The social contract that I choose to subscribe to already tells me what to do. I prefer that to total anarchy and "freedom," which is what we had oh, 40,000 years ago. And life was nasty, brutish, and short.
No one is telling you how to think. You're free to wallow in whatever delusions float your boat. You might not be allowed to act them out, though. Call that gummint overreach if you wish.
Did you just accuse me of anarchy because I disagree with some aspects of climate change? That's thoughful and typically indicative of your self-proclaimed effervescent IQ pertaining to all issues of importance to mankind.
I'm indeed happily wallowing in my decision to reject proposed remediation of climate change effects..the human approaches outlined to supposedly fix it. The often - noted " reduction in burning of fossil fuels..coal, natural gas, and other petroleum based resources" is often touted as the number one approach to reduce CO2 emissions when the climate change town criers hit their respective podiums. Most of these same individuals then board an airplane to Bumbfuck whereever and then do it again the next day. John Kerry comes to mind? How much emission reduction occurs with those hypocritical plane trips? The UN has a massive climate change summit scheduled for Nov/ Dec this year; I'd like to know the actual CO2 emissions produced from that summit and associative travel impact from that climate change event, whilst the participants spout their save the planet edicts. I don't care how many PhD's they have, or what their official governmental agency title is..there's some common sense missing in some of these approaches.
Seldom do these same people address the effects of grand scale reduced fossil fuel use on underdeveloped, less prosperous world nations; those nations can't afford turbine windmills and solar panels on the roofs of every domicile in those countries. So with that in mind, if we're to include these less prosperous nations and people in this universal climate change/ save mankind fix, this whole process becomes a massive wealth redistribution scheme that more fortunate countries ( like the US) and their citizens have to foot the bill for. If just one of these climate change activists would just admit that openly, I'd buy them a cigar and share my green chile with them.
You think China is going to reduce their emission levels whatsoever? How do you crack that nut? Ya can't. I mean, this whole effort is one large global undertaking according to proponents. China has just invested profligately in a massive expansion of their coal plant inventory. I guess they'll be the first nation to be annihilated once the actual climate day doomsday actually happens (supposedly by the end of 2030 now, despite AOC's prediction? the goalpost moves daily); they'll be eating a bowl of rice, their chopsticks will burst into flames, and their anatomies will just start melting, apparently? Subsequently, US citizens won't be able to get their hands on all those pharmaceuticals that China produces and distributes for/to us. Insulin and pain killers will be scarce..ohh, the pain. I told you that, imo, some of this crap doesn't make any sense.
The truth is, I'd welcome the implementation of alternative energy resources if efficient and affordable. Currently, some approach involving a combination of multiple energy resources within the next decade makes some sense ( that's probably the way it is / will be anyway). Right now, most of the alternatives don't meet one or both those conditions in many geographical areas. Admittedly, the cost of residential solar panel installation ( something I know a little about personally) has dropped considerably relative to that seen ten years ago. Still, transfer of this energy to our power grid situations are inefficient in many areas ( ask some Texans, if you can stand to). Subsidies in various forms supported SP installation early on ( yes, gas and oil gets subsidized..I know).You can justifiably argue that any newer technology across the span of industries seldom meets those conditions early on. Yet, somebody's got to pay for whats going on currently. Fire up the digital money presses again, and then hike my taxes. The funds will be needed to pay for energy resources in say, Bangladesh. I don't have to and don't like that much; call me an isolative nationalist, if it makes you feel superior, etc..
When's Climate Change Doomsday actually going to happen? Or, is there just a progressively worsening accumulative portfolio that makes it impossible to predict? One latest phrase from these do-gooders is " ninety seconds to midnight" . Should I dig / expand my back yard bunker now or after football season? It's a dilemma, but I'll need to know in about two months..unless there's a hidden fee.
End of diatribe ( maybe)...cheers..etc...from an effusively overwordy anarchist.
Again, sorry about hijacking the thread; but, according to you, as a conservative I am bereft of scruples and upstanding moral behavior anyway. Thanks. *l*
No, I didn't accuse you of being an anarchist. The concept, though, that I'd like to introduce to you is that unfettered FREEDUMB is not only a luxury we cannot afford, it tends to be unfair, skewing things toward the fortunate parts of the population.
You seem to love (as in, LUVVVVVVV) that "all the bigwigs are flying around in jets what about that huh huh huh belch grunt snort" argument, but you should drop it. Perhaps they all SHOULD meet virtually from now on. But most world leaders are from a generation where virtual meetings were not a thing. It is what it is. Having face-to-face meetings isn't hypocrisy--it's still the only way anything will get done. So sorry.
Underdeveloped nations can't afford renewable energy? They can't afford to NOT have it! Do you think they'll have the financial clout to outbid everyone else for dwindling supplies of fossil fuel energy?
And I don't think that what China does or doesn't do should affect our decisions. Furthermore, I reject the assumption that they'll blithely do nothing.
But let's talk about your so-called "massive wealth redistribution scheme." Maybe that's something that should happen. You see, Charles, for about two centuries, we've accumulated our wealth in large part due to "negative externalities." In a nutshell, we impose the costs attendant to wealth generation on someone else. The classic example is air and water pollution.
And the impacts are disproportionate and ipso facto unfair. Buford Bluto McBelch drives his Chevy Mastodon up and down Main Street on Friday night looking for hot babes. Because of climate change, he's paying 70 cents more a gallon for diesel. Meanwhile, a farmer in Zimbabwe is fearful that he might not be able to feed his family because of a third consecutive drought year. A fisherman in a Pacific island nation is watching the sea slowly swallow up his house. Climate change inconveniences some people, endangers others, and kills some.
You overstate how I feel about conservatives in general and you in particular, by the way. I think you have some vestigal moral center remaining. If I didn't, I wouldn't argue from a moral standpoint here.
According to NASA, one of many governmental climate change supportive agencies, sea levels have risen 3.5 inches in the last thirty years (1993 -2022). Your fisherman on that Pacfic island should have moved/ or purchased the footing and foundation for said house back about a foot further inland and it would have taken more than a century for the seawater to reach his living room floor at the observed rate of rise. He'd never see it in his lifetime. He must've built / purchased his residence that was literally just off the shoreline edge? Climate change extremists make it seem as if the reported .14 inch per year rise in sea levels published by these support agencies ( if true) is just one huge cascading tsunami event, requiring inhabitants to swim out, grab the nearest floating log, or oar their way to safety on a daily basis. We obviously need to get a congressional spending resolution to supply all worldwide shoreline property owners with trolling motors and rafts. We can pay for that with another ubiquitous tax hike, I guess. Why not?
And the status of the iconic climate change enduring mammalian marine animal..polar bears? Most reasonable reporting agencies that monitor these beasts of beauty suggest that the overall world population is stable, with some subset populations listed as increasing, some decreasing, and some stable. Overall, the general population is stable. Climate change proponents have used the polar bear as their poster child animal, which is why I brought it up. No doubt you can locate alarmist sources who claim the ploar bear plight is worse than dark...never mind that maybe half of those said sources might originate from Facebook.
As I offered earlier, some of this CC gloom and doom crap doesn't make sense or facts are just sorely misrepresented.. Or, that's my opinion anyway. Regardless, I don't relish paying for their proposed solutions. But you can and will if you so choose...have at it.
Uhhh...Charles...a three-inch sea level rise can be downright catastrophic...and the area/terrain affected could be huge, depending on the local topography. But I'll attribute your ignorance on that subject to perhaps never having lived near the ocean. What I'm more amazed by is your blithe assumption that our hypothetical island native could and should have just slung his house on his back (it's easy; it's just a grass hut) and moved inland...where there is plenty of land...that doesn't already belong to someone else...even though it's, you know, a small island...and he's not competing with someone else who's also getting flooded out...ya sure!
The polar bear is losing its genetic identity as a distinct species, because being driven onto land for a longer and longer portion of the season, it's mating with land-inhabiting brown bears. The loss in both biodiversity and habitat IS critical, but if you want to say "fuck it, what's another species down the crapper," be my guest, I guess. At some juncture, there's a tipping point, an inflection point, call it what you will, where the human-driven mass extinction of species will result in our own demise. Maybe that point is far in the future. Maybe we've already passed it. But maybe we should, just maybe, for a wee bit anyway, stop treating Earth like a frat boy's dorm room?
I find your casual dismissal of this yes, I'll call it a crisis because that's what it is, kind of disgusting.
And we should fucking pay to fix it because we fucking caused it and we fucking profited from it and we're largely fucking ignoring it. All the comforts you enjoy, Charles (and all the comforts I enjoy) have been obtained at the cost of others' discomfort, hardship, and danger. I don't feel guilty or anything, because I didn't create the system that brought it about. But I'm willing to pay to help fix it.
I'm sad and disappointed that you and your kind aren't. Are you merely showing fealty to your ideological masters? Is that what's really going on here? (And no, before you retort that that's what I'm doing, I was a climate change denier for some twenty-odd years before the data became irrefutable.)
Ah well, back to exploding conservitard mythology.
Originally posted by: Kevin Lewis
Uhhh...Charles...a three-inch sea level rise can be downright catastrophic...and the area/terrain affected could be huge, depending on the local topography. But I'll attribute your ignorance on that subject to perhaps never having lived near the ocean. What I'm more amazed by is your blithe assumption that our hypothetical island native could and should have just slung his house on his back (it's easy; it's just a grass hut) and moved inland...where there is plenty of land...that doesn't already belong to someone else...even though it's, you know, a small island...and he's not competing with someone else who's also getting flooded out...ya sure!
The polar bear is losing its genetic identity as a distinct species, because being driven onto land for a longer and longer portion of the season, it's mating with land-inhabiting brown bears. The loss in both biodiversity and habitat IS critical, but if you want to say "fuck it, what's another species down the crapper," be my guest, I guess. At some juncture, there's a tipping point, an inflection point, call it what you will, where the human-driven mass extinction of species will result in our own demise. Maybe that point is far in the future. Maybe we've already passed it. But maybe we should, just maybe, for a wee bit anyway, stop treating Earth like a frat boy's dorm room?
I find your casual dismissal of this yes, I'll call it a crisis because that's what it is, kind of disgusting.
And we should fucking pay to fix it because we fucking caused it and we fucking profited from it and we're largely fucking ignoring it. All the comforts you enjoy, Charles (and all the comforts I enjoy) have been obtained at the cost of others' discomfort, hardship, and danger. I don't feel guilty or anything, because I didn't create the system that brought it about. But I'm willing to pay to help fix it.
I'm sad and disappointed that you and your kind aren't. Are you merely showing fealty to your ideological masters? Is that what's really going on here? (And no, before you retort that that's what I'm doing, I was a climate change denier for some twenty-odd years before the data became irrefutable.)
Ah well, back to exploding conservitard mythology.
No, on backpacking the hut..that's ridiculous. I was simply describing how minimal the actual rise in sea levels
actually is..it's .14 inches per year since 1992 according to government - backed agencies. "Sea levels are catastrophically rising" is a classic CC mantra and has been for a long span; it's not true. There's always some fear-based deadline employed by CC proponents..and none to date have come true. Shall I provide that list of prognostications since the mid-70's that have largely been proven as fiction/ failed to materialize? I won't, cause others much more qualified than I already have and the crises predictions just continue. What's the point?
And sources don't consider the current polar bear population as anything but stable; you can interject correctly that the animals were placed on the Endangered Species list by the government in 2008 due to anticipated climate change effects. But current populations are holding their own based on info from sane sources, and the CC futuristic crystal ball predictions have become tiresome and often fallible. It's like Sarah McLaughlin and her save the puppies campaigns of old; I can envision her in a fictional ad holding a gun to a dog's head and claiming " come save this dog or he's a goner!"; truth is I'm a big fan of polar bears and puppies, FWIW.
You're wrong to suggest that I don't give a whatever about the environment..it's a resource that we absolutely need to be good stewards of. I've spent a considerable amount of time in it ( camping, hunting, normal activities). It's the overembellishment / magnitude of environmental multifactors often espoused by CC activists and their proposed solutions, along with whom's footing the bill for it that pisses me off. It really does fall into my disdain umbrella for governmental spending issues because that's exactly what it represents; as a conservative, I just can't help myself in that area ( and likely a few others). You're free to embrace all these CC issues..I won't.
And let's not forget Paul Erlich in the 70's who claimed we would all starve to death within 20 years. He is is still alive & still says it.
Not a single catastrophic prediction in the last 50 years has come true, but liberal fools like Kevin
keep drinking the kool aide
Charles, the ideological cloak you wrap yourself in is no doubt comforting, as it insulates you from reality.
I'm curious--when you hear a funny noise coming from your car's engine, do you turn up the volume on the radio until you can't hear it any more?
But y'know---because so many people, like you, dismiss the impacts of climate change, those who truly understand the severity of its effects have to use what you call "alarmist" language to get people to pay even the slightest attention. And when it's mentioned to them that they might have to slightly modify their creature comforts and/or contribute financially to a solution...they turn up the radio.
It's like when you tell a toddler why he shouldn't run across a busy street--you say something like "You'll get run over and killed," when in reality, he'll probably make it across unscathed. Would saying that to him do the trick, though?
We'll eventually know what 'reality' is, I guess. So far, a lot of it has been one large volume of fiction based on professed events of anticipated crises related to climate change. I'm certainly agreeable to look at real facts surrounding this issue, but I see very little of those within the subsets of CC issues we've discussed in this thread. If I'm completely off in left field with this attitude, then eventually I may just spontaneously combust thereby rendering my stances erroneous and meaningless. I'm willing to experience that ahead of being slammed with some gigantic carbon tax of some sort. No more green chile for me...asses to ashes, dust to dust.
Are humans smart enough to control / mediate climate and weather..or the related effects? I don't think so..beyond some reasonable approach to squelch emissions. I ask again, how are they / you going to whip the natural weather / climate cycles? As I asked earlier in the thread, how are these climate scientists going to control the blanket of water vapor that naturally surrounds our globe ( accumulated via condensation and evaporation of our oceans and assorted weather events) and acts as a true and critical 'greenhouse gas'? That'll mean we'll have to experience the largest worldwide tax increase in history as they figure out a way to nuke it? I don't want to play that game. But you can..and thereby cancel any input I might have on the subject. Problem solved..at least in that one-on-one microenvironment.
Its funny how you're having this conversation in the midst of the hottest week on historical record and yet another insurance company said they will no longer provide coverage in Florida.
There isnt a debate amongst scientists. The only debate is between scientists and the right wing rabble that offered up Ivermectin as a cure for COVID. It would seem laughable the latter seems to have so much street cred but they certainly do. Tom is proof.
