Trump Administration Sees a 7-Degree Rise in Global Temperatures By 2100 (washingtonpost.com) 436
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century. From a report: A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe. But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet's fate is already sealed. The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump's decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
Best thing that could happen (Score:2, Insightful)
The best thing that could happen, for both the planet and human beings, is for the price of oil and coal to skyrocket. Would it cause an economic disaster? Perhaps, but I don't think that really matters at this point.
Re:Best thing that could happen (Score:5, Insightful)
It matters insofar as prosperity is the only know non-cruel means of drastic population control, because economically secure modernized families seem to trend towards less than replacement births voluntarily the world over. Even in India, educated women who can easily feed and get medical care for their children just shrug after two or even one baby -- they are not personally interested in a larger than small family.
It would sure be nice not to have severe climate transitions over a measly century or so to create poverty and cause a few billion people to "die off" by other means.
Re:Best thing that could happen (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually the opposite: population in total is constricted by resource availability
[Citation Required]
Because what you're claiming flies in the face of what's happening. For example, first-world countries have very high resource availability, and have lower birth rates. Places with poor resource availability, (and high unemployment) have high birth rates.
Sure but... (Score:4, Funny)
Sensible (Score:4, Informative)
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I agree! If EU continues like this, then, in just a few years the average European will produce HALF as much as the average American!
I do not know the total emission by Asia and I could not be bothered to calculate it by adding up the countries, but the average person in Asia still produces much less than the average American.
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It's probably the cherry-picking. Although the US did better than the EU in 2017, if you look at the last decade or more, they're on a similar reduction trend, and Asia (mostly China) has also reduced emissions sharply in recent years, although from a very high level.
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Look at the graph on the page I linked here:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Show me how the US trend is much better...or better at all.
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Re:Sensible (Score:4, Informative)
Show me a graph that supports your point then. 2017 is just one year, stop cherry picking and show me a trend.
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Re:Sensible (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop this cherry picking nonsense involving only the last two data points of many, there are only three ways out of this for you:
1: Find a credible source for a graph that backs your assertion regarding the US vs. EU CO2 emissions trends.
2: STFU
3: Accept your status as a liar and continue lying.
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Also, regarding your sig, have any Nazis other than Jakiw Palij been deported under Trump?
You might also want to note that he didn't just deport a Nazi, but a Nazi war criminal. People who adhere to Hitler's national-socialist ideology, wear swastikas, and perform Nazi salutes but who have not committed war crimes, have not been deported, but rather referred to as "very fine people" by Trump himself. Very different treatment.
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In the last year, yes, that's the cherry picking I was complaining about. Look at the larger trend, not just the last two data points.
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http://www.climatechangenews.c... [climatechangenews.com]
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Re:Sensible (Score:5, Interesting)
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You are absolutely a troll for conveniently omitting that the US has the greatest emissions per capita in the world, and its federal administration is staffed by climate change deniers.
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Isolated facts that appear to be purposefully isolated in that specific manner in order to obscure the big picture could reasonably be interpreted as trolling.
I am not offering an opinion on whether that applies to your earlier post BTW.
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Use the flag, users who abuse mod points like that shouldn't get mod points.
I am surprised Europe isn't doing better, the UK has been doing a good job of reducing CO2, but we tories in power now and they're only paying lip-service to doing anything. They're more keen on doing the most crony things possible and wasting huge amounts of money on white elephants like hinkley.
Reality is trolling you (Score:2, Insightful)
> You are aware that it's entirely possible to troll with facts
If you're being triggered by facts, then just maybe you should reexamine what you believe and why.
Reality does not have a magical liberal bias and it won't go away just because you don't believe it.
Re:Sensible (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sensible (Score:4, Informative)
From 2010 to 2016, emission in Europe has gone from 6137 to 5608 (I think million ton CO_2). Yes, it is bad that it is not getting better every year, but these are quite complex things to change, so it seems reasonable that it takes a few years.
Data from http://globalcarbonatlas.org/e... [globalcarbonatlas.org]
Re:Sensible (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the official data: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/... [europa.eu]
EU CO2 emissions have been falling for a long time. There has been a bit of a stall recently due to a bit of a transition, but we are still on track for some very aggressive targets. The IEA is predicting wind to be the dominant source of electricity in 2027, with coal down to just 10%.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
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Everyone knows that China's emissions are still rising. It was accepted that they would have to peak instead of falling immediately. And China is well ahead of the curve of where it agreed to be.
See, environmentalists are not calling for economic suicide as is often claimed. They worked with China to come up with sensible, workable proposals and got them accepted. Expecting them to stop growing instantly is unrealistic and would just ruin any negotiation or hope of tackling the issue.
And so now you switch f
Re:Sensible (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you really going to say an American should be allowed 3 times the carbon output of a Chinese citizen? If you aren't willing to cut your own output significantly, you have no right to bitch about another human, regardless of whether they are your neighbor or on the other side of the planet.
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Solved, and then some (Score:5, Funny)
The Space Force will fix it by orbiting thousands of sun umbrellas [bbc.com], and all the rockets will be made in the former rustbelt in bustling rocket factories. We thought he was a babbling lunatic, but it all makes sense now! Sorry I doubted. MAGA!
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I can also easily give you a 50% discount if I first triple the price. In other words, it's kinda easy to lose the most weight in your Weight Watchers group if you got the fattest ass to begin with.
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Pointless outrage (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an NHTSA study to weigh the costs and benefits of automobile fuel efficiency standards.
A more fuel efficient car may be trading passenger lives for higher miles per gallon. It makes sense to determine what the benefits are.
In this case the preliminary study is saying the beneficial impact on warming may be insignificant. You can argue about those conclusions, but arguing about climate change as a whole is irrelevant to the point of the study.
Corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
A more fuel efficient car may be trading passenger lives for higher miles per gallon.
A heavier, less fuel efficient vehicle may be trading safety of the occupants of other vehicles it may get into an accident with for the safety of its occupants.
Uh oh! (Score:4, Funny)
Why bother with climate science? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno why climate scientists even bother anymore.
Scientists: "The world is going to overheat if we don't do something!"
Everyone else: We don't believe you cause I had to put on a sweater yesterday! And your data is wrong and sketchy!
Scientists: "Ok it's even worse than we thought and we're already starting to see the effects!"
Everyone else: Oh well, too late now. Fuck it. *throws environmental standards out the window*
It's awe inspiring. It really is.
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Here is the actual narrative:
Establishment: We have to downsize you to an efficiency apartment where you may eat kale and soy to save the planet. And we're exempt. And so is China.
Everyone else: Fuck right off.
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Moronic. (Score:2)
Get Trump and the rest of these idiots OUT, NOW. Then we can get some people in who will at least TRY.
Stage 4 already? (Score:2)
That was quick. Wait ... I have a strange deja-vu... right, I just recently said that already [slashdot.org].
Well, cut Trump some slack, old people take a bit longer to catch on.
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Big claims. Where's your sources?
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Big claims. Where's your sources?
Everywhere.
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Awesome! Now was that so hard?
Re:science not emotion (Score:4, Informative)
China has 4x the number of people that the US has
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China has 4x the number of people that the US has
So? Does the planet care about that? Does your environment get less smog rolling over from China based on population?
Re:science not emotion (Score:4, Funny)
So, does that mean that if I personally emit only 9 million Kt of CO2, it's cool because it's less than China?
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Re:science not emotion (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me try rephrasing this for you:
Country A has 100,000 people in it, and they emit 200,000 units of pollution. Country B has 400,000 people in it, and they emit 400,000 units of polution.
Question: which country hurts the environment more?
Re:science not emotion (Score:4, Interesting)
The environment doesn't care about countries. It cares about total pollution. Countries is a completely arbitrary delineation that has no bearing on anything. People is a concrete delineation -- to support people, some pollution must be produced. To support countries, in theory, nothing has to be produced because you can draw a line on a map and have a country of 0.
If the world had two countries, and one had only one person in it and did 49% of the pollution, and the other had the other 7 billion people, everybody else and did 51% of the pollution, which country has the most opportunity to reduce pollution? Unless you have a damn good rationale, it's the country of one person. Because the environment doesn't care about countries. But the country of 7 billion people is strong evidence that the other country is polluting almost 7 billion times as much as it needs to.
Especially since it's conceivable that the country of 7 billion is using the absolute minimum possible pollution to support 7 billion people at an acceptable level. But it's not possible for the country of 1 to be doing so.
None of that is to say that China is perfect. Eg. if you dug up evidence that 1/10th of China's population is responsible for almost all the polluting and the other 9/10ths are in abject poverty and should really be brought up to a higher standard even at the expense of polluting *more*, then you could make the argument that China is the bigger problem.
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The environment doesn't care about countries. It cares about total pollution. Countries is a completely arbitrary delineation that has no bearing on anything. People is a concrete delineation -- to support people, some pollution must be produced. To support countries, in theory, nothing has to be produced because you can draw a line on a map and have a country of 0.
CORRECT! Which means those who ignore China's massive CO2 output are simply being disingenuous and are using CO2 as a political hammer to attack certain countries, not deal with a perceived environmental issue.
IF you want to deal with CO2 emissions, you should start with the biggest source of CO2 (by a long shot): China.
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The one with more "wasted" pollution, as opposed to pollution that is thoughtfully and gainfully incurred in order to increase quality of life.
If one country has a higher per capita rate of emissions, that's evidence that it is wasting more pollution. You can counter that with quality of life evidence and then you try to dilly around with the right specific solution.
Note that pollution reduces quality of life directly, so it's not entirely the case that quality of life goes up with emissions. It's complex
Re:science not emotion (Score:5, Informative)
So the US produces 3x as much CO2 output per person than China?
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That's an important point during negotiations, but the atmosphere isn't going to warm up unequally based on a per capita statistic.
CO2 output is CO2 output - and China is doing the biggest chunk of the damage right now.
They therefore need to unilaterally take action - regardless of what the rest of the world does - or Western countries will be at best offsetting China's increases.
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Per-capita indicates how much the country needs to change to reduce their emissions.
China has lots of very large emitters. That's relatively easy to change because there's not that many places that need to reduce their emissions. Replacing a coal plant with something that doesn't emit CO2 is relatively easy.
To reduce emissions in the US requires a much larger change. For example, large SUVs driving us as individuals to sprawling suburbs/exurbs is harder to change, because it requires fundamental changes
Re:science not emotion (Score:5, Informative)
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What are you talking about? Per country is almost irrelevant. As you said, political action is necessary, but emissions per capita is the measure of opportunity for a country to apply political action.
There is no reason whatsoever to expect that a country with 4x the population has 4x the opportunity to do better. It's everybody that contribute, not lines on maps. Country lines are meaningless in terms of what is causing the problem.
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That doesn't support the conclusion that "it doesn't matter what the USA does". We're still a huge emitter, we still have massive influence on what the rest of the world does, and (incidentally) a lot of that stuff being made in China is being made for U.S. consumption (and shipped across an ocean at tremendous environmental expense).
The fact is, if we want to avoid global catastrophe, we must all attack the problem.
Re:science not emotion (Score:5, Insightful)
And how much of those emissions are due to making stuff for the rest of the world? Other countries have outsourced their CO2 to China.
Just because China is currently emitting the most in the past couple of years they haven't put most of the historical CO2. The developed nations have spewed CO2, and many other substances that have been found dangerous over time, for a long time while their economies grew up. Now as China tries to build up their economy they are vilified for doing the same steps as the other countries took before. (This also includes their policies on IP. The US stole a lot of IP from England when it was building up it's industry.)
Re:science not emotion (Score:5, Insightful)
Your numbers do not support the statement "the big emitter is not the USA, it doesn't matter what the USA does.". 5 Gt is not insignificant compared to 10 Gt. But, even if it was, the argument would still be flawed which can be easily seen if you bring it full circle:
1. France only emits 300,000 kt which is "nothing" (6%) compared to the US 5,000,000 kt so it doesn't matter what France does.
2. USA only emits 5,000,000 kt which is "nothing" (50%) compared to Chinas 10,000,000 kt so it doesn't matter what the USA does.
3. China only emits 10,000,000 kt which is "nothing" (30%) compared to the total of 36,000,000 kt so it doesn't matter what China does.
So, by that logic it doesn't matter if China reduces its emissions unless everyone else does since China emit "nothing" of the total. But all countries (like France) emit "nothing" of the total so it doesn't matter what anyone does.
The obvious solution is of course global cooperation and international agreements but... I guess you don't like that either, especially since good arguments are made why the developed world should take a larger part of the costs than the developing world (historical emissions, economic headroom, emissions per capita etc).
I used the numbers from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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China is now four years past peak coal. They are fixing their problems.
http://ieefa.org/ieefa-update-... [ieefa.org]
Re:science not emotion (Score:5, Insightful)
There are loads of far lefties here combined with trolls that will scream that China deserves to pollute.
They do not. But what they also don't deserve to do is get criticised for producing 1/3rd of the emissions per capita compared to the USA.
Physician heal thyself.
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It means the days of trying to force agreements that exempt the worst emitters while saddling the US with huge economic burdens are over. If you think we must "Do Something!!" you can no longer pretend that China doesn't exist and isn't an enormous contributor while dreaming up schemes to downsize the US to 1700's emission levels. None of that is politically feasible any longer — if it ever was — so you need to get your mind right and start imagining solutions that also burden China and whatev
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If you want to me take anything you say seriously then you best back up your words. I'm not doing the legwork for you.
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you're the one that needs to do legwork of very well known facts, including that China's emissions is more than twice the USAs and growing.
lazy git
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If you are a professor in school you don't have the time and you need people to prove they haven't stolen work. In the real world the last thing you sh
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If you want to me take anything you say seriously then you best back up your words. I'm not doing the legwork for you.
The bullshit argument of the loser. You're uneducated on a topic to the point that you don't know basic facts about it, then when presented with those facts you raise objection because you don't like them, but you still refuse to learn anything about the topic you're bitching about. Instead, you expect everything to be spoonfed to you.
Try stepping out into the real world. You're expected to have a base level of competency and familiarity about something before anyone will engage in that thing with you.
Re:science not emotion (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the USA consumes much of what China produces, the USA has a lot of influence on China's emissions. For example, we could tax foreign carbon and thereby force China to find less carbon-intensive ways to make things. So even though our emissions are only half of China's (and more than any other country besides China), we have a lot of power to reduce emissions in both countries.
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Re:science not emotion (Score:4, Insightful)
America has been headed in the right direction for the last 10 years. We need to continue that. Right now, it is the states that are doing it, not the feds. In fact, Trump's recent bill about methane emissions by oil companies may finally be the bill that increases America's GHG emissions.
OTOH, Tesla is continuing to push EVs at a faster and faster rate and consumers are walking away from ICE.
And yes, the HUGE emitter is China. The worst part is that they are continuing to grow and the far left along with trolls are good with that.
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We in the US ranked second in the world for totally carbon emissions, and third in the world on a per capita basis. China is the largest emitter on a net basis, but emits less than half of what we do on a per capita basis.
Now we green tards may be bad at math, but it's not really about math: The US emits 4x the CO2 that Japan does, but we have 2.5x the population of Japan, spread of 26x the area. It's apples to oranges.
Geographically large countries like Australia emit more carbon per capita than compar
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Why the hell does anyone still repeat those tired debunked talking points? This even goes beyond LALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU denial, it is like living under a rock for the last five years.
Re:It's cooling anyway (Score:5, Informative)
"Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it." - Joseph Goebbels
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“We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”
That's at least what NASA sees happening...
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We're in a grand solar minimum, so the rest of this century will be much cooler, not warmer.
First part of that appears to be correct (From WikiPedia [wikipedia.org]):
During 2008–2009 NASA scientists noted that the Sun is undergoing a "deep solar minimum," ... "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center ...
. And yet
Their non-linear character makes predictions of solar activity very difficult. ... Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) also developed a computer model of solar dynamics (Solar dynamo) for more accurate predictions and have confidence in the forecast based upon a series of test runs with the newly developed model simulating the strength of the past eight solar cycles with more than 98% accuracy.[5] In hindsight the prediction proved to be wildly inaccurate and not representative of the observed sunspot numbers.
which basically says "we don't know what's going to happen next". It reminds me of the standard disclaimer: Past performance is not indicative of future outcomes, which indicates that claiming that solar activity will make the earth cooler is misleading. Also consider that the report may have taken the Grand Solar Minimum into account (TL;DR).
For me, the Bottom Line is that the Trump Administration, a bastion of vociferous climate cha
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And here we have it folks, the endgame of climate denialism/conspiracism - climate obstructionism disguised as climate defeatism.
Re:They're just going by what the consensus said (Score:4, Insightful)
Waste heat isn't the problem, it's the atmosphere's capability to retain heat which mostly comes from the sun. Human-generated waste heat is a gnat's fart in the Cat6 hurricane of the sun's heat.
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Convince me that trying to *consciously* engineer the atmosphere is not as good an idea as continuing to negligently and now *consciously* make it worse, particularly if we were to make it better by sequestering the CO2 we've released.
We're already centuries into an unplanned and unmanaged atmospheric engineering experiment.
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I do, where do you think I've made a mistake?
I'm not saying that the atmosphere's capability to retain heat isn't affected by greenhouse gases, if I wasn't clear there. I'm saying that human-generated waste heat is a negligible problem compared to human-released greenhouse gases increasing the atmosphere's capability to retain heat, and practically all of that heat comes from the sun.
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...an increase in global GDP will always have waste heat. That's a law of physics.
I guess we skipped that chapter in my physics textbook.
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I mean, I guess it's not going to affect me, we're probably not going to slow down the rate of warming during my lifetime and I don't have any kids to worry about
..and THAT is precisely the attitude that way too many people have, which is what brings us to this point of crisis: "doesn't affect ME, why should I care?". Humans, stop being so gods-be-damned myopic!
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. Repubs hate green energy because they view it in regressive. (Mindmills were around in the 15th century).
Proving once again that conservatism's arguments are stupid (although it doesn't really matter since they're just a cover for mustache-twirling villainy). How long ago do you think the first caveman burned a lump of coal or peat? The first known use of coal was in China 3000 years ago. Solar cells are a helluva lot newer than most, odd that they don't love photovoltaic...
Re:Nuclear power is the answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Repubs hate green energy because they view it in regressive. (Mindmills were around in the 15th century).
People who can do arithmetic hate the headlong-rush to replace base load generating capacity with sunny-days-when-the-wind-is-blowing energy.
Nuclear energy can be the compromise. It will look like we are moving forward, while not producing evil carbon dioxide. We will need to lesson the regulatory burdern but not eliminate it. As it is we have a stalemate.
Yeah, I've been advocating phasing out coal in favor of nuclear for ... oh, about 40 years now. The so-called "Greens", of course, hate nuclear with an undying white-hot hatred. They will hate any energy source that threatens to be able to supply industrial/technological civilization. ANY energy source. Mark my words. If flow batteries threaten to actually make "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy sufficient to keep industrial/technological civilization running, they *will* find some reason that it's The Most Horrible Evil Ever. Guaranteed.
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You may be confusing the issue because you conflate the non-support of government subsidies for your pet "green" projects with "hate" when the motives are simply not wanting to waste more of the countries debt load on non-economic energy supplies. In short, you are just blathering environmentalist rhetoric about how Republicans want dirty water, and dirty air, when it's not at all true.
Renewable (especially photovoltaic) is already price-competitive with coal etc, and that's not even accounting for subsidies or the massive cost of defending oil supplies around the world (estimated to be at least $81B/yr for the US). [secureenergy.org]
And If they don't love dirty water and dirty air then why do they keep voting for it?
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Currently that backup generation costs nothing, because the sort of power suitable for backup generation makes up most of the existing grid power capacity. Eventually backup power will be needed. We know how much hydro costs, that can be used as energy storage. We now know how much battery arrays cost, those can work too.
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Yes, come over to the dark side. We have Air Conditioning.
Re:The Planet wll be fine. it's our fate being sea (Score:4, Funny)
Old joke
Two planets meet.
"Dude, you look terrible, what's bugging you?"
"Man, it's horrible, I got a bad case of homo sapiens."
"Ah. I had that too. Don't worry. It will pass."
There is no doubt about it, (Score:2, Troll)
this administration is pure evil.