SlyFrog
5777
It’s not all or nothing. We don’t have to get rid of all cars. We could start by forcing dipshits to stop driving monstrous fucking pickup trucks that they never use for their intended purpose hundreds of miles each week for commuting to work, etc.
Yes, there are things that would be very painful to get rid of. There are also a lot of things we do as a society that are just utterly fucking stupid. Like the amount of resources (water, chemicals, fuel, electricity, etc.) we spend on perfectly green, weedless lawns that really have no point other than to look unnaturally perfectly green and weedless. There are tons of examples of this.
I feel like hiking up the price of gas is a good start. People become more conscious of both their driving and buying habits of they had to start paying more.
Besides a higher taxes helps pay for the externalities of having a car. More money for roads and streets, more money for environmental programs. And if people buy more efficient cars, that’s a net win.
Dave Roberts thread on the CNN townhall - he live tweets Yang and Harris. (I caught Booker, thought he did pretty good. Booker actually advocated for nuclear. “Nuclear is half the renewable portfolio. If you ignore nuclear, you’re not paying attention to the data.”)
Couple of highlights below not focusing on climate but rather CNN moderators - quelle surprise, they’re bad at their jobs. (Edit: The town hall format is many orders of magnitude better than “debates” with 30 second sound bites. And no matter how poorly CNN moderators may be, they do deserve credit for devoting over seven hours of programming for this.)
If you don’t have a cable provider (e.g. cord cutters) then I guess yes.
For example, with the CNN debate, they waived the sign-in requirements so that everyone on the internet could watch it, you didn’t have to prove you got CNN through cable.
Timex
5783
Ya, this isn’t a debate put together by the DNC though.
The DNC wasn’t gonna do anything about this topic at all, so CNN did their own thing, on their own dime.
The idea that CNN wants to be paid for having 10 in-depth town halls seems pretty reasonable to me.
I agree although they did run commercials. I have no idea what the rating were. Probably worse than hurricane coverage interspersed with jokes about Trump and his sharpies.
Rock8man
5785
Potentially some good news for a change, though long term changes are still unknown.
Presidential candidate, John Delaney was on Bill Maher and he made point I had not really thought of.
Trump’s tariffs resulted in China cancel US Soybeans purchases. This created a big incentive for farmers in Brazil to clear the rainforest to not only raise cattle but also grow soybeans.
So yet another reason to hate Trump.
The Ex-Governator weighs in on Trump’s plans for California:
KevinC
5789
So just like everything else with the GOP during the course of my lifetime (41 years)? These rules apply only where and when they want them to.
The party of family values, except for when they’re banging their mistresses or their candidate is Donald Trump. Abortions are the most intolerable thing in the world unless their mistress or daughter (or their President) needs one. Gays are destroying America and don’t deserve civil rights, except for them while they pay for male prostitutes. The deficit is a crisis that should put a stop to any and all progress in this country, but it’s no big deal when it comes to starting new wars or cutting taxes. The right to bear arms is sacred and inviolate except when minorities try to exercise that right.
So yeah, States Rights are only important when it’s Republican states wanting to defy a Democrat-controlled federal government. Shocker. Given he was a Republican politician himself, this surely can’t come as any surprise to him.
Nesrie
5790
There are still a lot of Republicans that are in denial about their party has been. They act like Trump just happened to them, not that it was an invitation after years of laying don the red carpet for someone like that.
MikeJ
5791
More Drum climate cheery data:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/09/jonathan-franzen-isnt-quite-right-but-he-has-a-point/
Here is worldwide electricity capacity since 1990, when climate change first became a serious topic of conversation:
The good news is that use of renewable energy has increased, from 19 percent of total capacity to 22 percent. That’s genuine progress, and the use of solar and wind continues to accelerate.
The bad news is that this doesn’t even make up for the loss of nuclear power over the same period, let alone cut our dependence on fossil fuels. All told, our reliance on fossil fuels has increased from 62 percent to 65 percent.
dtolman
5792
The pessimistic data in the Mother Jones article is out of date. According to the latest report by REN21 the renewable sector has increased dramatically in share since 2015 - it is now estimated to be at 26% of world electricity capacity as of the end of 2018. See figure 8 (page 41) of the latest global report.
Figure 3, page 33 also indicates that over half of added power generating capacity since 2014 has been renewable, and the share continues to climb - it was 64% as of end of 2018.
MikeJ
5793
Thanks for the update! It is encouraging that new installations are going mostly renewable. Still, that thick gray bar didn’t move for a very long time, and we are still adding more non-renewable capacity that we will have to tear down, or else will be with us for decades more.
Timex
5794
As long as folks on the left continue to attack nuclear power and fight against its deployment, they are doing a disservice to the goal of reducing our carbon footprint.
KevinC
5795
Agreed. It’s something I find very frustrating about the environmentalists who speak of how dire global warming is but fight against the existing and real alternatives to base load power generation that we have available now.
Nuclear has its drawbacks and is very expensive to build the reactors, but that’s where I see a role for government. It’s in the nation’s (and world’s) interest to move off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Timex
5796
And again, we have a blueprint for how to do it… France did it, decades ago. In 1976, France created the Messmer plan, and went on to install 56 nuclear reactors over the next 15 years, resulting in an infrastructure where over 75% of their electricity was coming from nuclear power.
They did that in the freaking 70’s.
We could do that, today. We could effectively negate our nation’s carbon footprint in the next decade, if we wanted to. That is literally a thing which we could accomplish, without even requiring Americans to make significant sacrifices.
It wouldn’t require us inventing new stuff. It wouldn’t require scientific breakthroughs.
It would require nothing more than simply deciding to do it.
