I'm guessing you're the same type who would complain if your property taxes went up, let alone a pipeline or wind turbine went into your backyard, to pay for non urgent ER service in 5 minutes for everyone.
In terms of medical care, as usual, you are wrong. I don't like my property taxes going up for all the stupid spending like wind turbines. I would certainly oppose any more of those foolish wind turbines. look at how much the people of Ontario pay for energy(or taxes to subsidize the billions for unreliable energy)
Ironically, a pipeline runs adjacent to my fathers property. No complaints about that.
I have to laugh(or cry) at those silly enough to believe the Sky Is Falling crowd on the hard left. Socialist editor and 'intellectual' Nathan Robinson admitted that he doesn't even really believe in the BS he puts forward. Yet the gullible that have become useful idiots for Putin double down on green energy(some for profit motives).
THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROBLEM
If progressives think it’s a serious threat to humanity, why don’t they act like it?
by NATHAN J. ROBINSON
Let me make a confession to you. I don’t believe that human-caused climate change is a serious problem. Now let me be clear: when I look at the empirical evidence, I am very much convinced that it is a serious problem. In fact, every time I dig into the facts, read the reports of experts, try to understand the problem for myself, I become terrified. And yet I still don’t believe in climate change. I know I don’t believe in it, because if I believed in it, I would be acting differently. If I truly believed that Florida was going to sink into the sea, and that urgent action needed to be taken in order to stop this from occurring, I wouldn’t be editing a magazine. And I certainly wouldn’t have spent any of the past six months reading books or watching YouTube videos. If I believed climate change mattered as much as I am supposed to think it matters, I would be spending my every waking effort calling urgently for political action. I am not doing this. Therefore, I think I believe less in the importance of climate change than I say I do.
Here is one reason I think many people reject the apocalyptic forecasts of climate change “alarmists”: they don’t actually seem very alarmed. Yes, when climate scientists tell us about the problem, they tell us that if we do not radically reverse course on emissions immediately, we will boil ourselves alive and create an overheated hell of drought, displacement, and despair. But then why aren’t those climate scientists out in the streets? If the academic community believes climate change is a serious problem, there should be climate scientists going to every town in America, holding listening and teaching sessions at churches, libraries, and schools. They should be educating the public, fielding any and every skeptical question people might have. They should not just be giving quotes to newspapers, in which they tell us we’re all going to die, but they should give free and open lectures around the country, debating skeptics and embarking on a massive project to shift public opinion and end apathy.
If climate change is going to be as bad as climate scientists say it is, they need to work to shift the national mood. Obama should be talking about it constantly. It should be his number one issue. After all, if the claims made by scientists are true, then this issue should essentially come before all others, because it threatens the survival of the species. Supposedly, liberals believe the claims made by scientists, yet they do not treat this as an issue that comes before all others. Why didn’t Hillary Clinton respond to every single debate question by insisting on talking about climate change? Surely she affirms the scientific consensus. Yet the scientific consensus implies that this is the number one issue. But it wasn’t Clinton’s.
I have a suspicion that the failure to act as if the scientific consensus is actually true fuels doubts that it is true. “Rising sea levels” is not something we actually take seriously, it’s just something we say. After all, if liberals really took it seriously, it would be at the top of the New York Times every day. They’d never shut up about it. It isn’t the top story, though. The top story is usually something Trump did.
Imagine scientists discovered an asteroid hurtling toward earth. And they tried to warn people that unless urgent action was taken to blow up the asteroid, everyone would perish. But “asteroid denialism” set in. Blowing up the asteroid would require raising taxes and would disrupt the orderly operations of capitalism. Republicans would insist that the entire asteroid idea was a scheme cooked up by elitist liberal eggheads designed to scare Middle America into voting Democratic and bringing about a feminist Marxist dictatorship. But honestly, if the people voicing concerns about the asteroid were penning occasional op-eds, rather than constantly doing everything they could to persuade people to believe in the asteroid, I wouldn’t be sure that they really believed there was an asteroid at all. If they spent their time going to conferences and eating brunch, I would think that perhaps the Republicans were right. After all, people who think an asteroid will kill us all unless people are persuaded to stop it do not sit around eating brunch. After all, it’s a fucking deadly asteroid.
The situation with climate change is much like the asteroid. Every good progressive affirms on an intellectual level that climate change is not just a problem, but the problem. Yet if it’s really true that unless we act in the next few years, a series of very bad things will happen that may take many many, lives, nobody should be acting the way many contemporary progressives act. Certainly nobody should be watching Netflix. Unless you convince people that they are about to suffer terribly, then climate change will not prevent them from voting for a denialist like Donald Trump. So you’d better be out convincing people…
Climate change also raises some very important issues about what constitutes a “rationally” held belief. Weirdly enough, I think most people on the left believe in climate change for irrational reasons. They believe in it because scientists say it matters, or because The New Yorker says that scientists say it matters. But they haven’t actually spent months carefully combing through the arguments made by skeptics, and figuring out what the flaws are. They haven’t actually buried themselves in mountains of climate data in order to verify to their satisfaction that the scientific findings are sound. In fact, it may be impossible for non-scientists to hold scientific beliefs “rationally.” We have to trust that science is a rational process and that we are being told the truth.
That’s a paradox of (good-faith) skepticism: by refusing to accept the claims of scientists on a trust basis, skeptics are demonstrating a kind of rationality. I am a “skeptic” of a certain kind, in that I am very uncomfortable defending a “scientific consensus” that I cannot prove myself. If someone approached me with a series of pseudo-scientific arguments supposedly proving that climate change was not occurring, I would not know how to prove that it was. I couldn’t suddenly become an amateur climate scientist and defend the position rationally. I have to defend it with an appeal to authority, namely the authority of scientists.
This point about knowledge is important, because it means that ordinary people who are skeptical of climate change should not be treated as irrational and backward. In fact, it is perfectly healthy to be skeptical of the authority of experts. We can say that if I am not an expert in a field, I should not doubt the claims of those who are. But that position doesn’t hold. After all, I am not an expert in Scientology or alchemy. Should I trust the claims of Scientologists or alchemists? From the inside of a scientific field, the difference between fraud and reason might be obvious. But from the outside, for people who are not trained scientists, the difference is not obvious. It’s very difficult, when I am not an expert, for me to decide whom to trust among two people claiming to be experts. A Princeton physicist tells me that global warming isn’t real. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says otherwise. An oil executive tells me yet another thing. All of these people know more than I do about energy and the environment. Sorting out whom to trust is therefore hard. It’s easy if you already know how to do it. But most of us don’t know how to do it.
Yes, when 99% of scientists believe something, it’s probably wise to believe it. But recognize that unless you teach people the underlying scientific facts, this is still asking them to believe based on faith. “Scientific consensuses are true” is a statement that can be believed for either rational or irrational reasons depending on whether you’ve worked it out for yourself or believe it for the same reason you might believe “what the Koran says is true.”
Those concerned about climate change are therefore asking people to indulge in an act of faith: to believe, without understanding the underlying science very well, that the scientific prediction of an asteroid-type disaster is true. This is a major ask. It requires people to make a large amount of sacrifice for something that they are taking based on trust, trust that experts would never mislead them and are not deluded. It’s no wonder people prefer the comforting denials of a Trump, the insistence that experts are full of it and that everything will be fine.
I must admit, I don’t trust experts much myself. I think they’re frequently arrogant and self-delusional. I also don’t know anything about climate science, and I don’t have time to learn. In this respect, I am like most people. The question here is how, if most people are like this, they can be moved to support the necessary serious political action on climate change. The answer, I think, is that they need reasons why expertise can be trusted. They need experts to be trying to persuade them, rather than just dismissing skepticism as ignorance. They need experts to act as if their prophecies are true, rather than going on with their quiet and comfortable lives in coastal enclaves. A crucial lesson for Trump-era progressives is this: it’s not enough to be right. You have to persuade people you’re right.
Here in Massachusetts, I think a large swath of my neighbors affirm that climate change is the number one threat facing humanity. And yet they have never done so much as bring it up with me in conversation. If this really were a problem of asteroid-magnitude, don’t you think we’d at least be mentioning it with some regularity? If we think it’s going to happen, shouldn’t we speak about it?
If the science is right, we may be in the last few years where it is possible to do anything to stall the effects of emissions on the planet. That means it’s a moment of extraordinary urgency. For every single progressive who believes that this is in fact true, it needs to be treated as the crisis it ostensibly is. Otherwise, why should anyone take the leap of faith required to produce serious action? A vast political movement needs to be built if there is any chance of reversing existing trends. Doing so is going to require more than just having the facts. It’s going to require figuring out what it takes to get people to truly believe the facts, and then behave as if those facts are true.
pelmet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 5:00 pm
by NATHAN J. ROBINSON
If I believed climate change mattered as much as I am supposed to think it matters, I would be spending my every waking effort calling urgently for political action. I am not doing this. Therefore, I think I believe less in the importance of climate change than I say I do.
rookiepilot wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 6:58 pm
I’m just riding the wave of change, dude.
Have fun with Imperial Oil.
I think it will do better than those Russian stocks that some got into, but time will tell. The dividends are definitely better. But what do i know....I'm not a professional.
pelmet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 5:00 pm
by NATHAN J. ROBINSON
If I believed climate change mattered as much as I am supposed to think it matters, I would be spending my every waking effort calling urgently for political action. I am not doing this. Therefore, I think I believe less in the importance of climate change than I say I do.
And guess who will provide the money for that. The same people that could be supplying much of that money to Canada and eventually, some amount(perhaps significant) transferred to health care. But people voted based on emotion rather than tough common sense. They got greedy for the handouts. They believed the twisted half truths of those in power to be the full truth and got angrily emotional at those who tried to fully explain. or they wanted the faucet of taxpayers money to continue for them.
And......no one wants to be scolded publicly by a 16 year old girl. Some are foolish enough to even believe her. And many would rather just double down than admit error. That is almost as embarrassing as the scolding.
Listen to the fools clap and laugh and likely cower in silence. I bet many are from Europe. They think they are so superior and ignore the warnings and demonize those who warn. They aren't laughing now but maybe still cowering.
Perhaps the green transition supporters should watch this video starting at 1:20. It is something that might make sense to the green transition supporters.
Canada pumps more natural gas for Europe. It means that we exceed our greenhouse gas emission target. But the overall effect is a decrease in global greenhouse emissions because our gas displaces European coal that is now returning to use.
It is so logical. And guess who benefits massively from a financial point of view as the global economy heads for recession....everybody reading this post.
Let's use Ontario for an example. The Wynn Government spent close to 10 billion dollars putting up 43 wind farms of various sizes and numerous solar farms in the hopes of achieving a carbon neutral Province. An average daily power requirement in Ontario is generally 15,500 MW, and of this requirement, a combined total of 770 MW is produced by wind/solar...lol. Less than 5% of the required power!! Check it out for yourself! https://www.ieso.ca/power-data/this-hours-data This money should have been spent in building new hospitals, hiring new Dr's and Nurses and giving the existing healthcare workers a raise! Instead, Ontario residents get to pay the highest power bills in North America (California may be a bit higher, idk) and suffer through long hours of waiting in hospital ER's!! Priorities are screwed up!
EPR wrote: ↑Sat Sep 24, 2022 10:15 am
Let's use Ontario for an example. The Wynn Government spent close to 10 billion dollars putting up 43 wind farms of various sizes and numerous solar farms in the hopes of achieving a carbon neutral Province. An average daily power requirement in Ontario is generally 15,500 MW, and of this requirement, a combined total of 770 MW is produced by wind/solar...lol. Less than 5% of the required power!! Check it out for yourself! https://www.ieso.ca/power-data/this-hours-data This money should have been spent in building new hospitals, hiring new Dr's and Nurses and giving the existing healthcare workers a raise! Instead, Ontario residents get to pay the highest power bills in North America (California may be a bit higher, idk) and suffer through long hours of waiting in hospital ER's!! Priorities are screwed up!
pelmet wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 1:17 am
A five and a half hour wait for my father when I took him to the hospital last night for a recommended precautionary checkup.
Why are you waiting in line at the hospital for a precautionary checkup ? If it's not an emergency, just make an appointment with your doc, show up on the appointed time.
Over the last 3 years I've been to the hospital emergency twice, once for something myself, and once taking my wife in. In both cases the triage nurse checked us, and we went directly into the bay because the reason we were there was indeed a real emergency that required immediate treatment. But if you do show up at the emergency entrance with an ailment that isn't actually an emergency, ya, you get to wait in line. One of the problems with some areas these days, so many folks trot off to the emerge for 'little Johnny has a sniffle' or 'I stubbed my toe', the lines can get long at times.
If the triage folks at the emergency entrance at the hospital send you to the back of the line, then maybe you need to realize, you are not experiencing a symptom of the problem, you are indeed creating the problem.
Just to be clear, a 'recommended precautionary checkup' is NOT an emergency that requires immediate hospital treatment. If you can spend hours waiting in line at the hospital, your time would be better spent calling your local doc, make an appointment, and go in at the appointed time, leave the emerg entrance at the hospital for things that are indeed emergencies.
Buddy, I don't need your stupid advice about the hospital. My father was recommended by another Doctor with a letter to go to emergency as a precaution for potential risk of stroke due to some varying symptoms discovered during a last minute eye appointment that I took him to, due to double vision. They wrote a letter concerned about risk of stroke and the letter was shown to the the hospital staff and he was made to wait and wait and wait.
Eventually, he insisted on going home as feeling better and not willing to wait any longer. He seems to be back to normal today. Talking to someone else in the medical field, it may very well have been a TIA.
If I hadn't gone to the hospital and he had a stroke, you would be lecturing me differently.
As for his doctor, his last day on the job was last week. His next appointment with a new doctor is in October. He has no doctor and the waiting list is huge, so I am paying for a private clinic to bypass the all those voters forcing us into the wonderful, broken down Canadian system that is so fantastic. I think they are the same fools telling us how bad it is to build a pipeline for natural gas.
It seems almost every reply Golden Eagle makes to a post of mine is a stupid statement, this time telling me I am creating a problem at the hospital.
P.S. Todays waiting time for patients categorized as 'Urgent Care' at the two hospitals(the ones I was told are preferred for neuro) I visited early this morning to see if it my father was willing to go again...7-8 hours.
How much anger and abuse did you dish out to the hospital staff before you left, because your checkup had to wait behind real trauma cases?
Asking for a friend.
You don’t sound like the patient type. Nurses don’t need your abuse.
Why are you waiting in line at the hospital for a precautionary checkup ? If it's not an emergency, just make an appointment with your doc, show up on the appointed time.
Over the last 3 years I've been to the hospital emergency twice, once for something myself, and once taking my wife in. In both cases the triage nurse checked us, and we went directly into the bay because the reason we were there was indeed a real emergency that required immediate treatment. But if you do show up at the emergency entrance with an ailment that isn't actually an emergency, ya, you get to wait in line. One of the problems with some areas these days, so many folks trot off to the emerge for 'little Johnny has a sniffle' or 'I stubbed my toe', the lines can get long at times.
If the triage folks at the emergency entrance at the hospital send you to the back of the line, then maybe you need to realize, you are not experiencing a symptom of the problem, you are indeed creating the problem.
Just to be clear, a 'recommended precautionary checkup' is NOT an emergency that requires immediate hospital treatment. If you can spend hours waiting in line at the hospital, your time would be better spent calling your local doc, make an appointment, and go in at the appointed time, leave the emerg entrance at the hospital for things that are indeed emergencies.
Buddy, I don't need your stupid advice about the hospital. My father was recommended by another Doctor with a letter to go to emergency as a precaution for potential risk of stroke due to some varying symptoms discovered during a last minute eye appointment that I took him to, due to double vision. They wrote a letter concerned about risk of stroke and the letter was shown to the the hospital staff and he was made to wait and wait and wait.
Eventually, he insisted on going home as feeling better and not willing to wait any longer. He seems to be back to normal today. Talking to someone else in the medical field, it may very well have been a TIA.
If I hadn't gone to the hospital and he had a stroke, you would be lecturing me differently.
As for his doctor, his last day on the job was last week. His next appointment with a new doctor is in October. He has no doctor and the waiting list is huge, so I am paying for a private clinic to bypass the all those voters forcing us into the wonderful, broken down Canadian system that is so fantastic. I think they are the same fools telling us how bad it is to build a pipeline for natural gas.
It seems almost every reply Golden Eagle makes to a post of mine is a stupid statement, this time telling me I am creating a problem at the hospital.
P.S. Todays waiting time for patients categorized as 'Urgent Care' at the two hospitals(the ones I was told are preferred for neuro) I visited early this morning to see if it my father was willing to go again...7-8 hours.
How much anger and abuse did you dish out to the hospital staff before you left, because your checkup had to wait behind real trauma cases?
Asking for a friend.
You don’t sound like the patient type. Nurses don’t need your abuse.
Now you are accusing me of abuse with no evidence. I strongly suggest you get of this personal path of accusation, otherwise, I will respond in kind any way I can to piss you off as well. But it will be you who initiated this path. And don't give me the "Asking for a friend' B.S.
---------- ADS -----------
Last edited by pelmet on Sun Sep 25, 2022 4:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
Buddy, I don't need your stupid advice about the hospital. My father was recommended by another Doctor with a letter to go to emergency as a precaution for potential risk of stroke due to some varying symptoms discovered during a last minute eye appointment that I took him to, due to double vision. They wrote a letter concerned about risk of stroke and the letter was shown to the the hospital staff and he was made to wait and wait and wait.
Eventually, he insisted on going home as feeling better and not willing to wait any longer. He seems to be back to normal today. Talking to someone else in the medical field, it may very well have been a TIA.
If I hadn't gone to the hospital and he had a stroke, you would be lecturing me differently.
As for his doctor, his last day on the job was last week. His next appointment with a new doctor is in October. He has no doctor and the waiting list is huge, so I am paying for a private clinic to bypass the all those voters forcing us into the wonderful, broken down Canadian system that is so fantastic. I think they are the same fools telling us how bad it is to build a pipeline for natural gas.
It seems almost every reply Golden Eagle makes to a post of mine is a stupid statement, this time telling me I am creating a problem at the hospital.
P.S. Todays waiting time for patients categorized as 'Urgent Care' at the two hospitals(the ones I was told are preferred for neuro) I visited early this morning to see if it my father was willing to go again...7-8 hours.
How much anger and abuse did you dish out to the hospital staff before you left, because your checkup had to wait behind real trauma cases?
Asking for a friend.
You don’t sound like the patient type. Nurses don’t need your abuse.
Now you are accusing me of abuse with no evidence. I strongly suggest you get of this personal path of accusation, otherwise, I will respond in kind any way I can to piss you off as well. But it will be you who initiated it this path.
We are beset by old problems: Threats from Russia and China come at a time when the West is ill prepared — Canada and many European countries have starved their militaries of resources for decades; in the United States, military spending has continued to increase, but its troop strength has diminished, especially in Europe. An energy crisis overseas is on the cusp of morphing into a full-blown disaster, a direct result of political choices. Globalization has been in retreat, most clearly illustrated by sluggish and sometimes declining international trade. And a spectre from the 1970s and ’80s, in the form of high inflation, has returned to wipe away whatever wage gains regular people had enjoyed in recent years. Boring predictability has been replaced with persistent anxiety.
The world also faces newer problems — or, rather, a new spin on an old challenge: the state of American democracy. Refusing to accept the results of elections, despite the absence of widespread fraud or any evidence of meddling, is now common among both Republicans and Democrats. The falsehoods that former president Donald Trump told his followers about a stolen election in 2020, which then led to a riot on Capitol Hill, is the worst and most recent example, but this has been brewing for some time.
As the Americans concern themselves with sorting out their internal problems, what was once a superpower that almost single-handedly underpinned global stability through the reach and force of its military and economic prowess may become a less reliable partner. As the U.S. looks inward, Canada and our European allies will have little choice but to take threats much more seriously than we have in the past.
The relative peace and prosperity that came in the aftermath of the Second World War was taken for granted, but then, like now, not all was what it seemed. The U.S. did not enter into direct conflict with the Soviet Union or with China, but the era was was marked by multiple proxy wars, most dangerously in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. The parallels with Ukraine are not exact, but it does show the foolishness of behaving as if an authoritarian Russia would ever become a peaceful and reliable neighbour.
The ’70s, as now, were characterized by inflation and an energy crisis. It was also the first time the Americans began retreating from global leadership in a major way, by moving off the gold standard that the world had relied upon.
When the Cold War ended, a new era was heralded, but the world was not so different, as we are now painfully aware. The threat of nuclear war subsided in the public mind, but we now have a Russian government that is unafraid of threatening armageddon and rogue nuclear powers — like North Korea, and likely one day soon, Iran — will make us rethink traditional deterrence strategies. The decline of U.S. influence makes the world undoubtedly less safe and less stable. Governments remained aware of the dangers that persisted, but made the deliberate choice to ignore reality.
It had been apparent for years that foreign investment and international trade did not force China to become a less brutal, less authoritarian regime. But it was only in recent months and years that liberal democratic governments began reckoning with the reality that doing business with China ensured it would be run not by a western-style democracy, but by an increasingly wealthy dictatorship.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made no secret about his desire to reabsorb Ukraine. He said so repeatedly and over decades, just as western countries were putting fewer and fewer resources into their own armed forces.
Similarly, Germany was warned repeatedly by its neighbours not to become overly reliant on Russian natural gas. German leaders ignored that advice and shut down the country’s nuclear and coal plants anyway. For those who dismissed Putin’s rhetoric as just talk, the 2014 war in Ukraine should have been a major wake-up call.
Pointing out that the threats from China and Russia had been there all along is not Monday morning quarterbacking, because their intentions were obvious and made plain. Yet anyone who said so was often labelled an unsophisticated warmonger, or a racist.
In her 2013 history of the events that led to the First World War, “The War that Ended Peace,” Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan described a world at the beginning of the 20th century that wasn’t all that dissimilar from ours today.
The most brutal wars were decades in the past and Europe was enjoying a period of prosperity, which masked emerging and dangerous cracks. Great Britain’s leadership as the dominant world power was in decline, while another power, Germany, was ascendant. Military and economic competition was a constant, and leaders were making foolish mistakes. Prideful autocrats demanded respect. And yet, “Very little in history is inevitable,” MacMillan wrote. “Europe did not have to go to war in 1914.”
May our leaders make better choices than those of the past.
The Atlantic magazine has an article that states basically what I have been saying all along. The socialists are bent on overturning capitalism and use ridiculous man made global warming predictions as part of their never-ending malevolent agenda(much of which was based on violence in the past). In my opinion, unfortunately, all kinds of gullible people who make decision d=based on emotion instead of analysis buy into the fraud and are influenced to vote for this. Of course, there are always various agendas that enter into the fray such as businesses and people who say the care when their intention is profit. Progressive director Michael Moore even made a movie about it. Politicians who don't believe but will use the subject to achieve power, etc.
You are being fooled into the Scam of the Century.
What Many Progressives Misunderstand About Fighting Climate Change
Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have worked to thwart new oil drilling, coal-fired power plants, fracking for natural gas, and fuel pipelines. But today, Americans face a climate challenge that can’t be solved by just saying no again and again.
Decarbonizing the economy will require an unprecedented amount of new energy investment. Fossil-fuel infrastructure built over centuries needs to be replaced within the next few decades by clean-energy alternatives. The United States will need to build hundreds of thousands of square miles of wind and solar farms; deploy enough battery storage to keep power flowing through the grid even on calm, cloudy days; and at least double the country’s transmission-line capacity. And the same laws that environmental groups leveraged in the past to block or delay fossil-fuel projects are now being exploited by NIMBYs in ways that, however well intended, will slow the country’s transition to clean energy. Windmills off Cape Cod, a geothermal facility in Nevada, and what could have been the largest solar farm in America have all been blocked by an endless series of environmental reviews and lawsuits.
The good news is that, with reasonable reforms, the energy transition is fully within reach. Private investment in clean-energy technology is skyrocketing, and even Big Oil is starting to realize there is no future in fossil fuels.
But this may not be enough for some environmentalists. Jamie Henn, an environmental activist and the director of Fossil Free Media, recently told Rolling Stone, “Look, I want to get carbon out of the atmosphere, but this is such an opportunity to remake our society. But if we just perpetuate the same harms in a clean-energy economy, and it’s just a world of Exxons and Elon Musks—oh, man, what a nightmare.” Many progressive commentators similarly believe that countering climate change requires a fundamental reordering of the West’s political and economic systems. “The level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below ‘absolutely catastrophic’ is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo,” the writer Phil McDuff has argued. The climate crisis, the Green New Deal advocate Naomi Klein has insisted, “could be the best argument progressives have ever had” to roll back corporate influence, tear up free-trade deals, and reinvest in public services and infrastructure.
Such comments raise a question: What is the real goal here—stopping climate change or abolishing capitalism? Taking climate change seriously as a global emergency requires an all-hands-on-deck attitude and a recognition that technological solutions (yes, often built and deployed by private firms) can deliver real progress on decarbonization before the proletariat has seized the means of production. A massive infusion of private investment, made not for charity but in the anticipation of future profits, is precisely what’s needed to accelerate the clean-energy transition—which, like all revolutions, will yield unpredictable results.
The belief that top-down decision makers can choreograph precisely how the clean-energy revolution will proceed runs deep in progressive circles. In the manifesto describing his version of the Green New Deal, Bernie Sanders declared, “To get to our goal of 100 percent sustainable energy, we will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration, or trash incinerators.” Many environmental groups share the Vermont senator’s aversion to these technologies. But the climate emergency demands we take a closer look at some of them before writing them off completely. In the face of uncertainty about the best path to decarbonization, policy makers should think like a venture capitalist—placing lots of bets in the expectation that some technologies will fail but the investment portfolio will succeed as a whole. The “false solutions” that Sanders decries may indeed prove unworkable. Nuclear energy might never be cost-competitive, and geoengineering may prove technically infeasible. But we can’t know in advance.
Environmental activists have historically been skeptical of nuclear energy, but that attitude may be changing. California reversed its decision to shut down the Diablo Canyon plant, and Japan announced plans to start investing in nuclear energy again—an outcome few predicted after Fukushima. This is welcome news, considering that, per unit of electricity produced, nuclear energy causes fewer deaths than wind energy and creates fewer carbon emissions than solar (and concerns about waste are overblown). However, one major barrier to deployment remains: Unlike solar and wind, which have seen dramatic cost decreases, nuclear-power-plant construction costs have actually increased over time. Although that means the current generation of nuclear technology isn’t likely to be a major climate tool, advanced nuclear systems such as small modular reactors show considerable promise. The potential climate benefits from cost-effective nuclear fission or even nuclear fusion are so large that they’re worth some strategic bets—even at long odds.
Some forms of geoengineering, such as carbon-dioxide removal, would require massive reductions in cost to be viable as a climate solution. But the same was true of solar and wind decades ago, and the government was able to accelerate the learning curve in those fields by being an early source of demand and reducing the direct costs for consumers. Many progressive environmentalists feel uneasy with technologies that blunt the climate impact of fossil fuels rather than banish them entirely. And yet we need such options. Some major industries, such as aviation and cement and steel production, will be hard to decarbonize, and we’re already likely to overshoot the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius greater than preindustrial levels. The only way to permanently reverse that warming will be to suck carbon directly out of the atmosphere. More traditional carbon capture and sequestration methods, designed to capture greenhouse gases as they’re generated at large pollution sources, are showing less promise than carbon-dioxide removal given that they typically leave some residual emissions, but they’re still certainly better than unmitigated fossil-fuel use.
In a variety of other ways, Americans will have to choose between the perfect and the good. Some environmentalists are skeptical of geothermal energy, which requires extensive drilling. Yet it has high potential as a source of clean baseload power with a small geographical footprint that can, in theory, be deployed anywhere in the world (if you drill deep enough). One way to accelerate investment in geothermal energy would be to give this clean technology the same expedited permitting that oil and gas companies already receive for leases on federal land.
Yet permitting reform requires loosening regulations and laws that many environmentalists hold dear. The National Environmental Policy Act requires reviews that give enormous power to anyone who wants to block or delay a proposed energy project, either out of genuine social concern or for self-interested reasons. In practice, it is a major bottleneck to building clean-energy infrastructure. According to an analysis of government data by the R Street Institute, 65 percent of the energy projects categorized as either “in progress” or “planned” are related to renewable energy, and 16 percent have to do with electricity transmission. And nearly 20 times as much offshore wind power is held up in permitting as is currently in operation or under construction. U.S. climate spending could exceed more than half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade—but without permitting reform, those investments won’t translate into much physical infrastructure. A new permitting-reform measure put forth by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has drawn criticism for fast-tracking some specific fossil-fuel projects, such as the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, but in general clean-energy infrastructure has much more to gain relative to fossil fuels by streamlining permitting, because so much of it still needs to be built.
None of this means that the United States should let the energy market run wild. On the contrary, the federal government will need to use a heavy hand in ensuring that technologies like carbon-dioxide removal actually deliver on their claims (unlike carbon offsets—a sketchy market rife with fraud and greenwashing). And public investment in clean technologies has already been pivotal in driving down the costs of solar and wind power as well as batteries.
Yet we cannot succeed in the fight against global warming without giving many alternatives to the status quo an opportunity to evolve and prove themselves. In reality, the false solution to climate change isn’t geoengineering or nuclear energy—it’s the belief that we can decarbonize the economy only by upending our economic system, categorically rejecting certain technologies, and spurning private investment.
Onesie wrote: ↑Mon Sep 26, 2022 11:20 am
Pelmet still ranting his life away on avcanada to deaf ears... nothing's changed on here
Missed you Onesie and you are absolutely correct. Deaf ears, even in the face of the obvious.
Today's quote of the day to those riding the wave........
"“When you shame oil and gas investors, dismantle oil and coal-fired power plants, fail to diversify energy supplies (especially gas), oppose LNG receiving terminals, and reject nuclear power, your transition plan had better be right,” Saudi Arabian Oil Co. chief executive Amin Nasser said.
“Instead, as this crisis has shown, the plan was just a chain of sandcastles that waves of reality have washed away. And billions around the world now face the energy access and cost of living consequences that are likely to be severe and prolonged.”
Energy Renewables: Too Much Hot Air
Steve Forbes, Forbes Staff - 16h ago
The extreme heat waves that hit Europe and the U.S. this summer are leading to cries from some quarters that we must hasten the transition from oil, gas and coal to energy alternatives. The prospect of an expensive and ultracold winter in Europe, thanks to Vladimir Putin’s sharply reducing or cutting off Russia’s natural gas supplies to the continent, will likely increase demands for so-called renewables.
First, a bit of context. As hard as it is to believe right now, heat waves are no more common today than they were in the early 1900s. Moreover, thanks to better and more timely warnings, better building structures, better transportation systems and better medical treatments, the number of deaths from weather-related catastrophes such as floods has declined almost 99% over the past 100 years. That’s right, nearly 99%.
Doomsayers maintain that temperatures are rising over time. True, but not even close to the scale we’ve been warned about for decades. As climate expert Bjørn Lomborg and others have noted, we have plenty of time to adjust to fractional changes.
For heat waves, which we will get more of over the next 100 years, there are practical measures we can take. For example, Lomborg points out that Spain has successfully pushed for the use of lighter colors in roofing materials, which reduces the concentration of heat. Of course, the best antidote is air conditioning. We have plenty of that here, but it barely exists in Britain and elsewhere.
As for carbon dioxide emissions, it’s about time policymakers came to grips with the fact that developing countries aren’t about to forsake future economic growth by banning fossil fuels. India and China are busily constructing scores of new coal-fired power plants.
Western preachments about climate change strike these nations as hypocritical. Behind the scenes, both India and China make clear that they want to reach Western living standards, and that leads to using more oil, gas and coal.
Fast-growing high tech is also a gargantuan user of energy, which means future demand will vastly exceed current estimates of future needs. Already, as energy expert Mark Mills observes, “The global cloud uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan.” Windmills and solar panels alone can hardly meet future needs.
Here again, the solutions are clear. Natural gas is a clean fuel, as many in green-minded Europe now acknowledge. However, more natural gas production in the U.S. is being hindered by regulatory wars against permits, production and pipelines. In addition, there are plenty of natural gas reserves in Europe and Britain, but production there is blocked by obtuse governments. Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, has ended her country’s ban on fracking, but serious regulatory obstacles still need to be cleared.
Then, of course, there’s nuclear power, which gives off no greenhouse gas emissions.
Here’s another big thing to consider: As temperatures rise, cold weather is less common. Significantly more people perish from cold than from heat. The number of deaths from cold weather has declined at more than twice the increase in the number of deaths from high temperatures.
9.5 billion prople on the planet vs 3 billion 100 years ago ,that scientist base that global temp increase on . U.N. says every human being going about there daily live emitts 16 tonnes of C02
there inlies the rub , there is not a polictican on the planet that will avocate removal of 6 billion humans to reduce global warming (on second thought a half dozen dictators are trying lately.)
CANADA IS broke 1.3 trillion in debt with 15 million actual taxpayer. And with net population increase of 3.2 million tonnes C02 per year in immigration notgoing to ever meet targets 465000 immigrants -26500 natural mortality =200000 net pop gain ×16tonnes per citizen peryear n+1 x 5 years
