What shouldn't be done...about climate change

[Fragile Bird]

The person making better batteries plans to move to Mars, remember?

[Luzifer's right hand]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

The person making better batteries plans to move to Mars, remember?

Only because he does not want to watch the rest of humanity die from bunkers and guarded compounds like the rest of the billionaires who are young enough to plan for the fututre. Earth will be more habitable than Mars even if the worst happens unless it goes full Venus. You just have to watch most of humanity perish. Most other lifeforms will perish even before that and it is already happening.

[Altherion]

13 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Thing is, you also need to actually read the study. I don't think it says what you think it says.

I read it. It does not say that the areas become uninhabitable, it says that the human niche will move away from the equator. In fact, it's very cautious and does not even definitively say that there will be mass migration.

13 hours ago, Rippounet said:

People are "working" on the thawing of the permafrost or on the consequence of ice melting on Earth's albedo?

You can't stop the melting, but you can try to capture the gases. As Fragile Bird said, this is what Canada is trying to do.

13 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Of course I care. I'm saying it's not enough, that it's too little, too late. That doesn't mean we shouldn't work on that, quite the contrary.

The idea that we can go through this without changing our way of life, "without disrupting everyone's lives" is absurd, a lie for people selfish or stupid enough to be that gullible, "useful idiots" who won't question the current order too much. Of course it's going to disrupt everybody's lives, it already is! The only question is how. Either we understand what's happening and try to have some say in the decisions that are taken, or the way it affects us will be decided for us. No electric car will help once the shit hits the fan.

The problem is not that people are not questioning the current order, it's that the current order is extremely robust and the consequences of global warming are not yet severe enough to disrupt it (by the time they're severe enough, it will be way, way too late to do anything). Worse, this order is terrible at confronting truly global problems (i.e. ones that require changes from almost every human being everywhere on the planet) and the problem in this case (i.e. energy usage) is severe. In fact, even before the pandemic and even in relatively wealthy countries, the most basic measures such as (most famously) slightly increasing the fuel tax led to riots.

Thus, it becomes a question of how we can deal with this within the current order... and the only way out is technology. Or in other words, you'd better hope that the electric cars help because the governments of the world surely won't.

5 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

The person making better batteries plans to move to Mars, remember?

Nobody who has even briefly looked at the conditions on Mars hopes to use it as an escape plan. Even under the most apocalyptic scenarios (whether global warming run amok or nuclear winter), Earth is still orders of magnitude more habitable than Mars or than any other place in the solar system. Mars being an alternative is a long term project requiring technology far beyond what we have now as well as centuries of time.

[Rippounet]

22 minutes ago, Altherion said:

I read it. It does not say that the areas become uninhabitable, it says that the human niche will move away from the equator. In fact, it's very cautious and does not even definitively say that there will be mass migration.

"[...] in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara."

Yes, the scientists are cautious. But unless you consider the middle of the Sahara to be inhabitable, or having to live there to be merely "uncomfortable," the article is pretty fucking explicit.
And when you consider that I posted another study explaining that heat waves will become increasingly deadly...

But generally speaking, that's kind of your problem here, which amounts to denial. Taken independently, none of these studies/facts is particularly alarming. It's when you start taking them together that the big picture emerges.
And of course, if you don't want to see it, you will not.

*shrugs*
Ignorance is bliss, and playing the role of Cassandra is a pain.

22 minutes ago, Altherion said:

You can't stop the melting, but you can try to capture the gases. As Fragile Bird said, this is what Canada is trying to do.

And as I said, as far as I know, this technology isn't actually carbon negative yet.

If it were, I think we'd know more about it.

That being said, there is indeed hope in that direction, but there still remains the fact that such technology requires massive investment, and that the political will isn't here just yet. You'd need at least as many of these carbon-sucking machines as we have McDonald's, and then you'd still have to deal with methane.

22 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Thus, it becomes a question of how we can deal with this within the current order... and the only way out is technology.

You're basically repeating a variation of "there is no alternative."

My entire point is that this is not going to happen, because climate change is accelerating faster than we are implementing solutions. Even when the technology works, the "market" isn't favoring it enough. We're the white rabbit, always late.
Of course, that's because the "market" is a fiction in the sense that while "market forces" are real, they are shaped by political processes and ideologies. The "market" as we know it is in fact the latest religion justifying and reinforcing the current social order.

But a simpler way of putting it is that the current order is the problem. There will be no solution within it, because the greed and short-sightedness that are at the core of the system will counter-balance any technology that we develop. For instance, as the Artic Sea ice melts, oil rigs are moving in. That's because the problem isn't the "market" but the people deciding how the "market" works. Though of course, we're all guilty of something.

As long as people will believe we have to work within the current order we're fucked. Unfortunately that's fact... even without climate change. Climate change just makes it truly dystopian.

 

[Fragile Bird]

@Rippounet

Here's a fairly recent article describing the current situation in Canada regarding cabon capture technology. The biggest projects are capture and storage (ie burial) ones. It's very expensive and more than a billion has been spent in Alberta alone. The article says there are 18 large-scale facilities in operation around the world, 5 under construction and 20 projects in various stages of development. Four of them are in Canada, one is in operation already, 3 are being built, plus there are various test operations going on. The problem is wind and solar projects cost $30 per tonne of carbon, capture is costing $45 to $95 a tonne (US), and direct air capture will likely cost $100 to $150 a tonne. These costs are the reason why you aren't seeing projects in every city around the world, but we may reach a point where they have to be built, so people are going ahead with their plans and designs.

The article has a picture of one of the direct air capture units I remember seeing in that documentary show I mentioned.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/carbon-capture-faq-1.5250140

I was looking for the Nature of Things episode when I found this piece from CNBC, about the company mentioned in the article in Squamish, BC with the direct air capture unit.

It points out the issues quite well, and the opposition points.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHX9pmQ6m_s

 

[felice]

2 hours ago, Altherion said:

I read it. It does not say that the areas become uninhabitable, it says that the human niche will move away from the equator.

What do you think "the human niche will move away from the equator" means?

[The Anti-Targ]

@Rippounet I would suggest never asking if celebrities are being over-dramatic, the answer is invariably yes.

The cost of batteries is the outcome of a climate solution being left to the market. The market has already proven that battery solutions (cars, electricity storage) can be a winner that govts can pick. So really if we are serious about using these solutions govts should not wait for the market to bring costs down, they should be intervening in the market and providing heavy subsidies to get these solutions into the hands of people and business who will use them. Ideally production would be as low emission as possible to maximise the climate change benefit, but lifetime emissions for pretty much all battery uses provides a net reduction in emissions.

To balance the large amount of spending needed to make battery solutions affordable and adoptable, once the infrastructures are in place for easy adoption govt should tax the shit out of the CO2 emitting alternatives. 

[karaddin]

7 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Yes, the scientists are cautious. But unless you consider the middle of the Sahara to be inhabitable, or having to live there to be merely "uncomfortable," the article is pretty fucking explicit.
And when you consider that I posted another study explaining that heat waves will become increasingly deadly...

But generally speaking, that's kind of your problem here, which amounts to denial. Taken independently, none of these studies/facts is particularly alarming. It's when you start taking them together that the big picture emerges.
And of course, if you don't want to see it, you will not.

Its a wonderful catch 22 they're caught in - bluntly articulate the situation and people like Altherion will dismiss everything they say as being alarmist and absurd, phrase it in a conservative way to avoid being dismissed as alarmist and those very same people will do everything they can to minimise the obvious implications of what is being said. I admire the effort you're putting in here and hope you're convincing some other people reading the thread because the person you're directly talking to isn't in this argument in good faith and isn't going to be convinced.

[Altherion]

20 hours ago, Rippounet said:

You're basically repeating a variation of "there is no alternative."

My entire point is that this is not going to happen, because climate change is accelerating faster than we are implementing solutions. Even when the technology works, the "market" isn't favoring it enough. We're the white rabbit, always late.
Of course, that's because the "market" is a fiction in the sense that while "market forces" are real, they are shaped by political processes and ideologies. The "market" as we know it is in fact the latest religion justifying and reinforcing the current social order.

But a simpler way of putting it is that the current order is the problem. There will be no solution within it, because the greed and short-sightedness that are at the core of the system will counter-balance any technology that we develop. For instance, as the Artic Sea ice melts, oil rigs are moving in. That's because the problem isn't the "market" but the people deciding how the "market" works. Though of course, we're all guilty of something.

I am not a fan of the current order. However, it is extremely robust and subverts all attempts to overthrow it. I don't see any viable alternatives to it in any single country, let alone worldwide (the latter is what we need). What alternatives are there? The obvious candidate would be something like the green or environmental groups, but, in a supreme act of cosmic irony, those people are actually more responsible for global warming than anyone except the fossil fuel based energy industry because they were the ones who made nuclear power plants (the only location-independent, non-intermittent and nearly carbon-free energy source of the mid to late 20th century) nearly impossible to build. But even aside from the fact that this would be the classic mistake of giving power to a group that helped cause the crisis we're trying to solve, the greens are a minority party in a small number of nations and nearly absent in others (e.g. they're not even worth mentioning in the US).

That leaves us with the mainstream parties for whom climate change is a useful tool in terms of inciting a fraction of their base, but fixing it is not their primary goal -- it's something that they're aiming for, but concurrently with redistributing resources to their supporters (and the latter is much more important than fixing climate change). This naturally produces opposition from other parties which want the same resources for themselves and thus try to downplay climate change which basically leaves us with the situation we're in right now.

So, what alternatives do you see?

[Varysblackfyre321]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

I don't see any viable alternatives to it in any single country, let alone worldwide (the latter is what we need). What alternatives are there? The obvious candidate would be something like the green or environmental groups, but, in a supreme act of cosmic irony, those people are actually more responsible for global warming than anyone except the fossil fuel based energy industry because they were the ones who made nuclear power plants (the only location-independent, non-intermittent and nearly carbon-free energy source of the mid to late 20th century) nearly impossible to build. But even aside from the fact that this would be the classic mistake of giving power to a group that helped cause the crisis we're trying to solve, the greens are a minority party in a small number of nations and nearly absent in others (e.g. they're not even worth mentioning in the US).

Eh, the reason why nuclear energy utilized in place of fossil fuels is because overwhelmingly it is cheaper.

I'd say most Environmental groups who've been trying to get governments to address climate change for decades are not the second biggest contributors to it.

Those would be the groups, especially on the right who've literally crying ”hoax” in regards to this topic for decades.

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

That leaves us with the mainstream parties for whom climate change is a useful tool in terms of inciting a fraction of their base, but fixing it is not their primary goal -- it's something that they're aiming for, but concurrently with redistributing resources to their supporters (and the latter is much more important than fixing climate change).

What exact resources are you referring to?

 

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Eh, the reason why nuclear energy utilized in place of fossil fuels is because overwhelmingly it is cheaper.

I assume you mean the opposite (i.e. fossil fuels are still used instead of nuclear because the fossil fuels are cheaper) and this is true as far as the market goes, but nuclear is prohibitively expensive precisely because it is much more heavily regulated than any other energy source.

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

What exact resources are you referring to?

Administrative and bureaucratic ones. Money (whether in the form of direct government assistance or tax breaks), jobs, control over agencies that influence large economic sectors, real estate (in the form of rent regulation and laws governing what kind of building may be built in various locations) -- basically every point where the economy has contact with government bureaucracies.

[The Anti-Targ]

The reason fossil fuels are cheaper is because the GHG cost is not added to the cost of using fossil fuels for generating energy. The market isn't working because all of the costs are not being imposed on the market.

[IheartIheartTesla]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/23/california-cars-electric-vehicles-gavin-newsom-climate-change

Quote

California’s governor signed an executive order on Wednesday that would ban the sale of gas-only cars within 15 years, in a bid to combat the effects of climate change crisis.

Quote

The order, which requires that all new passenger vehicles sold in California by 2035 be zero-emission, “will improve air quality as well as improve the economic climate here in the state of California”, Newsom said.

The second quoted part is a bit confusing, since I imagine they are talking about tailpipe emissions and not CO2e emissions; even electric cars have some associated emissions from them just because they have to be plugged into the grid.

I own a plug-in hybrid and a full electric, so I feel like I am a great fit for 2035 Californa

[Rippounet]

10 hours ago, Altherion said:

So, what alternatives do you see?

I see quite a few (maybe half-a-dozen). I think history, anthropology, and economics offer us many alternatives. Many people at any given moment are exploring alternative ways of thinking and living, different "ways of life." They're at the margins today because the "market" isn't interested in that.
But you don't even need to be that radical to start genuinely addressing climate change. Even a return to the post World War II political climate would dramatically raise expectations. "Green New Deals" are exactly what's needed. A keynesian outlook on economics gives governments the necessary power to at least do something about it, and historically speaking (and contrary to the current dominant ideology) governments have in fact been rather efficient at getting shit done (like early space exploration). What Anti-targ says is common sense, and should already be in place.
Conversely imho the main problem is that governments are still contrained by arbitrary rules. But as the situation worsens, the fact becomes more obvious. The 2008 crisis exposed the logical consequences of the dominant ideology, thus undermining not just the trust in governments, but also the legitimacy of market-driven policies. Some of these chickens will come to roost, eventually. In other words:

10 hours ago, Altherion said:

However, it is extremely robust and subverts all attempts to overthrow it.

That is true, but you could say that of many past orders. In the end, there is always a "threshold effect" : you need a specific percentage of the population to feel concerned enough to perform some kind of activism (however small) against the dominant structure to cripple it (I think there's even a paper that tried to figure the percentage out, but don't quote me on that). In the case of climate change, once enough people think they are experiencing it, at some point there will be a dramatic shift in politics. It's already starting because of some of the images, and I'm hopeful that it will soon become the major force. In fact, I'm concerned about the form that it will take: "eco-fascism" is a possible outcome, though if we reach that point it may be too late already.

In all honesty, the major obstacle is -amusingly- inflation, that is, the value we put in money, in other words, worrying about "debt." And -amusingly- we're kinda already past that. The other big one is regulations, that is, collectively accepting and supporting restrictions that might impact our personal lives. The coronavirus crisis is transformative on that front: I am genuinely startled to realize, as some of us become used to regular government announcements for the common good (though of course there is much subversion there), that it's going to start happening in some places. There is no way every single people/nation that took serious measures will easily return to "business-as-usual" after the sudden realization that government actually has the power to freeze almost all economic activity if need be and/or seriously impact aspects of the daily lives of its citizens. It's hard to see how it won't stir things up if AR6 of the IPCC is as bad as is rumored, The one thing that's desperately needed is a better understanding of production, because in a way, it's just a choice about what we produce. Weirdly enough we all think first about what we would loose, thus forgetting that humans are unable to remain idle*, and will easily turn to whatever activities they find interesting. Many could work in recycling and repair instead of production. There's no major intellectual obstacle to economic localism, quite the contrary, and it's even a fad among the upper classes. And there's much that can be produced that is "green."

*I love the way Graeber uses Karl Groos in Bullshit Jobs.

On 9/23/2020 at 4:32 AM, karaddin said:

Its a wonderful catch 22 they're caught in - bluntly articulate the situation and people like Altherion will dismiss everything they say as being alarmist and absurd, phrase it in a conservative way to avoid being dismissed as alarmist and those very same people will do everything they can to minimise the obvious implications of what is being said. I admire the effort you're putting in here and hope you're convincing some other people reading the thread because the person you're directly talking to isn't in this argument in good faith and isn't going to be convinced.

Thank you for articulating this.

[ThinkerX]

A few weeks ago, I got curious enough about the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet during 2019 to run a 'back of the envelope' calculation.  Greenland lost enough ice during that year to raise ocean levels about 1-2 millimeters - and that was a record year.  On the one hand, it doesn't seem like all that much - we could have a dozen repeats of 2019 in a row, and the sea level increase would still be maybe two centimeters, give or take.  On the other hand, 2019 probably represents the bottom end of a ragged, near logarithmic scale.

 

Said calculation did not take into account thermal expansion or Antarctic Ice Sheet melt

  

[Altherion]

13 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I see quite a few (maybe half-a-dozen). I think history, anthropology, and economics offer us many alternatives. Many people at any given moment are exploring alternative ways of thinking and living, different "ways of life." They're at the margins today because the "market" isn't interested in that.
But you don't even need to be that radical to start genuinely addressing climate change. Even a return to the post World War II political climate would dramatically raise expectations. "Green New Deals" are exactly what's needed. A keynesian outlook on economics gives governments the necessary power to at least do something about it, and historically speaking (and contrary to the current dominant ideology) governments have in fact been rather efficient at getting shit done (like early space exploration). What Anti-targ says is common sense, and should already be in place.

Perhaps my question was imprecise. What I meant was not alternatives in general, but alternatives to which there is a plausible path from where we are right now and which would actually solve the problem. The heart of the problem is that the governments of today are not like the post WWII governments and something like the Apollo program (with its massive spending on unproven technology) is unthinkable today. If we could have those governments back and bring a substantial fraction of production to bear directly on the problem, then it would disappear in short order because we'd almost certainly have fusion (or at least many fission reactors) and carbon capture fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, the governments of today are focused primarily on distribution of existing resources among a long list of groups of many categories. If it's a Green New Deal you want, you should be happy because we'll see a bunch of them quite soon, but keep in mind that they'll be mainly redistributive and the CO₂ reduction from them will be small (and mostly market-driven).

13 hours ago, Rippounet said:

In the case of climate change, once enough people think they are experiencing it, at some point there will be a dramatic shift in politics. It's already starting because of some of the images, and I'm hopeful that it will soon become the major force. In fact, I'm concerned about the form that it will take: "eco-fascism" is a possible outcome, though if we reach that point it may be too late already.

I've heard this idea on the right, but it doesn't seem plausible to me (at least not in the US or in China; maybe it's more likely in some of the European countries). The environmental activists are vocal, but they are few, not particularly well armed and without much support from the major corporations.

14 hours ago, Rippounet said:

The coronavirus crisis is transformative on that front: I am genuinely startled to realize, as some of us become used to regular government announcements for the common good (though of course there is much subversion there), that it's going to start happening in some places. There is no way every single people/nation that took serious measures will easily return to "business-as-usual" after the sudden realization that government actually has the power to freeze almost all economic activity if need be and/or seriously impact aspects of the daily lives of its citizens.

This is also something I've read on some right-wing sites, but again, I don't really but it. First, the virus is an immediate threat to everyone with an obvious prescription for the actions to be taken to avoid it. That is, it's not something that may happen to some people a few decades in the future, it's something that will quite likely happen to you and me right now if we don't stay home as much as possible and socially distance when going outside.

Second, the government did not freeze all economic activity -- not anywhere close to it in the US or Europe anyway. If economic activity was really frozen, there'd be persistent shortage of goods (far beyond the ones caused by hoarding), but manufacturing, agriculture and distribution did not stop; it barely slowed down. The same is true of the defense industries, healthcare and practically everything else that people or the country might need on a daily basis. There were really only a few changes: office workers and other people who could work from home were forced to work from home and industries that are luxuries rather than necessities (hotels, restaurants, etc.) or ones which can be replicated at home for a time (barbershops, gyms, etc.) were closed or restricted. This felt like a massive change, yes, but in terms of both economic output and greenhouse gas emissions, it differed only slightly from business as usual.

I got curious about how much effect the restrictions actually had on the carbon dioxide and it turns out that while it's nowhere near everything, it's not a trivial fraction either:

Quote

Daily global CO2 emissions decreased by –17% (–11 to –25% for ±1σ) by early April 2020 compared with the mean 2019 levels, just under half from changes in surface transport. At their peak, emissions in individual countries decreased by –26% on average.

One relatively painless way to permanently lower emissions immediately is to mandate that even after the virus is dealt with, office workers who don't need to come to the office except for meetings work from home the vast majority of the time (e.g. they can only come in 6 days per month or something like that). However, this would decimate city centers so I suspect it won't happen.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

The heart of the problem is that the governments of today are not like the post WWII governments and something like the Apollo program (with its massive spending on unproven technology) is unthinkable today.

I have no idea how you can write this when so many high-profile politicians throughout the West are promising to do just that. Joe Biden promised to do exactly that, and he's not a radical.
Even Xi Jinping declared just yesterday that China will aim for carbon neutrality by 2060.
Of course many (if not most) of such announcements can't be taken at face value, but to say that massive spending is "unthinkable" is another really dumb declaration of yours, and I don't think I can take you seriously ever again now.
 

Quote

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-set-to-release-2-trillion-climate-agenda-11594738862

Joe Biden Unveils $2 Trillion Plan to Combat Climate Change

Former Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a $2 trillion proposal Tuesday to combat climate change, calling for a bigger investment and faster action than he backed during the Democratic primaries earlier this year.

“If I have the honor of being elected president, we’re not just going to tinker around the edges. We’re going to make historic investments that will seize the opportunity and meet this moment in history,” Mr. Biden said during a speech in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Biden’s program would use climate policy as an economic-development tool over a framework of four years. Last summer, he proposed spending $1.7 trillion over a decade. The souped-up investment Mr. Biden proposed Tuesday is part of an economic plan the presumptive Democratic nominee began releasing last week, when he announced a $700 billion economic revival program.

The climate plan would attempt to eliminate carbon emissions from the power grid by 2035, put Americans into electric vehicles and zero-emissions mass transit, and rebuild roads, bridges and other infrastructure. The plan would devote spending to minority communities and bolster rules to support unions, which the Biden campaign frames as a way to ensure benefits go first to poor and working-class people and to communities hurt the most by pollution.

 

 

 

[Altherion]

35 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I have no idea how you can write this when so many high-profile politicians throughout the West are promising to do just that. Joe Biden promised to do exactly that, and he's not a radical.
Even Xi Jinping declared just yesterday that China will aim for carbon neutrality by 2060.
Of course many (if not most) of such announcements can't be taken at face value, but to say that massive spending is "unthinkable" is another really dumb declaration of yours, and I don't think I can take you seriously ever again now.

I said "massive spending on unproven technology", not massive spending in general. Massive spending in and of itself is certainly possible and in fact inevitable from time to time -- it happened after the Great Recession and we're now in the middle of another round of it now. Massive spending on something like the Apollo program is more or less unthinkable.

Regarding Biden's plan: if you read the details of it, it's exactly what I said: a means of redistributing some resources to his supporters. At best, it will also upgrade the infrastructure (roads and bridges have little to do with climate change, but it's nice when they don't fall apart) and yes, help with purchasing electric vehicles. It doesn't actually say how the electric grid will become fully renewable by 2035 and while this is not impossible, it is extremely difficult because the energy required is colossal:

Quote

It didn’t take long to see that replacing the electricity now being produced in the United States from natural gas and coal will be — to put it charitably — difficult. The challenge, as is usually the case when it comes to power and energy systems, is about scale. Last year, natural gas-fired generators produced about 1,700 terawatt-hours of electricity and coal-fired plants produced about 1,050 terawatt-hours, for a total of 2,750 terawatt-hours. For perspective, that’s nearly three times as much juice as what was generated last year in Japan. Here are three more comparisons:

• Replacing the 2,750 terawatt-hours of electricity now being produced every year by burning coal and natural gas with nuclear energy would require as much nuclear capacity as now exists on the planet.
• Replacing that 2,750 terawatt-hours with solar would require 25 times as much solar capacity as now exists in the U.S. or nearly four times as much as exists on the planet. 
• Replacing it with wind would require installing nine times as much wind capacity as now exists in this country or roughly twice as much as current global capacity. 

In other words, promising stuff on the campaign trail is easy.

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 9/23/2020 at 12:35 PM, Altherion said:

Administrative and bureaucratic ones. Money (whether in the form of direct government assistance or tax breaks), jobs, control over agencies that influence large economic sectors, real estate (in the form of rent regulation and laws governing what kind of building may be built in various locations) -- basically every point where the economy has contact with government bureaucracies.

Alright “resources” has been clarified.

Yes political parties will run on issues, and put people from their party in position to address said issues. 

But it’s not inevitable other parties have to take the exact opposite position of any of said issues.

It’s not as if Nancy Pelosi today “Democrats are all pro-life now.” Republicans will reflexively go “We’re now pro-choice.”

Mainstream parties do adopt positions the other has if they think not doing such is too much of a hang-up.

The reason why there are still political parties who’ve taken the position  climate-denialism is primarily due to the countless funds they’ve been given to say it’s either not real, or not big enough a threat implement massive changes or spend trillions on it.

 Apolo couldn’t have happened if the USA wasn’t scared shitless about being over taken by the Soviets.

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

On 9/24/2020 at 3:06 PM, Altherion said:

 

• Replacing the 2,750 terawatt-hours of electricity now being produced every year by burning coal and natural gas with nuclear energy would require as much nuclear capacity as now exists on the planet.
• Replacing that 2,750 terawatt-hours with solar would require 25 times as much solar capacity as now exists in the U.S. or nearly four times as much as exists on the planet. 
• Replacing it with wind would require installing nine times as much wind capacity as now exists in this country or roughly twice as much as current global capacity. 

Interesting and sobering for the sheer scale of things as we now stand.