Another quote — from Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: "In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth's response is."
With photographs and maps, the article concentrates on the reduction in air pollution. There's also a bit about wild animals taking the opportunity to show themselves on city streets. But I'd like to see more about climate change.
All the article says is:
The greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause climate change stay in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, so the pandemic shutdown is unlikely to affect global warming, says Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year.But this can be viewed as an experimental head start on the Green New Deal we've heard so much about. What had seemed impossible to begin is now a way of life we've plunged into. We've gone much further than what the climate activists were proposing, though we've done it for a different reason, by government order, under the fear of death by disease, and seemingly only for a few weeks (or months).
Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?
Shouldn't the Democrats be saying this? Where's Joe Biden?
Could Donald Trump and the Republicans offer something like this? I know the term "Green New Deal" has a Democratic Party sound to it, but why can't they present something visionary and future-looking that inspires hope instead of merely presuming that what's best is whatever we happened to have had in the past?
Posts
263 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 263 of 263“I don't accept the idea that we should just pretend climate change is not a problem.”
Manbearpig is real.
The Democrats tried to write airline emissions standards into the COVID package.
Howard is a retired government worker? Oh. It all makes sense now.
I have yet to meet a government bureaucrat, retired or active, who could see beyond his own pension. Or one with any understanding at all of how economies work.
If the earth cleans up this fast, we obviously aren't doing much damage.
There seems to be some who support this crap as something that will be done, not in the bonehead, scorched earth style of AOC, but in some imaginary scientifically sound and careful way. You guys are delusional. This stuff is driven like all leftism: on emotion, fantasy, control, and power. Science and logic will be ignored anytime it gets in the way of those real drivers.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
@AOC
·
Apr 20
Now is the time to create millions of good jobs building out the infrastructure and clean energy necessary to save our planet for future generations.
Replying to
@AOC
and
@Dburns4221
When the coal industry started a long-term decline, instead of moving swiftly to support workers, DC got into a lobbyist-friendly vicious cycle of bailouts that helped co’s more than it helped workers.
This time we need to invest in creating opportunities & financial security.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
@AOC
·
Apr 20
Replying to
@Dburns4221
What we need to do is bring workers like you to the table in our transition to renewable infrastructure, & guaranteeing pensions for fossil fuel workers.
If you see what is happening to coal workers, the mines get $ and workers are hung to dry. We can’t allow for that to happen.
For our economy, our planet, and our future, we need a #GreenNewDeal.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
@AOC
·
Apr 20
This snapshot is being acknowledged as a turning point in the climate movement.
Fossil fuels are in long-term structural decline. This along w/ low interest rates means it‘s the right time to create millions of jobs transitioning to renewable and clean energy. A key opportunity.
Quote Tweet
No bleach bit... I'm a serial entrepreneur who started three different private businesses over the last 40 years. My only government experience was being a lifeguard for the city of Los Angeles and a United States Marine. I have also served on the number of government advisory commissions boards and committees all of which were unpaid some of which did require the constitutional oath.
Oh yes. Climate change predictions are based on computer models, remember? And remind me, what have we learned recently about computer models? Isn’t it something like they are always wrong, but sometimes they are helpful.
Shaky stuff on which to base an obsession.
Unknown said...
"If the earth cleans up this fast, we obviously aren't doing much damage."
I was wondering if anybody had noticed.
Carmakers around the world are about to flood the market with full electric cars because of government mandates. If millions buy them, which they won't until $4 gas, the electrical grid will collapse.
New deaths in the U.S. yesterday was the lowest since the end of March, almost a full month ago. This is great news! Sorry, Enviro-Nazis, but less people dying is good sign for most of us.
I think it is a colossal understatement to suggest that Althouse's proposal to "slot-in" a climate-change solution to the current medical and economic panic colossally understates the magnitude of the effort.
Althouse said…"Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?"
Other than ban air travel, I don't know what you're proposing. What other changes do you think we can do?
Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?
Oooh! Oooh! I know the answer! Because there is no such thing as a "livable, workable form of the Green New Deal."
That was easy, Professor, give me a hard one.
Howard apparently is a government contractor, and a regulatory compliance consultant for private clients.
I have dealt quite a bit with the second breed.
This class of business is a hanger-on of the regulatory state. Remoras on the shark.
Howard@ 8:58: "most of the carbon dioxide emitted goes into the oceans and into the soil. It is that osmotic pressure that makes carbon dioxide relatively long lived in the atmosphere. It is also one of the reasons why cutting back carbon dioxide will have essentially zero effect on climate change during our lifetime and our grandchildren's lifetime."
At the risk of getting into a side-show here, I have to disagree. I am no physicist but I have tried to do some reading and (basic) thinking about what the CO2 is doing, and I keep coming back to the question: if CO2 is causing the planet to warm, why does dissolved CO2 come OUT of solution as T rises? If the oceans warm, they will not take in more CO2, but less. They will outgas. See also: Ideal Gas Law. PV=nRT. See also: that carbonated beverage as it warms in your hand.
As for empirical evidence of atmospheric residency times? What do you have for that? I'm all ears. I'd love to hear how you can tag CO2 molecules and see where they go over time. Some isotopic tracing, yes: but comprehensive, convincing?
I know the term "Green New Deal" has a Democratic Party sound to it, but why can't they present something visionary and future-looking that inspires hope instead of merely presuming that what's best is whatever we happened to have had in the past?
Probably because those who dream of a GND are not visionary, they are fantasists. We listen to their fantasies and respond "DO NOT WANT!" After Obama, their way of defining their dream future is too precise, while they rail at their inability to replace this flawed polity with their version of the new proletariat. Coupled with a terminal lack of self-awareness, this display of "superior knowledge" is the leading joke of our era.
Has the Professor spent big bucks on virtue-signaling, expensive solar panels for her home? If not, why not? Has the professor encouraged her large group of followers to cut down on their internet usage by only checking in once or twice a week? If not, why not?
Every true environmentalist contends the "planet's" biggest problem is overpopulation. Deep inside, -19 is a dream come true. People are dying and oil is crashing. Any 'wish the world looked like this every day' is the equivalent of Mussolini making the trains run on time.
"I don't accept the idea that we should just pretend climate change is not a problem"
“Climate change is not a problem”
The pretending is that “climate change” is a problem.
Think critically about what “climate change” is. It is CAGW without the baggage of a falsified falsifiable hypotheses. Global cooling came before, and was falsified. Then came global warming, that too was falsified. Now they are pushing a theory that cannot be falsified. You cannot set up a test of the theory, and then run it. Instead, you have religion. If there are more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, more intense ones, less intense ones, you supposedly have your proof. The other thing that cannot be falsified is the belief in God. As a Christian, it has been 2,000 years since anyone really had direct proof of his presence. Only 1,300 years for Muslims, but maybe 2,500 years for Jews. Instead, you have to take the “leap of faith”, which billions alive today have done.
The big giveaway here is that the proponents of the GND, believers in “climate change”, and maybe even Ann, are using the exact same models, exact same fudged data, exact same theories and predictions, as were used to push CAGW, and using them for their new “theory”. We are talking sea levels rising, polar bears starving, etc as the justifications for massive government action. Except that if Climate Change were actually the problem being addressed, they wouldn’t be obsessing over Global Warming issues like those. The worry is that the Global Warming would cause all of the glaciers to melt, flooding AlGore’s, Obama’s, etc sea front properties. How do we get from fewer (or more) big hurricanes every year to catastrophic rises in the sea level? I don’t think that you can make a serious, scientific (and thus falsifiable) argument that you can. Hence, my argument that the only change is in the name of the supposedly pending catastrophe, from CAGW to CAGCC, sInce the former was falsifiable, and falsified, while the latter cannot be falsified, because it is, by its very nature, unfalsifiable.
The basic problem, from the first, has been that the left has policy prescriptions for massively socializing our economy that require scientific support to initiate, due to the damage that they would naturally do to our economy. So, we had a decade or two of the climate naturally cooling a bit. So, they invented a theory that tried to pin that cooling on industrialization. But by the time that their CAGC theory had matured enough to be used as a policy justification, the climate had naturally warmed a bit. So, they used the warming as the basis of their new theory - CAGW. But, again, nature didn’t cooperate, and their warming period came to an end, as these short term cycles always do. The predictions of continued global warming were wrong. The theory was thus falsified, as CAGC had been falsified several decades earlier. Having been bitten twice, they switched to CAGCC (Climate Change), which doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, and thus cannot be proven wrong. Except, of course, they are still using their Global Warming data and prognostications.
Ralph L @ 9:54: "Carmakers around the world are about to flood the market with full electric cars because of government mandates. If millions buy them, which they won't until $4 gas, the electrical grid will collapse."
There you go, pointing out inconvenient facts! Talk about wrecking our high, man!
In fact I wonder if the E-car thing can continue to scale. Batteries are very very pricey and they all eventually crap out. And their "true" price, I submit, has been concealed by major subsidies by the CCP to build a dominant position in battery technology. If (as seems at least probable) we re-patriate industry from China, we are going to face (much) higher costs as we go up the learning curve and scale up our facilities. And, remember, China avoided environmental costs from battery manufacture by...ignoring them. And we looked the other way. If we bring all that smelly stuff back here, and try to do it in a more responsible fashion, our costs will go up some more.
There is a place for E-cars. But it's mostly high-density Uber-type stuff. Exactly the environment that Wu Flu has made so attractive...
buwaya @ 10:07: "...This class of business [regulatory compliance officers] is a hanger-on of the regulatory state. Remoras on the shark." Well said!
They are doorknob-checkers, happiest when there are lists of things to be "concerned" about, that require anxious clients to order another review or two. I know this, because as a lawyer working in a highly regulated industry, I spent a lot of time trying to find ways to get things done: legally, ethically, quickly, simply, cheaply. Pick any two...
"but why can't they present something visionary and future-looking that inspires hope instead of merely presuming that what's best is whatever we happened to have had in the past?"
"Happened to have", like they just fell out of the sky without effort or thought? No. What we had in the past consisted of two things- the things we chose because they were preferable to what we had even before that, and the things that were forced on us by those who rule us.
Apparently, the thinking here is that the former is bad and the latter is good, so more of the latter is needed.
"I don't accept the idea that we should just pretend climate change is not a problem"
Two different theories here. One is that Ann actually believes this Malarky. She does life in Madison, living on a generous state pension from her decades working in academia. So her distance from reality may be real. After all, she apparently did vote for Obama and then Crooked Hillary. But the other theory is that she threw red meat to her commentariat, as she has done many times in the past. Is she a clueless, mindless, leftist? Or just goading us because our COVID-19 discussions have gotten bogged down and become boring, in recent months? My vote is red meat.
If you look at CO2 emissions by economic sector ( https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions ), the sectors that are presumably reduced by the lockdown, Industry and transportation, make up 50% of total emissions. Isn't it likely the case that the only way to keep those emissions down is not to go back to work, which would prolong the recession or slide us into depression? I just don't think there's any sense to Althouse's idea. And there's no meat on the bones of her proposal.
The greatest invention for the liberation of women was the washing machine. Does Ann, or any other woman, want to give that up for the environment?
Does anyone believe that women will be more liberated in a de-industrial world?
Climate chance is a scam. No, worse, it's a religion.
"In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth's response is."
"We" haven't whacked the Earth (system? WTF) with a sledgehammer.
This was a sledgehammer:
"The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event...was a sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth.... With the exception of some ectothermic species such as the leatherback sea turtle and crocodiles, no tetrapods weighing more than 25 kilograms (55 pounds) survived."
Hayden: "The pretending is that “climate change” is a problem."
Right. And if for the sake of argument you allow that it could be problem, why is it? You'd have to have some standard of the best super-duper climate you could have, and then show that "climate change" takes us away from that. But of course that's tricky:
1. Why would you say that "the climate" in 1900 was better than the climate in 2000, or that somehow the climate in 1750 was preferable? on what grounds?
2. If you do assume that some sort of climate is preferable for some sort of reason, "climate change" can only be a problem if it moves in the wrong direction--i.e., necessarily too much warming or too much cooling; but then that takes you back to either a warming or a cooling scenario, and you'd have to prove that either one is happening, consistently. Again, the "change" in climate change can only be bad if it consistently takes you in a particular direction, away from your ideal.
3. Many claims about the badness of "climate change" are in fact political claims about the badness of behavior progs don't like; climate change is a tool.
"Think critically about what “climate change” is. It is CAGW without the baggage of a falsified falsifiable hypotheses."
Of course. But as we have seen in The Panic of 2020, no alarmists and certainly no politicians give a damn about falsification. It makes a mockery of the appeal to science, but they don't give a damn about that either. When bad science fuels popular delusions, theory immunization runs rampant. Models were just based on guesses, you know, and they are useful even if utterly false, you know, and we just didn't have good evidence, you know, and things could be different this time, you know.
"Hence, my argument that the only change is in the name of the supposedly pending catastrophe, from CAGW to CAGCC, sInce the former was falsifiable, and falsified, while the latter cannot be falsified, because it is, by its very nature, unfalsifiable."
True, but it doesn't matter. The Althouses of America are not into falsifiability. They don't like your mansplaining. They seek beauty and creativity. They are afraid we are doing Something Wrong. They will give in to prog politicians who will promise them Beauty and Creativity and Not the Old Old and Science Certified by Experts.
I guess closing the schools would be one way to not go back to everything that we were doing before, but parents aren't prepared to teach their children in perpetuity and the number of teachers out of work (we'd have to stop paying them eventually) which cause all sorts of problems.
We could ban restaurants. I suspect this could be done without long term economic damage, though the short term realignment would be more of what we're seeing now. So right now I've got ban air travel and restaurants. And hotels, I guess. So the "hospitality industry". Nothing else comes immediately to mind.
Most of the before and after images in the linked article are of NO2 concentrations ("NO2 is a noxious gas emitted by motor vehicles, power plants, and industrial facilities."). So stop transportation and industry. How can we magically not do these things in May, June, July, etc. and still recover the economy?
"Two different theories here."
Not mutually exclusive. Althouse may well be clueless about about climate change and assume that her musings will stir the deplorables into action.
What testable hypotheses would you derive to distinguish between the theories? And what evidence would you need?
Bear in mind that Althouse is a "writer," who "observes." She does not like to be pinned down on things, like "this assumption behind the GND is valid," or "that policy is preferable because it achieves q." Cruel neutrality is a handy immunization strategy. So good luck.
We could slash health care. That would save a few CO2 molecules. Hospitals on the Rochester campus are operating at 35 to 40 percent capacity, and surgical volume is at 25 to 30 percent of the level that was expected. About 60 percent of Mayo Clinic's business comes from elective procedures of the kind that are now on hold.
Owen: the Henry's law calculations are quite clear. The approximately 1 degree C increase is enough to increase carbon dioxide by about 10 to 15 parts per million nothing hundred and twenty parts per million that has been measured.
Agriculture is 10% of CO2 emissions. I guess we could produce less food going forward.
"I am a poultry grower in Sussex County. My integrator (the company I contract to grow chickens with) is depopulating 3.2 million market- age chickens right now. The reason we are doing this is because we are running at about 1/3 of our production capacity due to employee absences at the processing plants. The vast majority of these absences are not due to sickness but to fear and childcare issues.
The farmer does not own the birds. We grow them on contract. They are not ours to give away. The company and farmers have liability concerns about people coming on farms to remove the birds before they are depopulated. […]
The pork industry is facing the same issues. Market age hogs are being euthanized also.
This quarentine (sic) is causing extensive disruptions in our food supply chains. When I hear people dismiss the consequences of this quarantine as nothing more than me wanting to “go to bars and restaurants” they have no idea that we farmers of America are concerned with putting food on your table, not wining and dining ourselves."
" If the oceans warm, they will not take in more CO2, but less. They will outgas. See also: Ideal Gas Law. PV=nRT. See also: that carbonated beverage as it warms in your hand."
I'm no expert, thank God, but I would assume that the level of CO2 in the oceans is lower than in a soda and not under pressure. It's a matter of relative concentrations. If the ocean's CO2 is low enough, it would still absorb CO2 even at higher temperatures, which you have to remember, we are talking about a degree or two higher. That's just an assumption from me, but I believe the levels of CO2 in the oceans and the atmosphere have both been higher in the past at the same time the temperature was also higher.
The impact of human activity on the climate and its eventual consequences are objective facts. That isn't to say we know what those facts are, but they exist nonetheless.
The infectivity and mortality of CCP19 are objective facts. We don't yet know what those facts are, but they exist, nonetheless.
Nothing about those facts, whatever they may be, has any ideological component whatsoever.
Yet there is a strong correlation between ideology and assumptions of what those facts are. Those towards the Collectivist (Ken B, Howard, Inga, et al) assumed that the facts of CCP19 were devastating, because the models said so. Others, far more individualist (Yancey Ward, Bruce Hayden, etc), went the opposite direction: CCP19 would prove to be no more dangerous than the flu typically is.
Similarly, collectivists assume the eventual facts of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) will be so serious that in order to prevent unbearable consequences, we have to make major changes now. Individualists assume the eventual facts will turn out to be insufficiently different from natural trends as to make ACC somewhere between easily accommodated and undetectable.
It is singularly odd that two natural phenomana utterly divorced from ideology should be so strongly correlated to ideology.
There is one fact that is becoming increasingly clear: individualists win the CCP19 round hands down.
In comparison to climate, epidemiology is plug simple. Yet despite that comparative simplicity, the predictions upon which we holed the world's economies below the water line were wildly in error: even on the day they were issued, they were worthless.
And that isn't just for cases or mortality, the models were a sick joke when it came to resource usage.
Of course, because there is no relationship between CCP19 and ACC, that doesn't mean that collecivists are headed towards 0-2. But, at the very least, it should cause collectivists to seriously question their worship of climate models.
As if.
For the sake of argument, I am assuming the global warming hypothesis. I just don't see what we could do about it (setting aside whether we should) coming out of the lockdown.
"Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?"
Maybe they don't want to sound clueless, but that doesn't stop everyone.
Perhaps proponents of 'change as we come out of the lockdown' could throw out a couple of specific ideas for us to gnaw on?
@Bruce Hayden:
Now they are pushing a [climate] theory that cannot be falsified. You cannot set up a test of the theory, and then run it. Instead, you have religion. If there are more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, more intense ones, less intense ones, you supposedly have your proof.
In 2018, if memory serves, three serious hurricanes, which ACC makes more frequent, and therefore proved ACC.
In 2019, once again relying on memory, there were none.
Which means? Whatever alarmists want it to mean.
Here is a test question. Hurricanes are seasonal, and randomly distributed. Assume that ACC has increased the frequency of severe hurricanes by 5% (note, when asserting that ACC is making severe weather events more common, one never hears how much more common), how long would it take to separate the ACC signal from the background random noise?
Something on the order of 300 years.
ACC, like any religion, can't be falsified.
"I don't accept the idea that we should just pretend climate change is not a problem and that the economic arrangements of the past are the best we can do."
The climate is always changing. Sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler. People adapt; animals adapt.
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a hoax.
I don't accept the idea that climate change is a problem.
I am always amazed that, even though Althouse skews liberal, the fact that she at least is woke to the fact of her liberalness, and is therefore often even-handed, results in most of her readers being conservatives like me, who are thirsty for fairness from liberals!
The solution Ann is looking for is one that was adopted by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and others, but on a much grander scale.
Currently, there are about 8 billion people on earth. Unsustainable.
Because there are so many people, many more pandemics are likely, just because there are people everywhere and bacteria and viruses feed on whatever is abundant.
In order to have Gaia, the world's population needs to be drastically reduced, perhaps down to one billion, or less. Around the population of the Renaissance...
That means 7 of every 8 people must die. Now.
Of course, the rich will be sequestered away in their bunkers in New Zealand, and elsewhere.
After this major human culling, the wealthy can come back out and enjoy a world with no poor people, and no pollution. The sun will shine again.
Ann, is this the world you long for?
"Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?"
So let me get this straight.
According to climate models, If the current pace of the buildup of greenhouse gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit between 2060 and 2100. This rise in temperature is not expected to be uniform around the globe but to be greater in the higher latitudes, reaching as much as 20 degrees, and lower at the Equator.
The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century. Scientists have already detected a slight rise in sea levels. Concurrently, heat will cause inland waters to evaporate more rapidly, thus lowering the level of bodies of water such as the Great Lakes.
And because of this parade of horribles, we must adopt some form of the Green New Deal. And only sheer denialists can claim greenhouse gas increases within plausible ranges will have little effect on climate.
Unfortunately, there is a little problem. I paraphrased firm predictions made in 1988 that should have either come about by now, or be well on their way.
And have turned out to be completely wrong.
How much wrong will it take to put ACC in the ash heap of history?
"I don't accept the idea that we should just pretend climate change is not a problem and that the economic arrangements of the past are the best we can do."
The current economic system we rely on is not flawless, nor perfect, but it is the only system that has survived the extensive and rigorous testing of centuries, with every competing system fallen into the dustbin of history, or hanging on clinging to the coat tails of our current system for it's very survival.
It seems pretty naive to imagine that the ideas of former bartenders, lifelong politicians, and academics, most of whom never built anything other than rhetoric or margaritas have suddenly come up with something better with no testing at all. It is precisely those type of sources that have created and forced alternate systems on peoples for decades now, and have accomplished nothing but widespread murder, starvation, and failure. I say following their advice is a bad idea.
Actually we already know Ann is a leftist , actually being a law professor she is not mindless,and dementia hasn't set in so she isn't clueless.
She doesn't seem to be familiar with, or interested in, any fields or ideas which aren't based on words.
Click baiting is the answer.
Still, it's a talent to make money from a (word-based) blog, not very many people can do it.
Right when people have newfound realization of how good things were before this grand episode of fail, Althouse thinks that's a low bar to return to.
"I don't accept the idea that we should just pretend climate change is not a problem"
"Climate change" polled low as a priority before all this.
To push it now is amazingly tone deaf.
Underlying Althouse's question about wherefore creativity is the assumption that creativity in planning is what lay behind our economy. Just because we can shut down the economy does not suggest we can manipulate it in finer ways to get it to behave like think it ought. Government can kill the economy. It can shut down the economy. It can try to offer some support for the economy when it appears to founder and/or flounders. But killing it and stopping it, even trying to restart it--which I hope we can--is very different than remaking it in the image of our collective vision, no matter how enticing. That we can't do, and prior attempts as others have elaborated have gone poorly.
When the creativity flows, the gods of the copybook headings take interest.
If you've ever traveled to China, you would be astounded by the air pollution.
If you've ever traveled to India, you would be astounded by the air pollution and by the garbage that is everywhere. Travel by train in India, and all along the railbeds there is garbage, more garbage and more garbage. Try taking a dip in the Ganges in Varanasi.
The pollution that these countries cause is invisible to someone who doesn't travel.
But right now we see Trump having government put it's heavy thumb on the market place in favor of coal and oil.
Google Solyndra and then get back to us about heavy thumbs.
"But killing it and stopping it, even trying to restart it--which I hope we can--is very different than remaking it in the image of our collective vision, no matter how enticing. "
Collectives don't have vision- only individuals do. Unfortunately, there appear to no end to the number of individuals who are more than eager to crush your vision as they implement their own. For your own good, of course.
Fair point. But let's say we could agree in large part on something like a collective vision for how the economy ought to be: envisioning it is one thing, perhaps impossible on its own, but making it happen is a separate thing that we also can't do. Those are both underlying assumptions in Althouse's question, that we can have this vision and that we can realize it.
"Could Donald Trump and the Republicans offer something like this? I know the term "Green New Deal" has a Democratic Party sound to it, but why can't they present something visionary and future-looking that inspires hope instead of merely presuming that what's best is whatever we happened to have had in the past?"
Because china will eat your lunch , Ann.
Gaia's Choice? Her Choice? Or, her Choice? An essential service. #WickedSolution
Getting everybody to agree to the same thing is certainly not likely.
"But let's say we could agree in large part on something..."
And that's the deal- there is always going to be a "smaller part" that doesn't agree. Unless "collective" doesn't include them, there's no collective agreement.
Funny, what it says to me is that the Earth rebounds quickly We can continue to innovate and find ways to live "cleaner" as we gradually get to the least-polluting lifestyle. We should not be afraid that we are going to irretrievably break the Earth unless we make severe drastic changes right now right now right the hell NOW, damn the consequences.
brylun said...
Currently, there are about 8 billion people on earth. Unsustainable.
Because there are so many people, many more pandemics are likely, just because there are people everywhere and bacteria and viruses feed on whatever is abundant.
*********************
When I see such arguments, I always ask myself: So why haven't we seen an increase in pandemics as the world's population has risen by 5 billion over the past 75 years? Why do such predictions involve only the future w/o taking past experience into account?
Ditto with the idea that a purported increase of a degree or two will cause a litany of horribles, including mass extinctions, when the past increases leading to today's CO2 levels did not?
The left always believes we (mankind in general and successful people in particular) are doing everything wrong, and they have a better idea, but what we have been doing is getting cleaner, smarter, more efficient, less polluting and more protective of the environment every year for a long long time and we are accelerating that trend without their totalitarian control. It is economically successful (rich) and free countries that lead the way with it by far. The U.S. is the only nation that has reduced its greenhouse gasses, and it has done it precisely doing the things the left hates most: fracking, and letting private industry lead the way. The left's ideas are the ones that failed everywhere else.
The GND relies on "clean" energy to work. Solar power does not work at night, works poorly on cloudy days, and is less effective during the winter. Wind power produces so little power that it may not even qualify as "power generation" in the sense that it produces more power than it took to manufacture the windmills, and it does not work when it is not windy or too windy. Combined they are very erratic power sources with the only certainty is there is not going to be much electricity generated at night. Hydroelectric power works well and can even be used to leverage solar and wind power somewhat, but there are only so many rivers that can be used and we have pretty much used them all, plus the same people who love the GND hate the dams. The only other "clean" energy is nuclear and that is a non-starter with these people. And that's pretty much it. The GND requires the end of electricity. The death toll from this course of action would be horrific. The economic fallout would be catastrophic. Civil war would be the BEST outcome.
But, yes, I think the Democrats should get all on board. "We're tougher than COVID-19" just rolls of the tongue.
Althouse at 7:27 doesn’t “accept that climate change is not a problem”.
Ok, so where’s your proof that it is a problem? Models??
Yeah, they’re great. Not. And so far exactly zero tragedies forecasted by the Hanson’s, Gore’s et al of the world have eventuated, so they just roll them another decade. And Althouse believes them.
I know lots of people who choose to believe their own reality, no matter what the actual facts or lack of evidence might be. Althouse appears to be one of them. The Church of AGW.
No wonder she thought 11 million of us would die of Wuhan. I wonder if she’d rather be correct or not on that one? She’s obviously heavily emotionally invested in AGW, and ignorant of basic facts about fundamentals (see her recent windmill energy fallacies).
Maybe she’s just as invested in Wuhan killing us too? Professor wants to be correct? I do wonder. Not that I can read her mind.
Wonder why this, if one is not a Malthusian misanthrope, not a better example lending support for de urbanization?
Livin' in a Luddite Paradise
Or give lots of subsidies to "clean tech"
> "People are not rising to the occasion, not seeing the challenge and taking it seriously."
Don't care.
Can I opt out of your scheme?
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