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months ago Licht said that 
now he’s been chit canned.
cnn continues to slide downward 
Walter C. where are you? 
Crying in his beverage of choice with John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings and the rest of the band.
The only reason to censor someones post is the fear that someone might read it and believe it!
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Yes I take crap for having a big car but I drive it on the autobahn road trips maybe once a month. I pack my groceries on my back up a big hill and use the e-bike. This week we had five adults and gear and a dog. My husband had some German friends he ice climbs with and they all drive little cars but then like to ride with him. I have this other Canadian GF and she can’t understand how flying Business class isn’t green 
because “the flight is going anyway.” I’m done with people, we just do our own thing.
I’ve been hit head on by drunk US drivers twice (and hospitalized) so I’m not interested in little cars without speed limits and cars going 120 mph.
I do wonder if the hurricane season will be fierce with the hot oceans. My 85 year old mom sat through the big one in Punta Gorda and is lucky to be alive and solvent. She might have an exciting season this year.
I like you more every day
I’m back with some good news reported by Forbes. Two direct air capture hubs will be built in Texas and Louisiana, they are slated to remove 2 million metric tons a year and produce jobs. This is just less than half the money allotted for doing this. Other projects for doing this are slated to be announced in 2024. Funding is coming from the Inflation Reduction Act. The current US CO2 emissions are 5.01 billion metric tons, so as you can see, we have a long way to go still. Proud to be an American in a country that is actually working to reduce CO2.
Current Climate: Feds Spending $1.2 Billion To Remove CO2 From The Air (forbes.com)
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I don’t challenge global warming. Its the duplicity that infuriates me. We were offered cfc lights, but they contained mercury or other toxins that suddenly didn’t matter, until one broke in your home and you needed a hazmat team to clean it up. I had a smoke alarm on each floor, then added a room and had to upgrade my home to add another eight detectors and three CO2 detectors, all with radioactive elements that must go to a special landfill after they die in ten years, due to the battery and radioactive strip. Its the selective outrage. Dead eagles and whales, very bad, unless it’s caused by a windmill on a hilltop or surveying to build a windmill in the ocean, then the death toll is covered up or diffused.
We were told to use electric appliances after peak hours to reduce the load on the grid. Now I read that we should use electric during peak hours to take advantage of the sun. Just brown out the electric output if the load exceeds output . . . Show of hands, who knows what three-phase power is? Who know that most industrial equipment is three-phase? Who knows what happens to a three-phase motor when a phase drops? It’ll burn up the motor, so industry stops during the brown out. Everybody is on the smart-grid. The electric suppliers can shut down any neighborhood they choose. If we have brown outs and black outs now, what happens at night when the grid can’t furnish the power. Shut off that air conditioner or charge your car, or do neither. It’s about choices. Since you know its coming, just shut off the air now. Just do it, because the earth is warming. You know it is, you say it is, so stop preaching and just do the right thing. Shut off the air conditioner NOW! Save the planet.
They’re stopping natural gas appliances and furnaces. All will rely on the electric grid. They’re stopping internal combustion vehicles. Every internal combustion vehicle will become obsolete. It will sit in a junk yard leaching fossil fuel residue. Every mechanic and the tools will be rendered useless. Convert or die. The batteries, where are they going to go after depleted, and when the landfills are overwhelmed, how long before the ocean will become the dumping ground. Oh, we’ll never do that. The way we keep foreign countries from dumping “the recycled” plastic into the oceans.
Plastic bags were the answer to saving trees. Now some of the same people say use trees, the renewable resource, because plastic bags last 1,000 years - that’s a lie. I had plastic grocery bags in a cabinet. The most recent bags were used for putting garbage out. Now I have to buy bags for garbage liners. The paper bags rip, spilling glass containers onto my concrete steps. But the real truth about plastic bags came when I cleared the old plastic bags out of storage in the bottom of the dark recess of the cabinet: they disintegrated, virtually turned to powder. I needed to sweep them up with a dustpan. It took about two years to expose the lifespan of a grocery bags as “a bald-faced lie!” I prefer my “Blue Ruin” in a plastic bottle so if I trip and can’t get up, it won’t cut me to ribbons as I roll around in glass shards trying to get back up.
I don’t like lies. I tolerate stupidity, but detest a lie. I view duplicity the same. I have no doubt that many advocates of green energy are fully sincere. At times the duplicity is overwhelming! Especially when you see elected officials tell you that “you must curb the population - have fewer children.” Then they open borders because we don’t have enough employees to fill job, while they suggest paying people not to work. Wages doubled, yet people still won’t work, so we have to bring in ousiders, under indentured servitude, to work for half the wage. My kids put themselves through school by working full time, part-time, sometimes multiple jobs. Some kids I know went into the trades and are killing it. Now they need to cover some ideologue’s college tuition, when the complaint becomes: not enough jobs for college grads - well thats becsuse you need a masters or PhD, to do what? Manage a Burger King!
The system offers the same opportunity as the Coal Miner’s “company store”. It’s just another form of control. Our representatives preach Green Green, but they sell off control of resources to countries hostile to US interests. Food production goes overseas, while legislators reap stock dividends for being on the ground floor of offering favored nation status and diversifying their portfolios. Allow foreign powers to buy up farmlands around military sites. Whether following the party line mantra or being aware of behind the scenes deals give, results in two different points of view. Perception is reality for some; ignorance of reality is no excuse, but it’s often easier to counter dissenting views with accusations of being a conspiracy dupe.
I might be a skeptic, but I’m not a denier.
I have a suggestion. The incadecent light bulb serve well for years. The cfc bulbs were shoved down our throat. The cost of the LED light was insane, but what eventually sold them was the innovation. Prices dropped and rather than simply selecting a bulb based on lumens and color temperature, I found units that allowed temperature to be selected using a switch. Research and development leading to innovation and lower price. Capitalism may have created a problem, but it’s the best way to create a better mousetrap.
What are we going to do when the electric grid becomes a single point failure; when California can no longer connect to the power grid supplied by fossil fuel; when we no longer have natural gas heat or stoves; when a sun spot knocks the system off line.
I belly laughed when on a business trip to Tampa, FL. Walking the street in Ybor City, Little Havana. All the shops and vendors had their double doors open to the street. Air conditioning pouring out into the streets to invite customers, and our utility provider tells us to set the cooling temperature between 78° and 82°.
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Luckily, Castoff is in the mountains. Wish I was with him. He’s really a funny guy if you can keep him off climate.
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I think a paddle recommendation is fitting here. Not good with compound strokes but really grabs the water.
Castoff also does very nice wood burnings on paddles and boats
During 1897, the remarks of Charley Dudley Warner, editor of the Hartfort Courant were referenced " . . . concerning New England weather, its a matter about which a great deal is said, but very little done.
I find it horrific that some overwrought zealot thinks that the answer lies in blocking sunlight, which I find as useful as loadstone levitated islands, breeding the meanness out of African honey bees, or in benefiting humanity from gain-of-function research using bat virus.
I have no idea of my carbon footprint. I make every effort to mitigate it by the most economical means. The most noxious of my caron footprint is whisked away to a processing lab through a dedicated conduit. It’s my understanding that the remains are converted to useable by products or otherwise returned to nature. All courtesy of an engineering marvel called the “golden eggs”. That’s progress! Hope them bugs don’t get out - they might consume the world.
It’s one river I haven’t paddled; it has a familiar scent.
Castoff might be funnier after a pilgrimage in the mountains. My recent trip was threaputic and restorative. Nothing like pastel skies to salve the inner spirit. Its hard to gaze at receding hills, bathed in pink as they merge with the sky, and harbour animas.
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“… you’ll see that it suggests human-caused environmental degradation is real…”
Ah, there’s the true scientific method at work. Read any published study and you will find all sorts of qualifiers in the conclusions. “For the population studied, under these conditions, the data suggests that these outcomes are likely”. And then of course there’s the sticky issue of the growing number of retracted papers. The retractions never seem to get the publicity that the original flawed study achieved, especially when media such as The NY Times consistently gives headlines to papers that have yet to be peer reviewed.
This is what the non-scientists of the world don’t get. Science is not now and never was, to be conclusions handed down on stone tablets by degreed persons of letter. Science should not be treated as a religion, which is too often the case. Every day, a researcher will look out a different window or pick up a new rock (and find a scorpion!) and have an ah-ha! moment that can change what only yesterday we would debate to breathlessness.
My physical anthropology prof said in class one day something that I have carried with me ever since: “There are no capital ‘T’ truths in biology; there are only little ‘t’ truths. And those are only true until someone comes along and proves them false.” There is no better definition of the journey science is meant to be. Only with an open mind and an understanding of what scientific conclusions actually represent can science be held in esteem without demanding slave like devotion to its conclusions. You can’t judge a paper by it’s abstract.
To quote Darwin: “I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”
Put another way by a more modern author: “But sometimes what we call conventional Western science is in fact scientism. Scientism being this notion that Western science is the only way to truth. It’s a powerful way to truth, but there are other ways, too. Traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous science, is a more holistic way of knowing.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of “Braiding Sweetgrass”
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Well said KB.
Many (maybe most) people don’t understand that science is a process of incremental advances that leads to a better understanding of the problem(s) at hand. Instead, they’re looking for that one big discovery that will stop global warming, cure cancer, create endless clean energy, and fix whatever else needs fixing. But at the same time, they don’t want to pay for good science with public funds and are first in line to blast privately funded research as biased. The fact that scientific inquiry is a process and not a race to a well-marked finish line is just not acceptable to the instant gratification crowd on social media.
As William F. Buckley, Jr. (founder of the National Review) said:
“… in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth."
And somewhere along the line we’ve raised a generation that sees the world with a binary mindset … good or evil … right or wrong … black or white. They’re unable or unwilling to accept ambiguity. Which reminds me of another quote:
“Some poems don’t rhyme.” (Gilda Radner)
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People are more comfortable in black and white worlds. Those spaces are easy because you are among likeminded people. This is the social media driven silo that too many rely upon for information. Gray areas are more complicated and require engaging with people who disagree with your point of view. Social media has eroded civil exchange.
Public funding would increase the amount of research done, maybe solve the problem of private funding skewing research results. But then, you’d have government deciding what research should be done and I’m not sure that wouldn’t create it’s own problems. I have many friends who used to work at EPA and CDC. They were in the trenches and saw what needed to be done yet the head honchos reined them in because the congressional finance committees didn’t want to lose campaign contributions from Big (fill in the blank) - Pharma, Ag, Oil, Coal, Auto or name a corporation.
To bring this back around to climate change, look at the push back against solar panel and wind farm installations in various parts of the country. The Clean Energy Future Is Roiling Both Friends and Foes - The New York Times.
Who gets to decide what area takes the hit for developing these projects? Who is willing to have their property value or their quiet disrupted by the thrum of turbines? How much farm land (that should be raising food) or untouched wild acres (that should be supporting pollinators) should be sacrificed for solar panel instillations?
What’s the cost for obtaining all that lithium, nickel, copper and cadmium needed for the electric future that’s supposed to save us all? We either have to rape ecosystems the way coal mountaintopped WV or make deals with countries who have abysmal human rights records.
Humans keep making decisions that take us from bad to worse.
"Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.” Mark Twain
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I think all the oil property has been bought up. The only way for new money is to discredit fossil fuel and get in on the ground floor with green . Now everybody know green is good. Green is smart. If you own the green resources, you’ll be suspect. Make the resources available to new markets and invest in them, you can reap the benefits without looking like a manipulator.
You squeeze the money out of the oil barons and line your pockets. Its called having your cake and eating
it too! Politicians are a narcissistic lot. There’s nothing better to a narcissist than than fabricating a popular uprisising to reorder economic holdings and impose social control over minions. Even if global warming is an imminent threat, neither the fossil fuel nor green goblins intend to fix it, the goal is to ultimately control us the way the coal companies lorded over my ancestors in Western Pennsylvania. The mistake is believing that anyone is really working to solve it. Colleges are getting rich with a new School of Green Technology. All we got to do is get Congress to pass free tuition so welders, carpenters, plumbers,gricery store clerks and McDonald line order cooks can afford the new taxes on their $15.00 minimum wage jobs. Did somebody say follow the money.
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Here is a current article that basically says the Inflation Reduction Act is not reducing inflation and according to President Biden, was never really intended too. Quote:
“I wish I hadn’t called it that because it has less to do with reducing inflation than it has to do with providing alternatives that generate economic growth,” Biden said Thursday at a fundraiser in Utah, adding that he still believes that with the law “we’re literally reducing the cost of people being able to meet their basic needs.”
Kind of contradicts himself with that but that is what he said, per the AP.
Yes, inflation is down. No, the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t deserve the credit | AP News
I saw that this morning too, and the graph I posted awhile back agrees with the AP story. If inflation peaked at about the same time the IRA took effect, it’s pretty clear the conditions needed for declining inflation were already baked into the economy and not due directly to the Act. It’s equally clear, however, that the IRA did not cause inflation.
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I would say it is too soon to know… as the article states the act is just now beginning to be implemented. It is also very unlikely that it will have “prices to explode upward as Republicans had claimed it would.” But that does not mean there will be no impact on inflation.
They officially admitted that.