I’d call it corporate gaslighting, passing the blame onto consumers to shield themselves from any accountability that could harm their bottom line. Similar to how they’ve roped a generation into believing the rhetoric of the consumer’s “carbon footprint” to shift the responsibility of climate action and deflect attention away from the world’s major polluters; multi-conglomerate companies.
That wasn’t corporations, that was a grassroots effort spearheaded by the left and famous climate proponents. Unless you’re insinuating Al Gore and Bill Nye the Science Guy were being bribed by big business the whole time.
I’ll be honest, this is part of the reason I’m not moving back to California, despite missing the sunshine a lot. I figure as global warming intensifies, we’ll probably get California weather here in the PNW, but with more water.
That’s what I’ve been thinking for a while too. That California would basically turn into Mexico. However I’ve been surprised by the weather these past 5 years. Unseasonable and strange extreme weather has actually brought more moisture, not less. To the extreme other end of trouble with flooding and such. There is a tropical storm warning in San Diego right now. The first one ever.
Global temperature rise means all kinds of different things for local weather. We shouldn’t assume that we can take the weather we have now and just dial it up 12 degrees.
Here in Mayotte, water has been increasingly rationed since 2017. Today we have running water every other day, a bit less than half the time if you count the actual hours. Quite a few people have wells, but far from everyone. There has been an immigration crisis for the past fifteen years too, and the population is officiously estimated to be twice the census (600k vs 300k officially). People are coming in from the nearby islands where there is endemic corruption and France’s development aid (74M€ staggered through several years) only seldom reached the population, as far as retellings of immigrants have taught me it was largely hijacked. Anyway, that should be our clue… but nothing has been made so far, only vague plans about an additional desalination plant… the rainy season, Kashikazi (roughly november to april), becomes less and less wet by the year. It’s not looking good.
NASA climatologist James Hansen testified to Congress in 1988 and the UN formed the IPCC that same year.
The atmosphere was still at a very safe and very reasonable 350 ppm (pre-industrial normal was 280-300 ppm), so all the emissions up to 1988 could be ignored if we had just taken action after 1988.
Since then, we fucked up. And we primarily fucked up by stopping the transition to cheap nuclear power that was already well underway, because we got scared of it after 1987 (Chernobyl).
If we had ignored those fears and listened to James Hansen, we probably could have kept CO2 below 400. It’s now 420.
Except he was in a position to push nuclear instead of a cockamamie scheme where you need to launch hundreds of rockets that are 10x the size of the Saturn V over the course of years to build solar farms the size of Manhattan.
A man who once had radioactive piss from a nuclear accident chose that over nukes.
No, he didn’t. He (or rather, Congress) financed a lot of research into alternative energy due to the oil crisis.
In actual fact, he pushed mostly for coal as a domestic energy source as a response to the oil crisis. His main concern regarding nuclear during his presidency was due to proliferation concerns.
In his defense, the magnitude of impact of fossil fuels on climate change was not as well understood during his presidency. That would take another 10 years.
As I said, 1988 was the year Congress got the expert testimonials and when the UN founded the IPCC.
This is not what happened. Takes like this, that oversimplify and make things seem inevitable aren't very helpful.
For decades before 1988 and for decades after, people have advocated for the environment. The shift to an understanding that we can have an impact on our planet has been slow and hard-won. Don't pretend like one person or one hearing or one technology could have prevented all this - that's just not true.
You may be upset that nuclear wasn't or isn't used more, but it doesn't really matter at this point - we are here, and we have really inexpensive and seemingly low impact technologies like solar and wind with battery or other types of storage. Plus, we can now have a more distributed grid with installs right in people's homes.
Move past whatever has you hung up on nuclear, there's lots of other ways to have a positive impact on our environmental future.
No, ignorant takes like yours are the real problem. We still can’t solve climate change without nuclear power, it’s simple math, physics and economics.
All the models we have show that we need a huge expansion of nuclear power, even if solar and wind growth fits the most optimistic curve we can think of.
If there was a way to solve climate change without it, I would be more optimistic about the future.
But there are too many ignorant people who can’t even do basic math.
Truth is, you both are right. Everyone who can afford it should have solar panels or wind turbines put on their homes so we have a decentralized, people-powered power network in case the power plants brown out during heat waves, which they will.
We need nuclear plants to serve as a baseline power source so we still get energy at night, or on cloudy or rainy days, or when the wind doesn’t blow.
Oh, there was nothing wrong with the gist of what they said, it was the personal commentary at the beginning that was unneeded. If they had skipped that then their point would have been likely considered more thoughtfully by those reading.
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