both extraction of the fossil fuels by companies like BP and in burning of them for energy by power companies - these too cause cancer but the companies do not pay those costs.
Instead, they rely on useful idiots like you to blindly pay far higher costs for healthcare insurance (or tax if you're in a socialised healthcare country) than you would otherwise have to if they were picking up the tab - so if they cause someone cancer through excessive pollutant release, then unlike the case where the nuclear power companies consistently pick up the tab, instead you pick up the tab for that person's cancer through higher healthcare costs even though they were at fault for causing it.
So people like YOU are subsidising them for paying for the effects of their actions, and in turn they can offer their product cheaper than is otherwise warranted, hence fossil fuels are only competitive because of that defacto subsidy. Again, read up on fossil fuel externalities before commenting further if you want to comment and actually understand what you're talking about. It literally has nothing to do with tax breaks, I don't know why you'd even assume that unless you're just jumping to conclusions and posting without understanding the problem, which I presume is the case.
Pick a different more right wing source if you prefer, or find a more left wing source if that's your flavour, but in case you can't actually be bothered to Google I'm going to offer up this one, because it has a nice simple bullet pointed list highlighting the things that people like you subsidise for fossil fuel industries:
https://skepticalscience.com/p...
Again, this is not a partisan issue, it's not about tax breaks, I'm making the point that you and everyone else in this thread are subsidising fossil fuels in real terms to keep their price artificially low. The only way you avoid it is if you don't pay taxes, don't pay healthcare and so on and so forth.
No, that seems to be a common misconception, until the court rules whether they're legally liable for damages in this court case then we don't know if they've broken the law or not. That's really the point of courts - to decide those things - not random people on Slashdot.
Even if there's no criminal liability that doesn't remove the possibility of civil liability and that still has to be based on the breach of some law, which is really the point of cases like this, to test whether they can be held civilly liable for damages due to negligence or similar.
"That's illegal. Providing gasoline for sale is not. The difference should be obvious, even to NYS politicians, but I guess stupidity has no limits."
Erm, that's exactly the point - we hold nuclear waste to far higher standards even though it kills literally many orders of magnitude less people than fossil fuel pollutants have. The point is precisely that when we discover something is bad we take action - we make things illegal, we seek compensation for damage done through the courts, or do you think the illegality of nuclear waste is some kind of universal declaration generated by nature itself when the universe first popped into existence at the moment of the big bang?
But then, I guess that's the risk you run of shitting verbal diarrhea into a conversation when you post drivel without actually reading the content of the thread in question.
I don't think you understand what's emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, I'll give you a hint, it's not just CO2, and yes, it does contain pollutants. If you think the problem with burning fossil fuels is merely a battle between global warming believers and unbelievers then you're rather missing the point - fossil fuels cause health problems, are finite in nature and have consistently been triggers for war, extraction of them has a higher casualty rate than most other power sources, and yes, they cause substantial environmental damage even outside of the burning of them - mining of them alone is damaging.
There have been literally hundreds of studies on the costs of fossil fuel externalities from countless organisations covering just about every end of the political spectrum, feel free to Google "Fossil fuel externalities" for any number of example papers, articles, and so on. The reason it's not a partisan issue is because even the most right leaning free market libertarians who understand the topic can see the stupidity of trillions of dollars of defacto fossil fuel subsidies as well as even the most left leaning hippy environmentalist.
We're using them out of habit and nothing more, call it politics if you want, it doesn't really matter, it's still a fundamentally good thing to do.
Actually it makes complete sense unless you're just trying to irrationally defend fossil fuel companies.
Consider this, say you use nuclear power to power your home, and you find out after years of research that the nuclear power plant has just been dumping it's nuclear waste in the environment where it's been seeping into water supplies and the food chain and causing massive damage.
The region responsible for governing that area of the environment realises from the research what's going on, we can criticise them for acting to slowly but does that:
a) Mean they should sue you instead because your home was powered by the nuclear power provided by the company dumping the waste in a damaging manner and you knew about it in the news and continued to power your home before the city got round to acting?
b) Make it any less valid to sue the company?
We have double standards when it comes to waste left over by power companies, for some reason we have people like you defending companies that produce and burn coal for power generation who dump the waste into the environment on a continuous daily basis, but if a company dealing with nuclear waste dumps their waste in the environment, absolutely no one defends it and it's treated like the gravest crime known to man, so we hold those companies to drastically higher standards.
Yet, the death toll for people killed from disease caused by fossil fuel burning such as asthma, the impacts of it on the environment in terms of both direct pollution, and longer term affects like global warming, is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions.
So I ask again, why is it so wrong to hold those profiting from it and their companies to account? We'd do it with nuclear waste without question so why not the waste generated by fossil fuel?
Besides, most people are already held accountable for fossil fuel use, my biggest expense in life is far and away the cost of petrol, and the cost of gas and electricity. Everything else - water, phone, internet, food, costs peanuts in comparison to the cost of using fossil fuels, yet I'm given no other practical option. I have no problem with the companies themselves paying up too, because whilst it'll hit me in the pocket by increasing my expenses even more it'll open the door for much cheaper suppliers to storm the market, like wind, solar, and nuclear suppliers (and yes, nuclear IS far cheaper than oil and gas when externalities are taken into account).
By not making fossil fuel companies pay for their total costs (i.e. including externalities - the costs they push onto others through their actions such as increased costs of healthcare insurance/tax) we're basically just subsidising them, and whilst I don't believe in absolute free markets (I believe there needs to be controls) I do believe that the defacto subsidies paid by the tax payer to cover the costs of fossil fuel externalities to the tune of trillions of dollars across the globe shouldn't be a thing - even a small subsidy to prop up an industry that would otherwise fall into the history books due to not being economically viable is too much, let alone the trillions of dollars in subsidies these industries get by offloading their costs onto everyone else and who cause substantial physical harm to millions of people in the process.
Statistically, the benefits the fossil fuel industries are given over anyone else are insane. The freedom from prosecution for harm and pollution, the subsidies they receive, and so on and so forth wouldn't even remotely be entertained by any other industry, there'd be substantial uproar and for good reason. The challenge is because they do receive trillions in subsidies they can afford to PR the shit out of the problem so that people like you think they're not the issue making it a self-sustaining problem. We need to break the cycle and stop giving these companies a free ride, they need to compete in the free market like everyone else, and when they do, they'll lose, because everyone else is far cheaper and cleane