> G7 group of countries has issued a pledge that they will phase out fossil fuels by the end of this century.
So we're going to try to shut down the global economy for the rest of the century. Obama's insanity is catching. I would've thought a bunch of countries shutting down all of their nuclear power plants would be a bit more careful about announcing plans to return the world to feudalism, grinding poverty, a male life expectancy in the 30's and a female one in the high teens. Yay for progress...
...why did the IPCC muck with it's own data? If there IS no hiatus, then their data would have SHOWED warming, wouldn't it? Why would they doctor data that backed up their assertion?
And where, exactly, does YOUR new data come from? You, yourselves, point out the ship-based intake temperatures are now sampled far more than bouy-based ones and you admit they skew higher - understandably so as such measurements will always fall prey to differences in designs for the water inlets, and you make no mention of how you correct for this over the various classes of ships the data is coming from. You then use this same observation to contradict every other study but the IPCC, which was PROVEN to be cooking its numbers with the microwave set to 11? How does this prove SQUAT? The American database is corroded with closings of more remote monitoring stations and skew hot because of the heat island effect. How, exactly, are you compensating for that? Answer: you still aren't - yet your study must be either using no land-based data at all (and so you're comparing apples and peanuts) or you are using bad data (comparing apples with bad apples) - and even THAT is giving you the benefit of the doubt. Face it, the climate changers have been outed as serial liars, you have some serious backfilling to do - and more every time Obama opens his lying mouth!
And, ABOUT that, in the interest of full disclosure, how many of the people in THIS study are Democrats, have given money to Democrats, or are working for companies like Solyndra that depend on Democrat handouts? Because I think you're just another climate-change alarmist sock puppet.
In short, you have made an extraordinary claim in defiance of twenty years of established science, but you have NOT shown extraordinarily convincing data, just more of the usual.
In a school system whose policies literally cannot differentiate between an actual loaded and cocked gun and a half-eaten pop-tart, do we really expect these people to be smart enough to tell when a BLASTER is fake? I mean, ASIDE from the fact that ALL blasters are fake? Come ON, really!
To even BEGIN doing this we would first have to teach the "authorities" the difference between "fact" and "fiction" which we already KNOW is beyond their poor mental capabilities!
While I certainly agree with (both) the basic premises, I would also point out that as a culture, we have completely UNDERcriminalized reprehensible behavior from far too many people whose misbehavior represents a significant national threat. Has what Hastert has done so much worse than what Hillary did? Why does he get the full flame-thrower treatment and she, still standing amongst the slowly dissipating smoke from her crime of (at least) destroying 30,000 government documents which may or may not have been proof of criminal actions is lauded as the first female president-in-waiting? Could it be because her husband helped set these new standards of so-what-everybody-does-it thinking that now excuse the administration of a man who has done more harm to this country than any external enemy could have ever hoped to inflict?
We aren't really OVERcriminalizing. We simply aren't bothering to apply consistent standards to determine whether a given behavior should be taken as criminal.
> we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction
Don't even think it. Every time Mickey Mouse approaches public domainhood, Disney lays more money on Congress and gets an extension, and they will certainly continue to do so, and Congress is certain to continue to do so. Copyrights are effectively permanent. That's what Eldredge was all about.
Ron Paul did not propose to "end student loans." He proposed to break the government monopoly on student loans that was put in by Obamacare. He suggests - and he is quite right in doing so - we return to having banks loan students the money. Not the government. The government monopoly is new and was put in place to extort additional funds from young people in order to help pay for vast boondoggle and government-employee program known as Obamacare.
> The only good reason to repeal ObawneyCare > would be to replace it with what it should have been > from the outset - a true, fair, comprehensive single > payer system.
Oh, yes, that worked out real well for all the countries that tried it. Would you like to watch your kid choke to death for lack of a tracheotomy that would at least ease the kid's passing? A tracheotomy is a simple, trivial, cheap procedure that the Canadian bureaucracy refused a dying child because they decided the kid's life wasn't worth it. The parents had to find an American hospital to do the procedure, maybe not significantly extending his life but at least sparing him a more gruesome passing. Way to go, Single Payer.
"Single Payer" is code for "government run", and the government does too much too badly already. That is the nature of the beast. It can't be changed.
This idiot cannot get rid of his hard-on for more and more taxes. After whacking in the trillion and a half for Obamacare, now he wants another 2 trillion on top of that - and then he wonders why businesses are scared to expand?
Oh - and let me get this straight - the Democrats are going to "save Medicare" - which is already drastically underpaying doctors more than any other insurance - by taking more money out of it? That will save it for Seniors? And this $247 billion more in addition to the half trillion he has already hacked out of it for Obamacare? That's how the Democrats are going to save us from the Evil Republicans? This is what we need saving from!
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it!"
Laffer must be laughing in his grave watching Keynes spin in the next plot over.
> Now glaciologists are left trying to figure out how not > understate the importance of the extent glacial ice > melt, while at the same time correcting the error.
In other and simpler words - how to continue claiming global warming is proven in spite of yet another failure of truth on the part of the GW believers.
If an email leak showed you were doctoring your data about your planetary discoveries like the UNCC did, we'd thereafter doubt you too. If you were closing certain telescopes that didn't support your diamond planet theory expecting everyone to accept your skewed data like Nasa did with their rural data collection sites, we'd not just doubt you, you'd be convicted of fraud in public opinion - just like the climate "researchers" are.
If you were proposing to actually mine the planet, we'd assume you ARE a climate "researcher" trying to glom onto more funds.
I, too, eventually parted with my Byte and CC collection and bitterly regret it. To get my nostalgia fix, I use emulators. I have my Apple II, IIgs, MacSE (whose physical implementation remains in my attic), a Lisa (whose historical importance is very high, IMHO), an HP85, and IBM 1130 (the first machine I ever used in college), various Commodore machines including the C64, a Lilith (yes, I did do professional work on a Lilith, once), Digi-Comp I and II emulators and, of course, my Olivetti Programma 101 emulator of the first computer I ever touched, that I wrote myself. Oh, yeah - the Apple II emulators run Apple Pascal, and I have a CPM emulator running V4 of the UCSD System. How's all that score on the old nostalgia meter?
...just how alien these "people" really are. This is a liberal thing, it's something they've wanted to do for decades. Why don't people listen to them before electing them and realize just what they are voting for? I notice most people here think this is stupid, but it's part and parcel of the liberal mindset of fascist control over every aspect of human life - and I predict this post will be modded down "troll".
Apollo Computer was shipping the 64-bit PRISM workstation when they were bought by HP. HP killed the PRISM because they were going to do their own 64-bit architecture.
Digital was shipping the 64 bit Alpha machine when they were bought by Compaq which was then bought by HP. HP killed the Alpha because they were committing to Intel's Itanium.
So what happens? HP, the owner of two, market-proven, debugged and viable 64 bit architectures finds itself backing the loser, having killed both of the projects they bought and paid for.
And so, what is HP's 64 bit architecture in the end? The x86_64.
You've really got to wonder what kind of idiots were running the company.
The existing global warming people have vested interests in global warming and they have proved they cannot be taken seriously. The UNCC was caught fudging the data. That was bad enough. Their whitewash absolving the guilty of doing so does not make their data any more useful. Nasa was also caught screwing with their data, they were closing monitoring sites farther from urban areas, thereby allowing the heat island effect to skew their raw data. There is NO evidence of global warming, not one set of raw data is available to even suggest it is so. All of it comes from people whose methodology is either suspect (Nasa) or outright fabricated (UNCC). If you want to assert global warming credibly you need to amass the data anew and make the raw data available to peer review. If it's real, I'll be the first to support basing public policy on it. But I have reviewed both of the data sets used to claim global warming and neither of them should be trusted. It isn't science. It's politics. And money. Money for studies and equipment "proving" something people want to be true to justify taking resources away from others.
Global warming is not just a misunderstanding. It's a lie, an organized and deliberate lie by people with a proven vested interest in lying about it.
> You seem to imply that renewable energy cannot possibly provide humanity with enough energy
"Enough" energy? How much is "enough" energy? I assert that the more energy is available, regardless of source, the better life is for everyone. When you use the word "enough" you are stating unequivocally that there is some level of energy that is "enough" by your standard. And you have no such right.
> The only roadblock I see regarding renewable energy is the one of price.
Need I point out that price is precisely the limiting factor in making more energy available to everyone? Blase' assertions that price should not be a factor is stupid, the more you drive up the price, the lower the standard of living becomes. QED. Desperate measures to push up the prices of available energy in order to make it less competitive with renewable energy simply reduce the standard of living. That doesn't bother rich people, only "normal" ones.
> if you end up concluding that renewables are indeed more expensive, I would still say so what?
And I say you are asserting that lowering the standard of living of others is acceptable, and I say that it is not. If renewables are so great, let them compete on an even footing.
> Also the Iraq War for instance was and still is extremely expensive and still the US keeps on with it;
What does that have to do with anything? There was never a choice between spending that money on energy or on war. The war was justified on the basis of Hussein having weapons of mass destruction (satellite photos of thousands of dead Kurds prove that beyond any shadow of doubt) and on his behavior showing that he still did have such weapons - a subterfuge he admitted later was deliberate. The war in Libya has much the same justification, only Muamar hasn't killed as many of his own people and it is known he has no weapons of mass destruction, yet you don't bother to bring up that latest war.
>You don't believe in renewable energy and you have solid, compelling arguments that it is indeed a dead end - not "it's more expensive", I mean really, it's physically impossible;
Fact: The UNCC has completely destroyed the credibility of climate change. The original revelation of jiggering the data was bad enough, the whitewash that followed absolving the people from jiggering the data made them unsupportable. There IS NO EVIDENCE of global warming. All we have is a pile of data we know was manipulated by believers in climate change.
Fact: windmills destroy birds and are unsightly.
Fact: Dams can destroy entire ecosystems in their controlled rivers.
Fact: Solar energy requires vast areas for collection.
Witness the Massachusetts liberal fighting tooth and nail to stop their wind farm proposal. Even when we are talking truly "renewable" liberals are against new sources of energy. Your "renewable" bleating is a red herring.
> Or you don't believe in renewable energy by convenience and then you're really a motherfucking, asshole licking disgusting pile of stinking crap.
Oh, yes, the inevitable liberal end product. Rage, hatred, anger, and ad hominem attack when they have no real answer to the issue. You're a hater venting your spleen and you regard other people as below you and worthy of being manipulated or outright controlled. You have zero interest in improving life for anyone.
Food prices are rising because the gov't wants them to. We have diverted one of our major cereal crops - corn - to energy production. Low-value energy production, less energy produced than was consumed producing it in the first place. Net result: higher energy costs. Taxes and regulations on producing energy also raise energy costs. Energy costs drive the entire economy. It governs how food is produced, how far it can travel, what it costs when it gets there. So long as it is the official policy of the gov't that energy should cost more, the price of food will rise.
We have less farmland under cultivation than we've had in a generation. Yet we produce far more food. We use tax money to put base prices under many foods to keep them from becoming too cheap. We pay farmers NOT to produce food. Both of these make food more expensive.
Finally, despite all the foregoing, food is still produced in massive quantities, and continually drops in percentage of budgets dedicated to it. People starve now not because there is no food, but because it is the policy of some gov't - usually their own - that they DO starve. Even at the height of the last Ethiopian famine, donated food rotted at the docks because the Ethiopian gov't didn't want it used to feed people who didn't support it - which was most people.
Starvation is not caused by lack of resources. It is caused by policy. It is that simple. If we were "running out of resources" then the price of those resources would be climbing. Well, they are - but not because of the market, because of gov't policy. We tax, we regulate, we intervene constantly in favor of pushing up the price of every conceivable commodity. It is our only consistent policy, and it works very well. Yet the reserves of any resource you can mention - oil, coal, metals, rare earths, anything - are constantly expanding because higher prices make practical extraction of these resources from places not practical before. Our response to this is to ban access to these resources, thereby driving up the price of resources.
The world does not have a shortage of resources. It does not have too many people. What it has is too little freedom and too much gov't control. Governments do not make things more efficient, they do not produce wealth or resources. They are far less efficient than the free market, and they burn vast quantities of wealth and resources and produce nothing of profit for having squandered them. Case in point: the National Recovery and Reinvestment Act - which managed to prop up local gov't jobs using federal money. Jobs that are vanishing now that the money is gone. No new roads. No new sources of energy, no new sources of wealth have been created or developed. We haven't even seen a mild reduction in the rate of crumbling of our national infrastructure. That money - that wealth - a trillion dollars of it - simply vanished like so much smoke. Yet still we will pay for it - with interest - and assuming we eventually do pay it off - and that is by no means certain - it will cost far more than the trillion dollars spent to retire the debt. And still no wealth will be produced, and prices will rise as the debt and the cost to maintain it creeps into the marketplace, and again, everything - including food - becomes more expensive.
We have to work hard to create this much want and misery. It isn't easy or cheap to starve this many people. But, alas, it's the one thing our gov't is good at.
You believe in global warming and therefore support nuclear power.
You don't believe in global warming and don't believe in nuclear power.
You do believe in global warming, and don't believe in nuclear power - thereby qualifying you as a brainless, back-to-the-mud-hut Luddite nitwit whose views no reasonable human being should listen to.
Of course, there is a tiny minority of a fourth position - those who don't believe in global warming and do believe in nuclear power - but no one ever listens to them. Economic growth, improved medicine, better life for all of Earth's billions, all the good things we know are tied to increased energy production...who wants that kind of crap?
Slashdot Mirror
> G7 group of countries has issued a pledge that they will phase out fossil fuels by the end of this century.
So we're going to try to shut down the global economy for the rest of the century. Obama's insanity is catching. I would've thought a bunch of countries shutting down all of their nuclear power plants would be a bit more careful about announcing plans to return the world to feudalism, grinding poverty, a male life expectancy in the 30's and a female one in the high teens. Yay for progress...
Why is the polar ice coverage greater now than at any previous time in the satellite-observation era?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
> I personally would rather not have New York State under a kilometer of ice.
Personally I find that idea very appealing. Between that and the San Andreas fault we might be able to make some REAL progress.
...why did the IPCC muck with it's own data? If there IS no hiatus, then their data would have SHOWED warming, wouldn't it? Why would they doctor data that backed up their assertion?
And where, exactly, does YOUR new data come from? You, yourselves, point out the ship-based intake temperatures are now sampled far more than bouy-based ones and you admit they skew higher - understandably so as such measurements will always fall prey to differences in designs for the water inlets, and you make no mention of how you correct for this over the various classes of ships the data is coming from. You then use this same observation to contradict every other study but the IPCC, which was PROVEN to be cooking its numbers with the microwave set to 11? How does this prove SQUAT? The American database is corroded with closings of more remote monitoring stations and skew hot because of the heat island effect. How, exactly, are you compensating for that? Answer: you still aren't - yet your study must be either using no land-based data at all (and so you're comparing apples and peanuts) or you are using bad data (comparing apples with bad apples) - and even THAT is giving you the benefit of the doubt. Face it, the climate changers have been outed as serial liars, you have some serious backfilling to do - and more every time Obama opens his lying mouth!
And, ABOUT that, in the interest of full disclosure, how many of the people in THIS study are Democrats, have given money to Democrats, or are working for companies like Solyndra that depend on Democrat handouts? Because I think you're just another climate-change alarmist sock puppet.
In short, you have made an extraordinary claim in defiance of twenty years of established science, but you have NOT shown extraordinarily convincing data, just more of the usual.
In a school system whose policies literally cannot differentiate between an actual loaded and cocked gun and a half-eaten pop-tart, do we really expect these people to be smart enough to tell when a BLASTER is fake? I mean, ASIDE from the fact that ALL blasters are fake? Come ON, really!
http://gawker.com/5988299/scho...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex...
To even BEGIN doing this we would first have to teach the "authorities" the difference between "fact" and "fiction" which we already KNOW is beyond their poor mental capabilities!
While I certainly agree with (both) the basic premises, I would also point out that
as a culture, we have completely UNDERcriminalized reprehensible behavior from
far too many people whose misbehavior represents a significant national threat. Has
what Hastert has done so much worse than what Hillary did? Why does he get the
full flame-thrower treatment and she, still standing amongst the slowly dissipating
smoke from her crime of (at least) destroying 30,000 government documents which
may or may not have been proof of criminal actions is lauded as the first female
president-in-waiting? Could it be because her husband helped set these new standards
of so-what-everybody-does-it thinking that now excuse the administration of a man who
has done more harm to this country than any external enemy could have ever hoped to
inflict?
We aren't really OVERcriminalizing. We simply aren't bothering to apply consistent
standards to determine whether a given behavior should be taken as criminal.
Sorry, but after the watching the news today I can't help but feel that we'd be better off without the President OR Congress.
That's actually part of a series:
Wizard's Bane
The Wizardry Compiled
The Wizardry Cursed
The Wizardry Consulted
The Wizardry Quested
Cursed and Consulted
> we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction
Don't even think it. Every time Mickey Mouse approaches public domainhood, Disney lays more money on Congress and gets an extension, and they will certainly continue to do so, and Congress is certain to continue to do so. Copyrights are effectively permanent. That's what Eldredge was all about.
Ron Paul did not propose to "end student loans." He proposed to break the government monopoly on student loans that was put in by Obamacare. He suggests - and he is quite right in doing so - we return to having banks loan students the money. Not the government. The government monopoly is new and was put in place to extort additional funds from young people in order to help pay for vast boondoggle and government-employee program known as Obamacare.
> The only good reason to repeal ObawneyCare
> would be to replace it with what it should have been
> from the outset - a true, fair, comprehensive single
> payer system.
Oh, yes, that worked out real well for all the countries that tried it. Would you like to watch your kid choke to death for lack of a tracheotomy that would at least ease the kid's passing? A tracheotomy is a simple, trivial, cheap procedure that the Canadian bureaucracy refused a dying child because they decided the kid's life wasn't worth it. The parents had to find an American hospital to do the procedure, maybe not significantly extending his life but at least sparing him a more gruesome passing. Way to go, Single Payer.
"Single Payer" is code for "government run", and the government does too much too badly already. That is the nature of the beast. It can't be changed.
This idiot cannot get rid of his hard-on for more and more taxes. After whacking in the trillion and a half for Obamacare, now he wants another 2 trillion on top of that - and then he wonders why businesses are scared to expand?
Oh - and let me get this straight - the Democrats are going to "save Medicare" - which is already drastically underpaying doctors more than any other insurance - by taking more money out of it? That will save it for Seniors? And this $247 billion more in addition to the half trillion he has already hacked out of it for Obamacare? That's how the Democrats are going to save us from the Evil Republicans? This is what we need saving from!
"We had to destroy the village in order to save it!"
Laffer must be laughing in his grave watching Keynes spin in the next plot over.
> Now glaciologists are left trying to figure out how not
> understate the importance of the extent glacial ice
> melt, while at the same time correcting the error.
In other and simpler words - how to continue claiming global warming is proven in spite of yet another failure of truth on the part of the GW believers.
If an email leak showed you were doctoring your data about your planetary discoveries like the UNCC did, we'd thereafter doubt you too. If you were closing certain telescopes that didn't support your diamond planet theory expecting everyone to accept your skewed data like Nasa did with their rural data collection sites, we'd not just doubt you, you'd be convicted of fraud in public opinion - just like the climate "researchers" are.
If you were proposing to actually mine the planet, we'd assume you ARE a climate "researcher" trying to glom onto more funds.
...these objects represent some of the "dark matter" we are searching for?
I, too, eventually parted with my Byte and CC collection and bitterly regret it. To get my nostalgia fix, I use emulators. I have my Apple II, IIgs, MacSE (whose physical implementation remains in my attic), a Lisa (whose historical importance is very high, IMHO), an HP85, and IBM 1130 (the first machine I ever used in college), various Commodore machines including the C64, a Lilith (yes, I did do professional work on a Lilith, once), Digi-Comp I and II emulators and, of course, my Olivetti Programma 101 emulator of the first computer I ever touched, that I wrote myself. Oh, yeah - the Apple II emulators run Apple Pascal, and I have a CPM emulator running V4 of the UCSD System. How's all that score on the old nostalgia meter?
> I wonder what the toilet version of The Blue Screen of Death is.
The Brown Screen of Death.
...of the old joke about the worm looking out the bird's ass as they fly high in the sky...
"You wouldn't shit me, would ya?"
...just how alien these "people" really are. This is a liberal thing, it's something they've wanted to do for decades. Why don't people listen to them before electing them and realize just what they are voting for? I notice most people here think this is stupid, but it's part and parcel of the liberal mindset of fascist control over every aspect of human life - and I predict this post will be modded down "troll".
Apollo Computer was shipping the 64-bit PRISM workstation when they were bought by HP. HP killed the PRISM because they were going to do their own 64-bit architecture.
Digital was shipping the 64 bit Alpha machine when they were bought by Compaq which was then bought by HP. HP killed the Alpha because they were committing to Intel's Itanium.
So what happens? HP, the owner of two, market-proven, debugged and viable 64 bit architectures finds itself backing the loser, having killed both of the projects they bought and paid for.
And so, what is HP's 64 bit architecture in the end? The x86_64.
You've really got to wonder what kind of idiots were running the company.
The existing global warming people have vested interests in global warming and they have proved they cannot be taken seriously. The UNCC was caught fudging the data. That was bad enough. Their whitewash absolving the guilty of doing so does not make their data any more useful. Nasa was also caught screwing with their data, they were closing monitoring sites farther from urban areas, thereby allowing the heat island effect to skew their raw data. There is NO evidence of global warming, not one set of raw data is available to even suggest it is so. All of it comes from people whose methodology is either suspect (Nasa) or outright fabricated (UNCC). If you want to assert global warming credibly you need to amass the data anew and make the raw data available to peer review. If it's real, I'll be the first to support basing public policy on it. But I have reviewed both of the data sets used to claim global warming and neither of them should be trusted. It isn't science. It's politics. And money. Money for studies and equipment "proving" something people want to be true to justify taking resources away from others.
Global warming is not just a misunderstanding. It's a lie, an organized and deliberate lie by people with a proven vested interest in lying about it.
> You seem to imply that renewable energy cannot possibly provide humanity with enough energy
"Enough" energy? How much is "enough" energy? I assert that the more energy is available, regardless of source, the better life is for everyone. When you use the word "enough" you are stating unequivocally that there is some level of energy that is "enough" by your standard. And you have no such right.
> The only roadblock I see regarding renewable energy is the one of price.
Need I point out that price is precisely the limiting factor in making more energy available to everyone?
Blase' assertions that price should not be a factor is stupid, the more you drive up the price, the lower the standard of living becomes. QED. Desperate measures to push up the prices of available energy in order to make it less competitive with renewable energy simply reduce the standard of living. That doesn't bother rich people, only "normal" ones.
> if you end up concluding that renewables are indeed more expensive, I would still say so what?
And I say you are asserting that lowering the standard of living of others is acceptable, and I say that it is not. If renewables are so great, let them compete on an even footing.
> Also the Iraq War for instance was and still is
extremely expensive and still the US keeps on with it;
What does that have to do with anything? There was never a choice between spending that money on energy or on war. The war was justified on the basis of Hussein having weapons of mass destruction (satellite photos of thousands of dead Kurds prove that beyond any shadow of doubt) and on his behavior showing that he still did have such weapons - a subterfuge he admitted later was deliberate. The war in Libya has much the same justification, only Muamar hasn't killed as many of his own people and it is known he has no weapons of mass destruction, yet you don't bother to bring up that latest war.
>You don't believe in renewable energy and you have solid, compelling arguments that it is indeed a dead end - not "it's more expensive", I mean really, it's physically impossible;
Fact: The UNCC has completely destroyed the credibility of climate change. The original revelation of jiggering the data was bad enough, the whitewash that followed absolving the people from jiggering the data made them unsupportable. There IS NO EVIDENCE of global warming. All we have is a pile of data we know was manipulated by believers in climate change.
Fact: windmills destroy birds and are unsightly.
Fact: Dams can destroy entire ecosystems in their controlled rivers.
Fact: Solar energy requires vast areas for collection.
Witness the Massachusetts liberal fighting tooth and nail to stop their wind farm proposal. Even when we are talking truly "renewable" liberals are against new sources of energy. Your "renewable" bleating is a red herring.
> Or you don't believe in renewable energy by convenience and then you're really a motherfucking, asshole licking disgusting pile of stinking crap.
Oh, yes, the inevitable liberal end product. Rage, hatred, anger, and ad hominem attack when they have no real answer to the issue. You're a hater venting your spleen and you regard other people as below you and worthy of being manipulated or outright controlled. You have zero interest in improving life for anyone.
Food prices are rising because the gov't wants them to. We have diverted one of our major cereal crops - corn - to energy production. Low-value energy production, less energy produced than was consumed producing it in the first place. Net result: higher energy costs. Taxes and regulations on producing energy also raise energy costs. Energy costs drive the entire economy. It governs how food is produced, how far it can travel, what it costs when it gets there. So long as it is the official policy of the gov't that energy should cost more, the price of food will rise.
We have less farmland under cultivation than we've had in a generation. Yet we produce far more food. We use tax money to put base prices under many foods to keep them from becoming too cheap. We pay farmers NOT to produce food. Both of these make food more expensive.
Finally, despite all the foregoing, food is still produced in massive quantities, and continually drops in percentage of budgets dedicated to it. People starve now not because there is no food, but because it is the policy of some gov't - usually their own - that they DO starve. Even at the height of the last Ethiopian famine, donated food rotted at the docks because the Ethiopian gov't didn't want it used to feed people who didn't support it - which was most people.
Starvation is not caused by lack of resources. It is caused by policy. It is that simple. If we were "running out of resources" then the price of those resources would be climbing. Well, they are - but not because of the market, because of gov't policy. We tax, we regulate, we intervene constantly in favor of pushing up the price of every conceivable commodity. It is our only consistent policy, and it works very well. Yet the reserves of any resource you can mention - oil, coal, metals, rare earths, anything - are constantly expanding because higher prices make practical extraction of these resources from places not practical before. Our response to this is to ban access to these resources, thereby driving up the price of resources.
The world does not have a shortage of resources. It does not have too many people. What it has is too little freedom and too much gov't control. Governments do not make things more efficient, they do not produce wealth or resources. They are far less efficient than the free market, and they burn vast quantities of wealth and resources and produce nothing of profit for having squandered them. Case in point: the National Recovery and Reinvestment Act - which managed to prop up local gov't jobs using federal money. Jobs that are vanishing now that the money is gone. No new roads. No new sources of energy, no new sources of wealth have been created or developed. We haven't even seen a mild reduction in the rate of crumbling of our national infrastructure. That money - that wealth - a trillion dollars of it - simply vanished like so much smoke. Yet still we will pay for it - with interest - and assuming we eventually do pay it off - and that is by no means certain - it will cost far more than the trillion dollars spent to retire the debt. And still no wealth will be produced, and prices will rise as the debt and the cost to maintain it creeps into the marketplace, and again, everything - including food - becomes more expensive.
We have to work hard to create this much want and misery. It isn't easy or cheap to starve this many people. But, alas, it's the one thing our gov't is good at.
There are only three positions here:
You believe in global warming and therefore support nuclear power.
You don't believe in global warming and don't believe in nuclear power.
You do believe in global warming, and don't believe in nuclear power - thereby qualifying you as a brainless, back-to-the-mud-hut Luddite nitwit whose views no reasonable human being should listen to.
Of course, there is a tiny minority of a fourth position - those who don't believe in global warming and do believe in nuclear power - but no one ever listens to them. Economic growth, improved medicine, better life for all of Earth's billions, all the good things we know are tied to increased energy production...who wants that kind of crap?
...of an economic basket case already, they can't think of a thing to do but kill some more of their tax base. Good thinking, there.