Proposal For United Nations To Study Climate-Cooling Technologies Rejected (reuters.com) 241
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A push to launch a high-level study of potentially risky technological fixes to curb climate change was abandoned on Thursday at a U.N. environmental conference in Nairobi, as countries including the United States raised objections. "Geoengineering" technologies, which are gaining prominence as international efforts to curb climate-changing emissions fall short, aim to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or block some of the sun's warmth to cool the Earth. They could help fend off some of the worst impacts of runaway climate change, including worsening storms and heatwaves, backers say. But opponents argue the emerging technologies pose huge potential risks to people and nature, and could undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not least because many are backed by fossil-fuel interests. Observers at the U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi said the Swiss-backed proposal was rejected in part because it called for a "precautionary principle" approach to geoengineering the climate. That principle says great care must be taken in starting activities that have unclear risks for human health or the environment. The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
No.... just no. (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction. You solve it by doing things in a balanced way from now on so that over time, the net result is balanced.
It's not like Lincoln said "okay, that's enough with black slavery, let's make the white man be slaves for a couple of centuries to balance things out"
You fix a problem by doing the right thing, today, and moving forward.
In this particular case, it means passing laws which put stricter limits on emissions than what currently exist, so that manufacturers are forced (yes forced, because as much as we might want them to, they aren't going to do it entirely voluntarily... or certainly not at the speeds that are required) to innovate and come up with long term environmentally friendly solutions to the problems that we are facing.
Re:To study Geoengineering. (Score:3)
The UN has plans for fighting global warming... (Score:1)
The UN already has plans for fighting global warming... This idea of using technology to counter-act global warming runs afoul of their preferred plan: Agenda 21 (depopulate the humans).
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The problem is that climate change has become totally politicized. It wasn't always this way. In 2007, a debate moderator asked the Republican candidates if they thought climate change was a "serious problem". All but Fred Thompson agreed. That is unimaginable today. Denialism has become a right wing litmus test.
The left isn't much better. They mostly see climate change as an opportunity to push an agenda for taxes, coercive big government, and centralization. So they reject even considering solution
Re:To study Geoengineering. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Um, no. The left does not fear that climate change will have a good solution. You're just being silly.
I don't think so. It is not just geo-engineering that the left opposes. They are also opposed to carbon sequestration [wikipedia.org] and nuclear. Both of these use our existing industrial infrastructure, and don't require any big new government initiatives. The economics of building new nukes is questionable, but shutting down working existing nukes was insane.
The left loves big coercive new initiatives. Yet most of the progress that we have made so far, such as LED bulbs, efficient variable speed motors, better insul
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They are also opposed to carbon sequestration [wikipedia.org] and nuclear. Both of these use our existing industrial infrastructure, and don't require any big new government initiatives
How, exactly, do you plan on widespread carbon sequestration without a government initiative making it profitable?
Also, nuclear requires a government initiative to deal with the waste since the government is required to deal with it by law. Also, it requires a new government initiative in the form of massive subsidies to make nuclear profitable.
Re: To study Geoengineering. (Score:5, Informative)
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Wind turbines don't provide consistent energy.
That is true locally, but not if they are widely disbursed. The wind is always blowing somewhere.
The winds are stronger and steadier at greater heights, so taller turbines produce more reliable power.
Offshore wind is very reliable. Above about about 35N, ocean winds never stop.
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.That completely ignores that there are storage techniques.
The problem is that the costs of storage negate many of the benefits of wind.
We need better storage tech, but we should also be building a national HVDC network.
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Atmospheric carbon dioxide sequestration is not a very good solution
Indeed. But that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about sequestration of highly concentrated CO2 coming directly out of power plants and cement factories.
Using Oxy-fuel combustion [wikipedia.org], which removes the N2 before burning, results in almost pure CO2 in the exhaust. The CO2 can then either be injected into geological shale formations, or sold as an industrial feedstock.
If it the CO2 is injected, it can improve the yield from shale gas fields, which results in even more CO2 reduction as the chea
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displacing much dirtier coal with cheap gas is not a CO2 reduction
Yes it is. Gas has twice the energy per kg of carbon emission.
In America, replacing coal with gas has done more to reduce carbon emissions than everything else that we have done combined.
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A very small but visible segment of the left does fear a good solution. They're the homeopathic types who see climate change as a sort of Earth goddress retribution for technology, through the lens of their back-to-nature values. They want the only solution to be the end of industry and return to a fantasy idyllic native american tribal balance with nature.
I certainly wouldn't say they have any political sway in the democratic party, though.
Re: To study Geoengineering. (Score:2)
Re: To study Geoengineering. (Score:2)
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Just look at the New Green Deal. It's ostensibly about climate, but almost entirely about social justice, communism, and the destruction of America as a world power.
Yes, but surely it has SOME downside?
*rimshot*
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The original New Deal, Roosevelt’s plan, included massive hydro projects that generations later are still the best renewable energy sources we have. It also summoned nuclear energy into being, the largest-scale carbon free source that we can still apply today.
The Green New Deal explicitly rejects both technologies, which is why it’s not going to save us any carbon. At best it will create some make-work jobs for wind turbine builders.
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Seconded. If you want the country to become ‘woke’ on the carbon problem, then you might want to try not automatically rejecting every technology that might work at scale.
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Who is 'automatically rejecting every technology that might work at scale'?
The participants in the UN conference in Nairobi, for starters.
Climate change is a serious issue, and no potential solution should be summarily rejected for political reasons.
It is reasonable to oppose geo-engineering, since we don't yet know enough about the consequences.
It is NOT reasonable to oppose scientific research on geo-engineering out of fear that it may actually work well.
Re:To study Geoengineering. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and in order to gain that knowledge you must... NOT study it?
They didn't vote down implementing technologies, they voted down gaining knowledge.
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Of course the need to vote against gaining knowledge because it has a well known liberal bias.
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What would you study? We're already at the point where all that's left would be implementing it, and studying the results.
That implementation has a potential for massive disaster, and is unlikely to produce a feasible clean-up system - none of the proposals are efficient enough to do at sufficient scale to actually fix climate change.
So, huge potential downside affecting vast numbers of people. Tiny potential upside. The alternative, "reduce emissions and stop clear cutting everything", has very little r
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Pollution is bad, regardless of the long term impacts on the planet. I've been to Beijing, the orange haze is nasty.
We should be pushing technologies that eliminate the largest portion of pollutants.
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You can not get a full understanding without doing it. And doing it has an enormous potential for disaster.
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Who can pay more and more for energy?
The cost of energy would be such a burden the private sector would move to another nation.
Productive private sector production lines need to run 24/7 with a very low energy cost.
No night time, day time energy costs changes.
No getting told that doing summer their nation can't do low cost energy 24/7.
For growth, jobs and winning experts, energy prices have to be lower.
Forced changes to energy prices just moves jobs to more understandin
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What happens when the only "understanding" nations left are the extra-friendly-to-the-free-market ones like North Korea, Syria, Russia...Yemen, maybe...?
Re:No.... just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
You have my sympathies on this one, but actually we're fucked. The jamming has been successful, nothing is happening fast enough to really get emissions under control, and when Miami is underwater you're going to see a panic to Do Something about this problem, and then we're going to do some of the quickest and dirtiest shit you can imagine (like, think blowing sulfides into the upper atmosphere with nuclear explosions).
No one sane wants to roll the dice on geoengineering to ameliorate global warming, but really that is what we're going to do, and it would be a good idea to start doing some research on the techniques now, in hopes of dodging some of the worst ideas.
I would be happy to be proved wrong about this prediction, but what we're actually seeing is the right is still in denial about the problem and the left is in denial about the solutions (we can do it all with renewables! In fact the problems have already been solved! Just sit back and watch the juggernaut of green technology conquer the world!) and the middle of the road folks aren't paying any attention because gas prices are down, so obviously there's no problems anywhere.
Re: No.... just no. (Score:2, Informative)
"When Miami is under water..."
You mean back in 2015, according to An Inconvenient Truth and other bullshit you ate up?
Re: No.... just no. (Score:4, Insightful)
You know you've completely lost any ability to distinguish fact from fiction when you start citing movies as evidence in a scientific debtate.
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You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction.
Yes, that's actually exactly how you fix a problem. If you accept that there is a problem then cutbacks and regulations won't do it, we've been doing those for half a century with no noticeable impact whatsoever. If the end is truly nigh as basically every climate change spokesperson for decades has been saying then we have two options: accept it and die like animals, or embrace our Humanity and fix the fucking problem.
Re:No.... just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
cutbacks and regulations won't do it, we've been doing those for half a century with no noticeable impact whatsoever
Oh, please, there have not been doing serious cutbacks and regulations. Where there were - like the problem with the ozone hole, cutting back on the emissions at the source of the problem up to the point of eliminating them has had a most noticeable impact.
Here the same approach would work well, except for the selfishness of those who shirk the responsibility for their contribution to it.
Re:No.... just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws are not all tyranny. Denying that is delusion. Burning fossils to obtain power or transportation is NOT an "immutable law" in our world. Practical solutions exist, and impractical super-greedy obstacles called corporate oil industry profits stand in the way. These are cartels that you're allowing to be in charge of weaning you off their heroin.
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You mean enforcing laws doesn't work?
Okay...I am guessing you have never been outside of the US or if you have been it was Canada or the Bahamas. How are you going to convince some guy in Pakistan not to cook with propane when it is the only method he can afford and his kids will starve if he doesn't? You could stick an AK47 in his face, but you'll have to stand there pointing it at him until you both die. Do you see the problem?
You can't enforce zero CO2 emissions without a world police state that makes North Korea seem like an Ayn Rand laiss
Re:No.... just no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't use big words like "tyranny" or "immutable" if you don't know their meaning.
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A "tyranny" is an authoritarian regime in which the power of the state is unchecked and vested into the tyrant. A democratic government with a democratic legislative process is the precise opposite of tyranny, because the outcome of this process involves the whole society, and the process is to a very large degree of negotiation, and not of coercion.
You cannot expect that every individual in a large society will agree to the precise legislative outcome, but acceptance of a democratically enacted law while d
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That's because the 2nd amendment is the opposite of tyranny.
Didn't you just say that forcing people to accept a law they don't like is "tyranny"? Yeah, you did, but only if it is a law you don't like. You've got a bit of a problem with what words mean, as I told you already. And you're, err, "intellectually dishonest", you don't apply your critique to your own arguments.
So, yeah, a typical aynrandian.
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The 2nd amendment isn't forcing people to accept something,
Yes, it is. It forced a friend of mine to put up with armed-to-the-teeth gunnut neighbors, who shot at his house twice some years ago, hurting his kid. He would much rather have a law that does not give random idiots the tools to attack him and his family from a great distance with a deadly force for no good reason, but he's out of luck. The law is such that he is oppressed by the tyranny of gun ownership, without any benefits from it for him, or
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I would recommend shooting back next time.
He's not interested in shooting back. He's interested in not having idiots next door who are armed to the teeth. Shooting back will not solve this problem, or the problem of the tyranny of the law that allows it.
it's there to be able to stop the government from imposing tyranny
LOL. How does that work? "Your" government has already imposed a tyranny on you. As some other liberatarian helpfully explained here [slashdot.org], all your laws are "tyrannical", because you're not their
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paper has any bearing on your freedom
It is not "the paper" that has bearing on your fredumz, silly.
It is the social contract written on the paper and accepted by the society that has a bearing. It is the acceptance of these rules by the society that gives them power, because the society invests a part of its resources into a political system that tries to enforce the rules, including the "fredumz" (and limitations) that are defined in the said contract.
Without it, your "fredumz" are limited to the strength
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It's been going on for decades because people have been educated for decades to behave in ways that enable the problem to happen. I'd argue that if people can be educated to be selfish or indifferent or apathetic at the expense of the environment, then they can similarly be educated to think and act in ways that benefit the environment. A little empathy and compassion is contagious and can go a long way towards changing the collective mindset of a culture.
I'm not saying that you couldn't engineer a solution
Re: No.... just no. (Score:2)
Re:No.... just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
The harsh fact is that getting 200 countries to cooperate to stop emissions is probably impossible. Whereas it only takes one country to fund geoengineering.
Right now is obviously too early to turn to implement risky geoengineering strategies, but right now is definitely the time to study them, which was what the proposal was about. If we put off the studying until we're already in a serious crisis, it'll be too late for the decades of study needed to produce anything in time to prevent catastrophe.
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but right now is definitely the time to study them, which was what the proposal was about.
This proposal was to start implementing them so that you could study the results.
Implementing geoenginering with no real idea of the side effects, in order to find out what those side-effects are, is a very, very, very bad idea.
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The thing is, "doing things in a balanced way" to keep things "balanced"?
We're being told that "We're already fucked!"
So we need something that will tip it BACK towards a "safer" or "saner" balance point.
So, all the enviro-twatwaffles need to make up their mind.
People are NOT simply going to turn over all control and authority to world governments.
It's just not gonna happen.
So, socially engineering people to live in caves and eat grass ain't happening.
Nor is demanding that people not have kids.
In most of th
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Okay, so genociding most of the human population it is then?
Because I thought the plan was to economically lift most of the developing world out of poverty and increase their standards of living and natural resource consumption. If we are going to do that no level of conservation can prevent massive increases in deforestation and CO2 emissions going forward, unless we have some kind of singularity and get Star Trek level replicators.
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Development to western levels improves forest cover. Most of the western nations are adding forest, not removing it. Developed countries with sane agricultural practices don't do things like slash and burn.
Most developing countries are located where non-carbon energy sources, particularly solar, are quite practical, and again, they're mostly taking that route and skipping the dirty industrial path the west went through. Developing clean energy sources also eliminates things like household coal, wood and cha
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Most developing countries are located where non-carbon energy sources, particularly solar, are quite practical, and again, they're mostly taking that route and skipping the dirty industrial path the west went through.
I live in a developing 3rd world country and I am not seeing any of this. Citation desperately needed. PV panels are too expensive for most developing countries and how do you store the energy when the sun goes down?
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>You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction. You solve it by doing things in a balanced way from now on so that over time, the net result is balanced.
You don't avoid a crash by stepping on the brakes or turning the wheel in the other direction! You just take your foot of the gas, go limp and hope everything works out!
We're already at the point where natural processes are starting to take hold that will continue to warm the planet even if all human activity were to stop t
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Lincoln also didn't say "okay, let's stop enslaving people going forward, and eventually the number of slaves will naturally drop until we're slave free!"
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If carbon is as big a problem as climate researchers claim it is, we need to apply both approaches at the same time: emit less carbon, and sequester some of our earlier emissions. Only when the world stops emitting new carbon into the system can we stop sequestering.
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You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction. You solve it by doing things in a balanced way from now on so that over time, the net result is balanced.
That will never ever work on certain systems, which have built-in unbalancing effects. And it won't work fast enough on other systems. So that's the best procedure to use in the best case, but it isn't a law.
It's not like Lincoln said "okay, that's enough with black slavery, let's make the white man be slaves for a couple of centuries to balance things out"
If they had paid just reparations back then, we wouldn't be hearing about demands for reparations now. And if just ending slavery had solved the problem, we wouldn't have affirmative action now. But since nothing was done to bridge the gap created by all the years of slavery, black people are still at a
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We're getting a bit OT, but I think affirmative action is B.S. too... it just perpetuates racial discrimination which is what kept slavery alive in the US for as long as it was... long after virtually every other nation had outlawed it.
While it's probably true that simply freeing the slaves did not go far enough, I b
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When it turns out that human-caused warming is a small percentage of the warming, people are going to have to do geoengineering if they want the planet to stay cold.
They ought not do that, but the rich who own the coastal cities don't want to lose their investments and the people who want to centralize power and levy more taxes are happy to cooperate.
The people claiming "precaution" also stand to benefit from not cooling the planet (in their lifetimes).
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Except, now we have Affirmative Action, which is pretty much that some "you got turned away before so the other gets turned away now"
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You don't solve a problem by trying to tip the scales in the other direction. You solve it by doing things in a balanced way from now on so that over time, the net result is balanced.
It's not like Lincoln said "okay, that's enough with black slavery, let's make the white man be slaves for a couple of centuries to balance things out"
You fix a problem by doing the right thing, today, and moving forward.
I'm not sure that's the best example as it's ended up being pretty unfair to black people. Even if you ignore Jim Crow and all that and fast forward to the 60's when official discrimination ended being black still left you at a huge disadvantage.
It's not enough to just solve the problem, you need to start undoing the damage as well.
In this particular case, it means passing laws which put stricter limits on emissions than what currently exist, so that manufacturers are forced (yes forced, because as much as we might want them to, they aren't going to do it entirely voluntarily... or certainly not at the speeds that are required) to innovate and come up with long term environmentally friendly solutions to the problems that we are facing.
Yes you need to do that. But you also need to realize that even if we stopped emitting tomorrow the existing carbon in the atmosphere might have a lot of nasty warming built in.
W
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Tin foil? Hardly, more like a widely circulated news story, [newsweek.com] that one.
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If smoking causes cancer, but the cancer is curable, then why bother quitting smoking?
Utilizing mechanisms that will actually undo the environmental damages that we have caused ultimately gives license to continue to cause those damages, because if we can undo them, then there is less incentive to have to worry about the consequences of our actions.
The first thing we need have happen is pass laws which force manufacturers to make environmentally cleaner solutions, today, not 10 years from now. And it
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My point is that trying to undo the damage only gives further license to continue to cause it, because you are doing commensurately less net harm, and social and economical inertia will tend to keep people going in the direction that they are, presently. The only way I know of to overcome that inertia, I'm afraid, is with legal consequences for failure to do so.
Eventually, yes, some of the things you mention may very well have to be done, but if we don't fucking stop what we are doing first before we s
observation vs concept (Score:1)
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Californians....talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.
I don't think that's true haha. All I hear are complaints about those companies.
This is how you behave when (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't care about fixing a problem but forcing a preferred solution down people's throats.
You can see the same thing in the way nuclear isn't even a thought in the Green New Insanity.
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"You can see the same thing in the way nuclear isn't even a thought in the Green New Insanity." - Are you high? Nuclear is going under because the MARKET isn't viable anymore, mainly because renewables are cheaper and less involved.
You're basically advocating socialism to fund nuclear power. It's ironic you'd reference "Green New Insanity" while mindlessly advocating massive public spending anyway. You're not only a hypocrite, you're an idiot.
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"You can see the same thing in the way nuclear isn't even a thought in the Green New Insanity." - Are you high? Nuclear is going under because the MARKET isn't viable anymore, mainly because renewables are cheaper and less involved.
Due mostly to outright unrestrained barratry by the self-proclaimed "Greens". This is the "Erik and Lyle Menendez demand the Court's mercy because they are orphans" argument.
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Nuclear is going under because the MARKET isn't viable anymore, mainly because renewable are cheaper and less involved.
Wind is cheaper, as long as it is subsidized. However, since it IS subsidized AND it requires expensive storage to be useful just for a day, nuclear becomes MUCH MUCH cheaper. And even subsidized solar remains more expensive than Nuclear. And yes, I am a supporter of both.
Horse shit, wind is cheaper than coal un-subsidised and so is solar and both are giving natural gas a hard time. The LCOE of (advanced) nuclear in the US is 90 $/MWh, for conventional coal 100 $/MWh, for advanced natural gas plants was 40 $/MWh, onshore wind is at 42 $/MWh, Photovoltaic solar 48.8 $/MWh. These figures are according to the EIA, adjusted for inflation, without any subsidies. Onshore wind and solar are beating everything except natural gas.
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They are:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com]
The cost to run an existing coal plant, especially with subsidies, is less than it is to build a new solar or wind plant, so the existing ones keep chugging. But virtually all new development in the US was exactly what the OP said was the cheapest: wind, solar and natural gas.
Re: This is how you behave when (Score:2)
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Nobody is stopping you from investing time and money to solve the problem. But nobody's doing that seriously, I for one, have not heard of a realistic proposal, or for one without significant side effects for that matter.
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Consume less.
This is not a solution to the accumulated CO2 problem. Now, had you said "plant trees"... But then I've plant two every weekend since 1995.
This problem affects the entire planet. There is no isolating one variable here.
Judging by this completely meaningless diatribe, you're a bit on the dim side, so I'll repeat it for you: there are no realistic geoengineering proposals, and among the rest there are no geoengineering proposals that do not have significant side effects.
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This is not a solution to the accumulated CO2 problem
Actually, it is. The various natural CO2-absorbing processes on the planet will eventually fix the problem, but only if we output less CO2.
Now, had you said "plant trees"
Trees die, burn, and so on. Releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere. You need to not only plant trees, but you need to cut them down and sequester the resulting biomass so it does not return to the atmosphere.
If you're just planting trees, then all you're doing is slightly accelerating the natural processes I mentioned above. It won't accelerate the cleanup much.
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I'm more of a two-stage theory man, which puts me at odds with Trotsky, but I wouldn't expect a /. troll to know what's behind the words they are using, or to be able to recognize a Marxist theory by it characteristics if it is not named :)))
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Nuclear can't be part of the Green New Deal because the economics don't work. Too expensive, too few jobs created, too little financial benefit to anyone but the plant owners, and too many socialized costs.
The Green New Deal has to fix things like former coal miners needing jobs, and nuclear doesn't do that.
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You can see the same thing in the way nuclear isn't even a thought in the Green New Insanity.
Nuclear has a massive problem with waste that has not been solved, and likely can not be solved. It isn't a technical problem, it's a political one.
Massively increasing the waste problem does not solve it. Especially when the "exciting new designs" keep not working out as well as predicted, and the cost is higher than renewables + storage.
Revist in 20 years (Score:3)
We'll revisit this proposal in 20 years when its obvious that everyone's efforts to try and curb emissions has completely failed. Keeping with the trend of humanity being completely reactionary in all this.
Re: Revist in 20 years (Score:1)
Why wait? Let's revisit what they were screeching about 20 years ago.
New York, Miami, New Orleans all under water by now.
Tenfold the strength and quantity of hurricanes and tornadoes.
Hundreds of millions dead, billions displaced. Wars, famine, collapse of economy.
Oh wait. It was all fucking lies then, it still is now, and will be in 20 years.
Re: Revist in 20 years (Score:2)
Course not! (Score:1, Troll)
APGW is too much of a cash cow for Political leaders to sacrifice power over. The solution can only allowed to be a political one, it can never be an economic or technological one.
The proposal should go forward if for nothing else than to learn more, regardless of whether the technology/research is useful or not... used or not. Everyone nay saying it likely feels threatened because they are only driven by fear and ignorance. Seriously what is it going to hurt to research it? Other than your personal pol
Re:Course not! (Score:5, Informative)
the research could actually go towards helping prove that APGW is real, rather than just a theory.
I disagree with your choice of words, as "just a theory" makes it sound as if it's someone's hunch/idea/opinion/guess/hypothesis. A scientific theory [wikipedia.org] is something very different, and presents both explanatory and predictive claims that have been tested and stood up to falsification attempts. A scientific theory can never be "proved," as those hard statements are reserved for mathematics and philosophy. Religious folk would muddy the waters with the same "just a theory" argument about the theories of evolution and heliocentricism, and it's very misleading.
It may also help identify better metrics so we can make an accurate prediction as well... since we know they have only failed in all of their models.
I must disagree here as well. Climate models tend to do pretty well at making predictions that are subsequently backed up by observations. See https://www.skepticalscience.c... [skepticalscience.com] for a primer on the topic, along with some illustrative videos.
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The solution can only allowed to be a political one, it can never be an economic or technological one.
Cleaner energy sources are destroying coal in the US because they are cheaper, despite politicians trying to stop it. The solution very clearly can be economic.
Ahh let's do nothing, that'll solve it! (Score:2)
Who is doing what in this sentence? (Score:2)
Setting aside the logical impossibility of applying the "precautionary principle", the sentence is ambiguous. Who is the "it" calling for the precautionary principle? Is it the Swiss plan, as the wording implies, or the Assembly, which makes more sense in the broader context of the piece? If "it" is the plan to
Knowledge is Bad Now? (Score:2)
So, obviously, curbing emissions is clearly the best approach to arresting climate change. Lowering emissions is Plan A.
But what is wrong with creating a Plan B? Or a complementary project that enhances Plan A?
That study is basically a detailed look at some technologies that might help. It wouldn't implement them; it wouldn't change anything. The purpose of that study is nothing more than to understand our options.
This decision is asinine, but I wouldn't expect anything else from a denialist administration.
because this is how the world will end. (Score:2)
"block some of the sun's warmth to cool the Earth" (Score:2)
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Re:GW Alarmists... (Score:5, Informative)
they would have no reason to attempt to steal all our money and bring poverty to the citizens of the USA.
You would have been spot on with this sharp and super-smart observation, if not for the small fact that The United States, Saudi Arabia and Brazil were among the strongest opponents of the proposal, with Japan also expressing reservations.
Its hard to believe that there are those that do NOT see that this movement is engineered in Moscow in order to damage their chief rival, the USA
This conspiracy theory would have been very interesting as well, except that Moscow is, as a major fossil fuels exporter, among the staunchest opponents of CO2 emissions reductions.
You're probably just as "well" informed about the other aspects of the global warming issues.
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Why was the whole point of the Paris agreement to take money from America and give it to hostile countries who hate us?
It wasn't. The idea is we need the third world to "skip over" the step in their industrialization where they get energy from fossil fuels. That requires money. The wealthy countries would provide some of that money in order for the poor countries to be able to afford this skip.
After all, Miami going underwater is going to cost us a hell of a lot more money than a coastal village in a poor country going underwater. We have a greater financial incentive to fix the problem, and the money to fix it.
We have tons of our own people who need help, after we fix their problems we can start meddling in other countries.
Great co
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How do you verify that the money was spent on its intent? You don't. There was no mechanism.
There was also no mechanism to transfer the money in the Paris accord either.
It was a plan, mostly aspirational. Implementation details were intended to be worked out later. Presumably, there would be specific deals that fall under the effort, such as building a particular photovoltaic plant.
It was just a transfer of money from us, who need it badly for our own people
If you actually believed this, you wouldn't keep voting for people who keep cutting aid to the poor.
Bahaha, like the far left gives a shit about working class Americans. They voted for Trump! You think they're racist fascist deplorables, remember?
You do realize that Clinton is a centrist, right? The "far left" candidate in 2016 was Sanders.
Who's better: you educated people or the people of walmart?
Neither. But that's
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Maybe you should read the actual agreement before spouting bullshit, eh.
The Paris agreement is about voluntary measures to reduce CO2 to some targets, measures that every country has largely determined by itself. It is definitely not "taking money from America". Nobody is taking money from America, just the opposite, money is being pledged to go the poorer countries in America.
I don't know who "you" are, but seeing how you equate two continents with one country on one of them I can only assume you're a US c
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How about you don't sprout bullshit to me on /. but instead talk about it to your politicians about it. Then get back to me and report what did they tell you. See how far you go, eh?
Also, a nice diversion on your Paris agreement bullshit, this impotent foreign policy rant of yours. Congrats.
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You're good on excuses, that's for sure. Well, it is a way of life, too.
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1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living
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1) We could possibly, in time, figure out how to do it cheaper, but this would be a start.
Blowing money on "a start" that can never produce the necessary results isn't exactly the best way to spend money.
2) Is it more or less expensive than wack-job politician's "Green New Deal" that is currently tagged at somewhere around $90T and will NOT actually be capable of solving the problem? ("Solving the problem" means doing so without killing millions of people, which the raising of the price of energy would do by casting more and more people into poverty. Poverty kills. Smoking may take 7 years off your life, but living in poverty is good for a 10 year reduction.)
One key element of the Green New Deal that you are unwilling to understand is the efforts within the program create jobs. Somebody has to actually refit old houses to be better insulated, and so on.
Those jobs reduce poverty, ameliorating the problem you cite here.
3) Has it escaped everyone that we are currently adding about $1T to the National Debt every year and NOBODY has a clue what to do about it
We know exactly what to do about it because that deficit was created by a massive tax cut on the wealthy.
Fixing it is also trivially
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Oh, and #4, the subject of the whole thread is that the powers that be have decided NOT to research any such generalized solution such as sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere with machinery, but instead attempt to continue going down the impossible road of leaving the carbon in the ground. That is, of course, what would be necessary to start lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere - we have to stop putting it in the atmosphere in the 1st place, and can only do that by stopping the fossil fuel burning. We can't
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Fixing the refrigerator without killing a lot of folks that are on the lower income end of the economic chart is currently impossible. The GW Alarmists are all about increasingly sucking $$$ out of the USA, and thus killing American citizens via casting them into poverty. Some of us would rather research approaches that do NOT kill millions of Americans by casting them into poverty while trying to pay for the approach of fixing the refrigerator, which is actually beyond repair with the technology we ha
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Because we want the space to grow more cows.
Also once a forest is grown it's mostly zero sum, you have to continuously bury the transformed CO2 to make headway (preferably with as little loss of soil nutrients as possible).