4371

Horrific as that idea is in the abstract, imagine it coming out of Zinke’s smug maw and you understand why I had to stop watching mid sentence.

4372

Reminder: these people represent a clear and present danger to you, your family, everyone you know and love. Allowing them to remain in power is tantamount to suicide on a global scale.

4373
4374

You make that fit on a bumper sticker and I want one.

4375

Does anyone else ever do a Naughty by Nature FUCK THE GOP remix in their heads when reading various headlines? No? Cool, just me then.

4376

100% this. Its why I have become far more absolutist. Republicans want to kill all of us and our children, quite literally.

I will never forgive them.

4377

And now us lilly white straight dudes can begin to grasp what it feels like to be not one of those things!

4378

I think the GOP leadership has moved beyond “it’s not happening” now to “it’s so far gone we can’t do anything to stop it”, and are proceeding to loot the system and set up their protected enclaves as best they can. Don’t think that the “invasion” language is just a backwards-looking dog-whistle; it also looks forward to the generations of refugees and migrants who will be splashing about the world for the next century.

4379

This article seemed more hopeful than most I read:

First of all, in the last 15 years, wind and solar went from extremely expensive green luxury items maintained by subsidy to the cheapest forms of energy ever. That happened because government subsidized wind and solar, made a market for it that companies competed over, and they relentlessly drove the cost down. It’s a remarkable achievement – that conservatives should relish – of market success, but through government subsidy.

With the direct air capture technologies, 10 years ago you would have said that’s just like a fairy tale. But because of diligent activity by a small number of technical people, there’s been very rapid progress, so much so that knowledgeable people who are not starry-eyed, but just hard-headed, believe that there is a very high probability that a research effort within 10 years would produce direct air capture at less than a dollar a gallon of gasoline. That’s $100 a ton [of captured CO2].

I didn’t know carbon capture was already happening on this scale:

Carbon capture and storage has gone from, “Well, maybe it’s possible to do,” to a big business. Sixty-one million tons of CO2 are going into reservoirs and staying there this year in the Lower 48 [U.S. states] alone. That’s a big number.

4380

Some good news in the right direction:

4381

Not directly climate change related, but the same economic arguments that justify pollutants often lead to overriding environmental concerns over dredging. Which, as the article says, can lead to significantly higher flooding and storm surge issues. Combine with more extreme weather events from climate change, and you have some very wet futures for a lot of coastal and riverside areas.

4382

Where would this go? Qatar wasn’t a huge oil producer, but this isn’t good visibility for OPEC.

4383

You got to love really old people who actually care about the future after they’re gone. If only there were more of them.

4384

David Attenborough rules.

4385

Have some more Krugman climate dudgeon:

There are three important morals to this story.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.

Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party, which has burrowed ever deeper into climate denial even as the damage from a warming planet becomes more and more obvious.

Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics. And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.

4386

The Baltic Sea offers a preview of what’s to come with global warming
https://wapo.st/2FRdMmD

Shrinking populations of fish that traditionally live in those waters, and migration of species that like warmer seas. We may see this in larger bodies of water in the near future.

4387

Thanks for the link. I read through it and at the end thought “hmm, I should post this on the Qt3 thread”, I must be getting too old.

4388
4389

Gilded Age 2.0, only hotter

4390

I mean people learn your history. The Gilded age ended peacefully, relatively, because the working class was allowed gains. Had the wealthy of the day behaved as the wealthy of our day? Guillotines. That’s where that ends.

You can only turn the screws so tight.