human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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Pope Leo rebukes climate skeptics after Trump calls warming a ‘con job’
The Illinois native’s comments come a week after the U.S. president derided the fight against climate change.
By Louise Guillot | October 1, 2025 7:10 pm CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-leo-rebukes-climate-skeptics-afte
r-us-donal-trump-calls-warming-con-job/
Pope Leo XIV denounced people who deny climate change on Wednesday, arguing that they are contributing to the destruction of God's creation.
"Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident science of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most," Leo said.
The pope's comments come just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a speech at the United Nations, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” On Tuesday, Leo made a direct foray into U.S. politics, defending the Chicago Archdiocese’s decision to honor Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who supports abortion rights.
“I think it’s important to look at the overall work that a senator has done,” said the pope, a Chicago-area native.
"Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life," he added. "Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
The pope was speaking on Wednesday at a conference commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Laudato Si, a 2015 formal doctrinal letter issued by his predecessor, Pope Francis, that called for the protection of the planet, including the fight against climate change.
"We cannot love God whom we cannot see while despising his creatures, nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded," Leo said.
Following in the footsteps of Francis, Leo called on "everyone in society ... to put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls" to fight climate change and protect the environment.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Nuclear energy fails in all countries, except when the national government is paying to build the plant because it is a national priority. France is successful because the French government designs, builds, and owns the nuclear power plants. It can't be done successfully any other way.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And I have no idea how you could be so certain that you've "already watched videos like this" without watching it. Did your videos include the part about how we've basically made it fiscally irresponsible for any individual or company to even entertain the idea of building a nuclear power plant because of all of the government red tape we allowed to be wrapped around the process after Chernobyl? Did your videos show you several examples of nuclear power plants that were in the process of being built when this all began and the owners of that land and those projects went bankrupt while they were fucked over by the US government and their new laws that made completing a nuclear power plant virtually impossible? Did they show you the laws and the intentional vaguery of their wording pertaining to passing inspections which allow anybody to claim anything as a problem and then allows them to completely shut down the work that was currently going on, or even require them to bulldoze all the work they'd already completed and start over from scratch?
Who in their right mind would sign up for that and invest tens or even hundreds of million dollars into something that you know is essentially doomed to lose every dime and every second you put into it before you break ground?
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+is+france's+nuclear+program+su
ccessful
Yes, the French government owns Électricité de France (EDF), the company that operates virtually all nuclear power plants in France, making the government the owner of the nuclear power infrastructure. In 2023, the French state fully nationalized EDF, increasing its control from 89% to 100% to accelerate nuclear power construction projects and secure full control over this critical energy sector.
Here is how nations fail when building reactors owned by capitalists rather than the national government:
Paper Reactors vs Practical Reactors
October 3, 2025
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/10/03/paper-reactors-and-paper-tigers/
The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that US firms would invest billions of dollars in Britain.
The symbolism was appropriate, since a central element of the proposed investment bonanza was the construction of large numbers of nuclear reactors, of a kind which can appropriately be described as “paper reactors”.
The term was coined by US Admiral Hyman Rickover, who directed the original development of nuclear powered submarines.
Rickover described Paper Reactors characteristics as follows:
1. It is simple.
2. It is small.
3. It is cheap.
4. It is light.
5. It can be built very quickly.
6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)
7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.
8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
These characteristics were needed by Starmer and Trump, whose goal was precisely to have a piece of paper to wave at their meeting.
The actual experience of nuclear power in the US and UK has been an extreme illustration of the difficulties Rickover described with “practical” reactors. These are plants distinguished by the following characteristics:
1. It is being built now.
2. It is behind schedule
3. It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.
4. It is very expensive.
5. It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems.
6. It is large.
7. It is heavy.
8. It is complicated.
The mo
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Nuclear energy fails in all countries, except when the national government is paying to build the plant because it is a national priority.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And I have no idea how you could be so certain that you've "already watched videos like this" without watching it. Did your videos include the part about how we've basically made it fiscally irresponsible for any individual or company to even entertain the idea of building a nuclear power plant because of all of the government red tape we allowed to be wrapped around the process after Chernobyl? Did your videos show you several examples of nuclear power plants that were in the process of being built when this all began and the owners of that land and those projects went bankrupt while they were fucked over by the US government and their new laws that made completing a nuclear power plant virtually impossible? Did they show you the laws and the intentional vaguery of their wording pertaining to passing inspections which allow anybody to claim anything as a problem and then allows them to completely shut down the work that was currently going on, or even require them to bulldoze all the work they'd already completed and start over from scratch?
Who in their right mind would sign up for that and invest tens or even hundreds of million dollars into something that you know is essentially doomed to lose every dime and every second you put into it before you break ground?
False.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Canada heat waves in 2025 tied to human-driven climate change
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/climate/impacts/human-driven
-climate-change-tied-to-2025-canadian-heat-waves
Tariffs Won't Stop China's Clean Energy Dominance
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Tariffs-Wont-Stop-Chinas-Cl
ean-Energy-Dominance.html
Nuclear Naysayers Are Nothing New
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2025/10/13/nuclear_naysayers_
are_nothing_new_1140708.html
Chinese officials reportedly planning ambitious energy pivot: 'Meltdown-proof'
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chinese-officials-reportedly-plann
ing-ambitious-211500317.html
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Quote:China Has Overtaken America in Electricity Generation
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
False.
By Paul Krugman |Oct 15, 2025 at 5:35 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america
In 1957 the Soviet Union put the first man-made satellite — Sputnik — into orbit. The U.S. response was close to panic: The Cold War was at its coldest, and there were widespread fears that the Soviets were taking the lead in science and technology.
In retrospect those fears were overblown. When Communism fell, we learned that the Soviet economy was far less advanced than many had believed. Still, the effects of the “Sputnik moment” were salutary: America poured resources into science and higher education, helping to lay the foundations for enduring leadership.
Today American leadership is once again being challenged by an authoritarian regime. And in terms of economic might, China is a much more serious rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Some readers were skeptical when I pointed out Monday that China’s economy is, in real terms, already substantially larger than ours. The truth is that GDP at purchasing power parity is a very useful measure, but if it seems too technical, how about just looking at electricity generation, which is strongly correlated with economic development? As the chart at the bottom of this post shows, China now generates well over twice as much electricity as we do.
Yet, rather than having another Sputnik moment, we are now trapped in a reverse Sputnik moment. Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.
The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more.
While Trump proclaims “Drill, Baby, Drill”, projected growth in U.S. solar and wind power has been stunted, and perhaps even stalled, by the administration’s hostility.
In his rambling speech at the United Nations, Donald Trump insisted that China isn’t making use of wind power: “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind.” I don’t know where Trump gets his misinformation — maybe the same sources telling him that Portland is in flames. But here’s the reality:
Lots more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/china-has-overtaken-america
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think
Solar electricity is growing rapidly, but can it really dominate the global energy system? Here is what it will take for us to power the planet on sunshine
By Madeleine Cuff | 23 October 2025
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2500013-solar-energy-is-going-to-
power-the-world-much-sooner-than-you-think/
Is solar power going to take over the world? The past few years have seen a frankly astounding acceleration in the rate of its deployment, with total generation capacity doubling between 2022 and 2024 to supply a full 7 per cent of the world’s electricity. Just how high can that figure go?
The first six months of 2025 saw wind and solar together pass a historic milestone, generating more power than coal for the first time and making renewables the world’s leading source of electricity. The driving force behind this “crucial turning point” in the energy transition, as the UK-based think tank Ember described it, was the growth of solar. It accounted for 83 per cent of the total increase in the world’s electricity demand in 2025, Ember’s analysis indicates, and has been the largest source of new electricity globally for three years in a row.
Solar’s secret weapon? How cheap it is. It is the world’s lowest-cost electricity, with the cost of installing a solar system dropping in price by 90 per cent over the past 15 years. “Right now, silicon panels themselves are the same cost as plywood,” says Sam Stranks at the University of Cambridge.
In other words, we have a plentiful and cheap source of electricity that can be built quickly, almost anywhere in the world. Is it fanciful to imagine that solar could one day power everything?
At the most fundamental level, the supply of solar energy to Earth is almost limitless. Even once you factor in the efficiency rates of modern solar panels, supplying all of the world’s energy needs with the sun’s power would require around 450,000 square kilometres of land, a 2021 report from the UK think tank Carbon Tracker estimated. That’s just 0.3 per cent of global land area.
https://carbontracker.org/reports/the-skys-the-limit-solar-wind/
Kingsmill Bond, one of the report authors and now at Ember, says that, while there are “trade-offs” when it comes to land use – solar may compete with agriculture, for example – “for most countries, there is plenty of space to deploy these technologies”.
A new generation of panels
The question, then, is what is stopping solar power from taking over the global electricity supply entirely? The first issue is that of efficiency. Silicon photovoltaic panels, which make up the bulk of the global solar market, currently convert about 20 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity. By comparison, hydropower plants convert 90 per cent of the potential energy into electricity, wind turbines about 50 per cent and fossil fuel plants 30 to 40 per cent.
In real terms, this means you need many more solar panels to provide the same amount of power that you could harvest from other sources. That’s why solar firms and scientists are hard at work trying to unlock more efficiency gains from solar panels, in the hope that an efficiency boost will deliver a double win for solar: even lower system costs and less demand for land.
However, crystalline silicon panels are nearing the limits of the efficiencies they can achieve, with best-in-class cells now at about 25 per cent efficiency. “The practical limit for crystalline silicon is probably about 28 per cent,” says Jenny Nelson at Imperial College London.
Pushing efficiencies above that will require a shift to what is known as a tandem solar cell, which introduces a second semiconductor to increase the amount of energy a cell can extract from the solar spectrum. Tandem silicon-perovskite cells are seen as the most promising option, with a theoretical efficiency limit of about 50 per cent. Real-world tandem panels won’t achieve anything like that level of efficiency, but could reach 3
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Trump and Republicans Join Big Oil’s All-Out Push to Shut Down Climate Liability Efforts
Republican attorneys general, GOP lawmakers, industry groups and the president himself are all maneuvering to foreclose the ability of cities and states to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for damages linked to climate change.
By Dana Drugmand | October 26, 2025
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26102025/trump-republicans-big-oil-
climate-liability/
As efforts continue to hold some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations liable for destructive and deadly climate impacts, backlash from the politically powerful oil and gas industry and its allies in government is on the rise, bolstered by the Trump administration’s allegiance to fossil fuels.
From lobbying Congress for liability protection to suing states over their climate liability laws and lawsuits, attempts to shield Big Oil from potential liability and to shut down climate accountability initiatives are advancing on multiple fronts.
“The effort has escalated dramatically in the past six or seven months,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an organization that advocates for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for selling products they knew were dangerously warming the planet.
Pushback to liability initiatives from fossil fuel interests is not new. But the political landscape has shifted dramatically this year as the second Trump administration works to reward loyalists and campaign donors, including fossil fuel interests.
The oil and gas industry spent $445 million during the last election cycle to influence President Donald Trump and Congress, including $96 million on Trump’s re-election campaign, according to the progressive advocacy group Climate Power.
“What has changed is that there is a new administration,” said Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group. And the Trump administration, she said, “is continuing to defend the fossil fuel industry and assail anyone who dares try to hold them accountable.”
Over the past eight years, communities across the country have filed tobacco-style lawsuits targeting ExxonMobil and major players in the fossil fuel industry, seeking to recover damages for localized climate impacts or to force companies to cease greenwashing and other misleading behavior.
More than 30 of these lawsuits brought by municipal, tribal and state governments are working their way through the courts, and several are now closer than ever to reaching trial.
At the same time, some states are enacting or considering so-called climate superfund legislation that would hold large fossil fuel companies strictly liable for climate damages and require them to help pay for a portion of climate change costs incurred by state governments. Vermont and New York both passed climate superfund laws last year, and similar legislation is pending in a handful of other states.
In response to these budding accountability efforts, the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress and GOP attorneys general are mounting what Wiles describes as a “massive orchestrated campaign” to try to stop climate liability laws and lawsuits in their tracks, and to push for legal immunity akin to what gun manufacturers received two decades ago. Trump’s Department of Justice has even filed highly unusual, if not unprecedented, lawsuits against Vermont and New York seeking to overturn their climate superfund statutes.
“It’s just this superbly choreographed effort on the part of the oil industry and its allies to get gun-industry-style legal immunity for all the damage that they’ve caused,” Wiles told Inside Climate News.
Oil Industry Is Lobbying Congress for a Liability Shield
Among the climate liability lawsuits inching closer to trial: a consumer protection case brought by Massachusetts against ExxonMobil, and suits seeking damages filed by Honolulu, Hawaii, and Boulder, Colorado.
As reported by The Wall Stre
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Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity
By Jameson Dow | Nov 4, 2025
https://electrek.co/2025/11/04/australia-has-so-much-solar-that-its-of
fering-everyone-free-electricity-3h-day/
Australia has been installing lots of solar power. Formerly a coal-heavy nation (for which coal is still its 2nd-largest export), solar and wind have rapidly taken over Australia’s electricity grid, pushing coal and methane gas out of the equation.
The government did receive some pushback from electricity retailers, who feel they were not properly consulted on the plan. But Australia’s Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said he would make “no apologies” if this scheme reduced their margins, and that “consumers are put first” as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The government plans to implement the scheme starting in July next year, first in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. If it works well, other regions will get it starting in 2027.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Does nuclear power have a place in a green-energy future?
https://news.yahoo.com/does-nuclear-power-have-a-place-in-a-green-ener
gy-future-170518028.html
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COP Can’t Cope With Climate Risks
We need a climate moonshot. That sure as hell won’t come from the UN.
By Quico Toro | Nov 13, 2025
https://www.persuasion.community/p/cop-cant-cope-with-climate-risks
The rigmarole begins again.
It’s that time of year again: climate negotiators from around the world are converging on an exotic locale—this time it’s Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon—to negotiate an intricate global agreement that won’t really change the planet’s climate trajectory.
The yearly Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—COP, to habitués—has morphed, over the years, into a kind of travelling circus grotesquely mismatched to the problem it’s meant to address.
There’s a soul-deadening regularity to the proceedings. Tens of thousands of politicians, negotiators, activists, NGO-types, journalists, and hangers-on of every description declare themselves shocked that global carbon emissions are even higher now than they were when they met a year earlier. Looking solemn, they make heartfelt pledges to do better, to really change this time. A year later, they do it all again.
Having gone through this rigamarole thirty times now, you’d think the world would have caught on that the COP process doesn’t work, and doing it harder won’t help.
But why doesn’t it work? Because it’s built on the wrong model of what determines a country’s level of greenhouse gas emissions. COP imagines these emissions as something a country’s government can set, like the dial on a thermostat. But emissions are more like GDP: the outcome of a complex process that politicians would like to be able to control, but don’t actually control.
More at https://www.persuasion.community/p/cop-cant-cope-with-climate-risks
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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