The march is the prelude to a UN meeting starting Monday. The President will be in town, as will many other world leaders. The purpose, therefore, is to show that there is real support in getting some type of agreement together. This is a classical political maneuver. The march fits within a broader context.
A clueless post. See above.
Red Squirrel
No Lifer
Not a single protest or vote or anything will accomplish anything, but it still does not hurt to do it anyway to try to raise some awareness. This is is a much better cause then silly "gay pride" parades that seem to be all the rage these days. Just a bunch of hipsters protesting about nothing. At least this is a real cause for a real problem.
But regardless of what people do, the government has it's own agenda and will not change stuff just because people ask. However raising awareness can at least help make other people try to be more green and think more of the environment. Unfortunately there is not much we can do about big oil and other government run operations that are the real killer.
But regardless of what people do, the government has it's own agenda and will not change stuff just because people ask. However raising awareness can at least help make other people try to be more green and think more of the environment. Unfortunately there is not much we can do about big oil and other government run operations that are the real killer.
These UN agreements do really have an impact. Like the one on CFCS in the late 1970s, for example. Also, I went to check out the march on my Citibike. Lots of families with baby strollers, along with the hippies and politicians. It was a nice scene. People really do care about stuff like this. Assholes in this thread making fun of this are no better than the deniers who question science or think they're cool by denigrating those who actually give a damn about climate change.
mmntech
Lifer
- Sep 20, 2007
- 17,501
- 12
- 0
The problem with the climate movement is that people are thinking based on emotions rather than logic. Which is rather ironic from a group that claims they listen to science above all else.
Currently, the only solution they can seem to come up with is either taxing carbon or selling carbon credits. Government based solutions tend to get mired in bureaucracy, and the money rarely gets spent on anything that benefits the average citizen. Anybody who thinks government has their best interest in mind is a damned fool.
Making people pay more for carbon use isn't going to reduce emissions. People still have to get to work, industry still needs to transport goods and services so people have jobs to go to. The more you make them pay, the less they have to spend on other things as the prices of staple goods go up. Thus lowering quality of life. Which is bad enough as is in the west, it could be devastating in developing countries.
The alternative to oil use is to seek out alternative forms of energy. For the environmental crowd, this means renewable sources like wind, solar, and tidal. However, those sources of energy have one fundamental flaw: they can't dynamically vary output. There's a delicate equilibrium between production and consumption that has to be maintained. Industrially generated electricity cannot be stored. You'd need a battery bigger than an aircraft carrier to power a small town. So systems have to be taken offline when they're generating too much electricity, and brownouts become a problem when they're generating too little. Home based solar is cost prohibitive as well for most families, even with subsidies. Yet it doesn't completely replace the need for industrial generation. Nor can renewable energy power large ships or jet aircraft. I don't think anybody wants to go back to the time when it took a month to cross the Atlantic.
Hydrogen is another option. However, it's cost prohibitive to produce. There's probably some unforeseen environmental effects from converting all that seawater to fuel. What about countries that only have fresh water resources?
Microwave power? Mostly sci-fi. I know Japan wants to try it. However, it took us 15 years to build a football field sized space station. Let alone a solar array big enough to power a city. It would make energy costs go through the roof just to pay for construction. Space launches aren't cheap. Especially now since the US doesn't exactly have a space program.
Nuclear is a good all around choice. We've gotten very good at fission and we're starting to understand the process needed for fusion. Yet environmentalists freak out about meltdowns. Yet there have only been two major accidents since it was invented 1951. One caused by gross negligence and complete disregard for safeguards by a corrupt government. The other caused by an unprecedented natural disaster. Given how much energy is safely generated every year without issue, it's a damn good record. Yet films like the China Syndrome continue to corrupt people's minds on a perfectly safe and emissions free source of mass power generation.
So what's left? Consume less energy? Are you going to give up your cellphone? Go back to pre-industrial quality of live? Or do we let technology run its course? Oil is getting expensive and people are already exploring ways to wean us off that. Just look at what Tesla is doing. Necessity drives innovation. Not government meddling or crowds of climate alarmists. They're just a bunch of fools with a cause and no solution.
TL;DR
-Alarmists aren't putting forth solutions that don't involve taxing us to death
-Technology will run its course and slowly wean us off hydrocarbons. There's no quick fix.
-Necessity is driving this innovation, not alarmists or government.
Currently, the only solution they can seem to come up with is either taxing carbon or selling carbon credits. Government based solutions tend to get mired in bureaucracy, and the money rarely gets spent on anything that benefits the average citizen. Anybody who thinks government has their best interest in mind is a damned fool.
Making people pay more for carbon use isn't going to reduce emissions. People still have to get to work, industry still needs to transport goods and services so people have jobs to go to. The more you make them pay, the less they have to spend on other things as the prices of staple goods go up. Thus lowering quality of life. Which is bad enough as is in the west, it could be devastating in developing countries.
The alternative to oil use is to seek out alternative forms of energy. For the environmental crowd, this means renewable sources like wind, solar, and tidal. However, those sources of energy have one fundamental flaw: they can't dynamically vary output. There's a delicate equilibrium between production and consumption that has to be maintained. Industrially generated electricity cannot be stored. You'd need a battery bigger than an aircraft carrier to power a small town. So systems have to be taken offline when they're generating too much electricity, and brownouts become a problem when they're generating too little. Home based solar is cost prohibitive as well for most families, even with subsidies. Yet it doesn't completely replace the need for industrial generation. Nor can renewable energy power large ships or jet aircraft. I don't think anybody wants to go back to the time when it took a month to cross the Atlantic.
Hydrogen is another option. However, it's cost prohibitive to produce. There's probably some unforeseen environmental effects from converting all that seawater to fuel. What about countries that only have fresh water resources?
Microwave power? Mostly sci-fi. I know Japan wants to try it. However, it took us 15 years to build a football field sized space station. Let alone a solar array big enough to power a city. It would make energy costs go through the roof just to pay for construction. Space launches aren't cheap. Especially now since the US doesn't exactly have a space program.
Nuclear is a good all around choice. We've gotten very good at fission and we're starting to understand the process needed for fusion. Yet environmentalists freak out about meltdowns. Yet there have only been two major accidents since it was invented 1951. One caused by gross negligence and complete disregard for safeguards by a corrupt government. The other caused by an unprecedented natural disaster. Given how much energy is safely generated every year without issue, it's a damn good record. Yet films like the China Syndrome continue to corrupt people's minds on a perfectly safe and emissions free source of mass power generation.
So what's left? Consume less energy? Are you going to give up your cellphone? Go back to pre-industrial quality of live? Or do we let technology run its course? Oil is getting expensive and people are already exploring ways to wean us off that. Just look at what Tesla is doing. Necessity drives innovation. Not government meddling or crowds of climate alarmists. They're just a bunch of fools with a cause and no solution.
TL;DR
-Alarmists aren't putting forth solutions that don't involve taxing us to death
-Technology will run its course and slowly wean us off hydrocarbons. There's no quick fix.
-Necessity is driving this innovation, not alarmists or government.
I think the solution is to develop systems that recycle CO2 into petroleum feedstocks, either through biosynthetic generation (recombinant algae or the like) or chemical catalysis, which I think several groups are working on. That would pretty much solve the whole problem, and not render trillions of dollars of infrastructure worthless.
The only actual solution is to not participate in the economy at all until the technology gets to the point where all our energy and production is close to zero impact... anything else is a (practical or pragmatic as it may be) compromise.
Anyone who is helping to advance education and science - or to ensure that civilization survives and isn't morally bankrupt and too greedy to care about the environment until we get to that point - is doing their part. I personally don't think a march is an effective use of my own time or skills, but I'm not someone who is really attracted to political or social movements like this. To each his own.
Anyone who is helping to advance education and science - or to ensure that civilization survives and isn't morally bankrupt and too greedy to care about the environment until we get to that point - is doing their part. I personally don't think a march is an effective use of my own time or skills, but I'm not someone who is really attracted to political or social movements like this. To each his own.
Not sure why you think that, but projecting such opinions seems to be a common issue in climate science discussions.
That's not really true. There's a lot more ideas than that, but taxing it is actually a more elegant attempt and one that's intending to remove the political nature of the topic. Economists are actually the ones behind that anyway, as it's an obvious case of externalities. The tax is not really about raising money for the government, it's about forcing real economic costs on things that have negative impacts that aren't factored into the costs normally. That absolutely irrefutably changes behavior and is exactly why it's being brought up because it has proven to be effective. The problem is it's actually very minor so far (meaning it's not enough to actual cause meaningful changes that it should be, so it just turned into a system where investors can cheat it; we need both tax and enforcement of other policies to force the changes we need to see).
Yes it will as people will change their habits. No it won't get people counting carbon (which the point of the tax is that it isn't about stuff like that and becomes a purely economic issue), but it will get them to adjust (look at how quickly average fuel economy changed over the last decade). I'd have to actually look into the projected economics, but I'd hazard a guess that the argument that it'll suddenly tax everyone to death and ruin the economy and everything else are horribly overblown, it's a common boogeyman by a certain political group that uses it as its "appeal to logic" argument after all of their others fail. Plus, if we're going to focus on the fiscal aspect, it's less costly to plan ahead than to try to fix the mess later.
Yes, it will be a gradual change, but when you have people in power trying to prevent advancement of using and improving technology, then you won't see the progress you normally would. Alternative energy is going up against a fossil fuel industry that sees more government help and protection. People decry "green subsidies" while acting like the industries it's up against aren't subsidized to hell and back (and/or weren't).
The US does have a space program. Funny you should mention that actually since that's a poster child for why the government shouldn't be cost cutting science R&D like it has been and should be finding ways of increasing their funding so that it's not a joke. Oh, and NASA is part of the government, are you seriously arguing they've not innovated anything?
Stop projecting everyone as being anti-nuclear just because they're not climate change deniers. The problem with nuclear isn't even environmentalists, it's been politicians.
Give up a cellphone? You do realize these smaller more energy efficient computers could actually provide a major benefit in energy consumption, right? You act like the only options are to just totally give up or sit and twiddle our thumbs waiting for some company to magically solve this stuff. Nevermind most companies won't/can't make business cases for a lot of the things you act like they'd resolve (fusion research for instance). Funding research into this stuff is exactly something that people concerned about the climate have been pushing for. (That's another "solution" by the way.) You do realize Tesla received large government subsidies, right? Necessity doesn't drive innovation when companies' focus is making money, otherwise oil companies would be pumping all of their profits directly into alternative energy (since they know their resource is finite and their costs to find it and process it are escalating).
Government meddling is exactly what is necessary here as it's the only institution that has the power to do anything about it.
Yet your solution is to just ignore it which will almost certainly cost orders of magnitude more in the long run? Talk about fools with no solutions.
I don't really know what trillion dollar infrastructure you think whatever else would leave worthless, but I don't think those are anywhere close to accomplishing what you suggest (solve the whole problem), and they're still in their relative infancy as far as development. It's an area that holds promise but is a long way from being a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
John Connor
Lifer
- Nov 30, 2012
- 22,757
- 617
- 121
khon
Golden Member
- Jun 8, 2010
- 1,318
- 124
- 106
John Connor
Lifer
- Nov 30, 2012
- 22,757
- 617
- 121
Sinsear
Diamond Member
- Jan 13, 2007
- 6,439
- 80
- 91
Yeah, how dare they care about both the environment and the poor ? Fucking losers!
Just as i figured, same losers.
John Connor
Lifer
- Nov 30, 2012
- 22,757
- 617
- 121
Honestly. There are bigger issues like the NSA butt fucking the average joe and government screw overs to bitch about rather than the damn climate. If level headed people would just focus on that we wouldn't have so much BS from the government.
khon
Golden Member
- Jun 8, 2010
- 1,318
- 124
- 106
I dislike NSA violations of privacy as much as anyone, but that is a tiny issue compared to the climate.
For example, have you ever seen a map of Louisiana over time ? They are losing 17 square miles per year to rising sea levels. That's not some wild projection for the future, it is the measured average from 1985 to 2010, and it's only going to get worse.
If ISIS took over 1 square foot of US soil everyone's head would explode, but when you lose 17 square miles per year in just one state, noone seems to give a shit.
John Connor
Lifer
- Nov 30, 2012
- 22,757
- 617
- 121
Matt1970
Lifer
- Mar 19, 2007
- 12,320
- 3
- 0
To make America as clean as possible. It will make everything more expensive, but that's ok, we will just buy our stuff from nations that basically lay waste to their environments.
Linflas
Lifer
- Jan 30, 2001
- 15,395
- 78
- 91
- Jun 19, 2006
- 18,574
- 7,671
- 136
- Jun 19, 2006
- 18,574
- 7,671
- 136
- Jun 19, 2006
- 18,574
- 7,671
- 136
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