human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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PAGE 15 of 111
On March 29, wind became the second largest source of daily electricity in the US, surpassing coal and nuclear for the first time on record (but still trailing far behind natural gas).
This highlights the rise of renewable energy and the fall of coal in the US. The country’s combined wind and solar output doubled in the decade between 2008 and 2018, while coal electricity generation fell by more than half over the same period. Since March 2019, wind and solar output have nearly doubled again, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.
Natural gas remains the dominant (and growing) energy source in the US, despite a US goal of net-zero emissions no later than 2050 (and carbon-free electricity by 2035). The US Energy Information Administration predicts renewables will still make up just 44% of the US energy mix by 2050, up from 21% in 2021. If the US net-zero targets are going to succeed, the country will need far more months like this past March.
https://qz.com/2155659/wind-surpassed-nuclear-power-output-in-the-us-f
or-the-first-time/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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If the Amazon Rain Forest reaches tipping point, containing global warming will be 'blown out of the water'
The area of tropical forest burned in 2021 was enough to send more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than India does in an entire year from burning fossil fuels, according to an analysis published today.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/world/forest-loss-deforestation-fire-wr
i-climate-intl/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Cool.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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This New Style of Climate Denial Will Make You Wish the Bad Old Days Were Back
The bizarre claim that what we need, right now, is more fossil fuels.
If you are concerned about our warming world, you should know who Alex Epstein is. The libertarian intellectual, who’s presented himself as the “next generation in energy thought,” has long hammered at a thesis that’s the next big thing in climate denial: Fossil fuels are not leading to an uninhabitable Earth but have actually improved Earth’s natural and built habitats, and contributed to “human flourishing.” Because of this, the unfettered development of oil and gas and coal is a “moral” imperative; if you oppose this “irrefutable” fact, you’re a genocidal, racist, anti-human, and anti-science fool who would rather have billions of people slip into poverty and/or die for the benefit of “nature,” which, Epstein argues, kills more humans on its own than any climate effects do. It’s a set of ideas he’s boosted for the past two decades through work with the Ayn Rand Institute, the Cato Institute, and his own “for-profit” think tank, the Center for Industrial Progress.
Epstein, a master at having it both ways, realizes that you, the average Slate reader, probably consider his mission to achieve unlimited fossil fuel production to be at odds with global concerns over human-influenced impacts on climate and nature. And trust him, he shares your concerns and would not like to be described as a “denier.” But he’s also really worried about how our “knowledge system”—big newspapers, prominent scientists, the United Nations—distorts scientific findings and exaggerates climate-related warnings and predictions, which is why he pals around with conspiracy theorists like Lauren Boebert, Dennis Prager, Scott Adams, and Candace Owens. By the way, as much as Epstein respects the Koch brothers, his ideology would never be influenced by their dark money network, even though he’s worked for decades at multiple institutions financially supported by the oil and policy magnates. Plus, he wants to debate opponents in good faith and is opposed to “ad hominem” attacks, which is why he refers to climate-concerned politicians as “fascists” and “monsters” while mobilizing his supporters to demand the termination of journalists who perform factual analyses of his oeuvre.
More at https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/alex-epstein-fossil-future-climat
e-change-argument.html
Download for free Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.blue/search.php?req=Alex+Epstein+Fossil
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This New Style of Climate Denial Will Make You Wish the Bad Old Days Were Back
The bizarre claim that what we need, right now, is more fossil fuels.
Oh yeah? How much money do you make in a year, Nitish?
Fuck Slate. Fuck Nitish Pahwa.
Democrats are losing the black and Mexican vote.
Good luck winning anything when all you've got left is rich white people and some token minorities that you're paying extremely well for the bullshit propaganda you've got them spewing for you.
And just wait until all the people you know who still drive gas cars around have to pay a buck a kWh on top of the high gas prices because you just can't get enough of the smell of your own farts, retard.
Democrats are DOOMED.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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The US’s New Record in Renewables
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02062022/inside-clean-energy-renewa
bles-2022/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What a Dying Lake Says About the Future
A few days ago The Times published a report on the drying up of the Great Salt Lake, a story I’m ashamed to admit had flown under my personal radar. We’re not talking about a hypothetical event in the distant future: The lake has already lost two-thirds of its surface area, and ecological disasters — salinity rising to the point where wildlife dies off, occasional poisonous dust storms sweeping through a metropolitan area of 2.5 million people — seem imminent.
( https://web.archive.org/web/20220614101334/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/06/07/climate/salt-lake-city-climate-disaster.html )
As an aside, I was a bit surprised that the article didn’t mention the obvious parallels with the Aral Sea, a huge lake that the Soviet Union had managed to turn into a toxic desert.
In any case, what’s happening to the Great Salt Lake is pretty bad. But what I found really scary about the report is what the lack of an effective response to the lake’s crisis says about our ability to respond to the larger, indeed existential threat of climate change.
If you aren’t terrified by the threat posed by rising levels of greenhouse gases, you aren’t paying attention — which, sadly, many people aren’t. And those who are or should be aware of that threat but stand in the way of action for the sake of short-term profits or political expediency are, in a real sense, betraying humanity.
That said, the world’s failure to take action on climate, while inexcusable, is also understandable. For as many observers have noted, global warming is a problem that almost looks custom-designed to make political action difficult. In fact, the politics of climate change are hard for at least four reasons.
First, when scientists began raising the alarm in the 1980s, climate change looked like a distant threat — a problem for future generations. Some people still see it that way; last month a senior executive at the bank HSBC gave a talk in which he declared, “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?”
This view is all wrong — we’re already seeing the effects of climate change, largely in the form of a rising frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, like the megadrought in the American West that is contributing to the death of the Great Salt Lake. But that’s a statistical argument, which brings me to the second problem with climate change: It’s not yet visible to the naked eye, at least the naked eye that doesn’t want to see.
Weather, after all, fluctuates. Heat waves and droughts happened before the planet began warming; cold spells still happen even with the planet warmer on average than in the past. It doesn’t take fancy analysis to show that there is a persistent upward trend in temperatures, but many people aren’t convinced by statistical analysis of any kind, fancy or not, only by raw experience.
Then there’s the third problem: Until recently, it looked as if any major attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would have significant economic costs. Serious estimates of these costs were always much lower than claimed by anti-environmentalists, and spectacular technological progress in renewable energy has made a transition to a low-emission economy look far easier than anyone could have imagined 15 years ago. Still, fears about economic losses helped block climate action.
Finally, climate change is a global problem, requiring global action — and offering a reason not to move. Anyone urging U.S. action has encountered the counterargument, “It doesn’t matter what we do, because China will just keep polluting.” There are answers to that argument — if we ever do get serious about emissions, carbon tariffs will have to be part of the mix. But it’s certainly an argument that affects the discussion.
As I said, all of these issues are explanations for inaction on climate, not excuses. But here’s the thing: None of these explanations for environmental inaction apply to the death of the Great Salt Lake. Yet the relevant policymakers still seem unwilling or unable to
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Fusion is coming?
Who will get there
also
Researchers discover new isotope thorium-207 and odd-even staggering in a-decay energies
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-isotope-thorium-odd-even-staggering-deca
y.html
A research team at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), together with their collaborators, has recently synthesized a new isotope
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The actual cost of preventing climate breakdown
https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_the_actual_cost_of_prevent
ing_climate_breakdown/
As the climate crisis worsens, too many people are swinging from denial straight to despair. But we should not lose hope. Humanity has enormous resources under its command, and by applying them wisely, we can still prevent ecological cataclysm.
00:20
Let's talk numbers. What would it cost to prevent catastrophic climate change? Would we have to commit 50 percent of our total budget? Thirty percent? Ten percent? Naturally enough, no one knows for sure. My team and I have spent weeks poring over various reports and academic papers living in a cloud of numbers. But while the models behind the numbers are dizzyingly complex, the bottom line should cheer us up. Most experts converge on the number two percent.
00:58
If humanity increases our annual investment in clean technologies and infrastructure by around two percent of global GDP, that should be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change.
01:12
If you want to see how experts got to that number, you're welcome to visit the Sapienship website. https://www.sapienship.co/
01:20
We can, of course, argue endlessly about the exact number, tweaking the models this way and that way. But we should look at the big picture. The crucial news is that the price tag of preventing the apocalypse is in the low single digits of annual global GDP. Even the more pessimistic models generally estimate it at below five percent. And most models say it requires investing only an additional two percent of global GDP in the right places.
01:57
And note the word investing. We are not talking about burning piles of banknotes in some huge sacrifice to the spirits of the Earth. We are talking about making investments in new technologies and infrastructure, such as advanced batteries or other technologies to store solar energy and updated power grids to distribute it. These investments will create lots of new jobs and economic opportunities and are likely to be economically profitable in the long run, in part by reducing health care expenditures and saving millions of people from sickness caused by air pollution. In addition, since oil and gas often prop up autocratic and militaristic regimes, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels will be a huge boon to democracy and to peace. All this can be translated into a concrete political plan of action.
03:05
We have learned in recent years to define our goal in terms of one number: 1.5 degrees Celsius. We can define the means to do this with another number: two percent. Increased investment in clean technologies and infrastructure by two percentage points of global GDP, above 2020 levels. Of course, unlike the 1.5 Celsius figure, which is a scientifically robust threshold, the two-percent figure represents only a rough guesstimate. It should be understood as a ballpark figure that can help to frame the kind of political project humanity requires. It tells us that preventing catastrophic climate change is a totally feasible project, even though it would obviously cost a lot of money.
04:05
Since global GDP in 2020 was about 85 trillion US dollars, we are talking about a number around 1.7 trillion US dollars. But that's still just two percent. This means that to save the environment, we don't need to completely derail the economy or to abandon the achievements of modern civilization. We just need to get our priorities right.
04:36
Committing two percent of annual global GDP is far from the whole story, of course. It won't solve all our ecological problems, such as oceans brimming with plastic or the continued loss of biodiversity. And even to prevent catastrophic climate change we'll need to make sure that the funds are invested in the right places and that the new investments don't cause their own negative ecological or social fallout. We will also need to change some of our behaviors and ways of thinking from what we eat to how we travel.
05:1
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TED needs to stop talking. Get fucked, TED.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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