The Glade 4.0

Attention from funding, not media attention. The Kardashians get more press than environmental concerns, which is to me a great indicator of the problem with the media today.Renewable hydro, solar and wind are hugely inefficient in terms of their energy generation footprint - Coal, natural gas, and nuclear power all feature the smallest, and nearly identical physical footprint, of about 12 acres per megawatt produced. Solar and wind are much more land intensive technologies using 43.5 and 70.6 acres per megawatt, respectively. Hydroelectricity generated by large dams has a significantly larger footprint than any other generation technology using 315.2 acres per megawatt. When populations double, that becomes significant.

https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdfIn 2014, the US government spent $22 billion on "Federal Climate Change Expenditures” vs the DOE’s "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy” program that received a total of $1.9 billion

It's not much of a priority, clearly.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/si ... ngress.pdf
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/ar ... nding.html

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In time, this too shall pass.

I’m not sure the point you’re making here. From my reading of the 2014 budget report, The lions share of the ‘climate change research’ was on clean energy tech and energy use reductions.

The point I’m making is, the narratives being promoted don’t match the solutions proposed. Do you want to meet Koyoto’s climate numbers? Replace coal burning power plants with nuclear powered generators and you’ve met it - 20% reduction in CO2 emissions, right there. No additional technology breakthroughs needed. Declare a moratorium on legal

As I see it, the problem is either as dire as it’s been declared to be, or it’s not. I’ve been told we’re at a tipping point. Looking at what is being done, where the money is being spent and how much is being spent, I don’t see actions commensurate to the narrative. If it’s the end of the world as we know it, if 100 million people are really going to die directly because of climate change consequences in the next 12 years as we’re being told, then it’s time to abandon fear of the atom and go nuclear. Given the forecasted population densities and power requirements, it’s the only way, well, unless aliens gift us a better solution.

Instead, I just see governments fiddlefarting around, talking about how carbon credits are a solution, other folks going on about how "cow flatulence is an even bigger problem than we thought”, etc. How's the government really responding? Earmarking climate change “clean energy tech” money and giving it to private companies that failed to deliver :

Evergreen Solar - $25 million
SpectraWatt - $500,000
Solyndra - $535 million
Babcock and Brown - $178 million
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 - $118.5 million
Amonix - $5.9 million
Fisker Automotive - $529 million
Abound Solar - $400 million
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group - $700,981
ECOtality - $126.2 million
Raser Technologies - $33 million
Energy Conversion Devices - $13.3 million
Mountain Plaza, Inc. - $2 million
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company - $10 million
Range Fuels - $80 million
Stirling Energy Systems - $7 million
GreenVolts - $500,000
Nordic Windpower - $16 million
Konarka Technologies Inc. - $20 million
Mascoma Corp. - $100 million

That money’s been thrown out the window. It’s gone.

Chicken little’s are going full tilt but nobody’s addressing the problem as the problem is being described, or even attempting to develop a solution for the problem as it’s being described. That solution is nuclear energy. I’m not happy about it, I’d rather a different solution, but there it is, if you want to save the world, if the world is in as dire a climate situation as is being claimed, thats all that’s on the drawing board today, it’s the only available tech that can be implemented as quickly as it’s being claimed is needed.

It’s all smoke and mirrors and the problem isn’t as bad as is claimed, OR, we have to do something TODAY, OR, it's too late and we’re all going to burn/freeze/drown.


Pick one and stop with the platitudes.

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In time, this too shall pass.

You’re arguing that because govt isn’t taking actions then it ain’t a big deal so the government shouldn’t take action?

I must be missing something or this is utterly circular reasoning

If someone says they need to spend your money to correct a devastating problem that must be fixed NOW, but then give that money away to folks that can't or won't fix the problem and refuse to spend it on known and available solutions ...

Well, yeah, you're missing a lot. But, you're probably happy, so keep on, nothing to see here, move along and don't look behind the curtain.

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In time, this too shall pass.

That’s not how government spending works. All those earmarks are determined by politicians, not scientists. Those politicians are swayed by public opinion, dogma and lobbists. Supporting nuclear is unpopular. Supporting coal gets you votes in key states. Supporting oil gets you votes in other key states. It has nothing to do with what the real threat is, only with what someone convinced a politician to earmark.

Tell you what: slash the energy budget by 30% and let a group of climate and energy scientists decide where the money goes free of any earmarks.

Neither one of those sites is particularly credible, either.


A conclusion arrived at only by defining 'informed' as 'having appropriately leftist views.'



School funding is getting us no real results; we spend absurd amounts on education for piss poor returns. Misbehavior and incompetence by 'educators' is a daily part of the more minor current events that make up our lives, and the schools are dominated by leftists who apparently think it is perfectly ok to encourage children to 'walk out' for causes they believe in because they get exactly one idea fed to them by those same educators.



That would be the Democrats.



No one is 'making it harder for people to go to college'.



If by 'informed', you mean 'do not have as much of the view of the world the left considers informed'.

This is actually the entire problem right here, and why it is pointless discussing these issues with you. You, and the left in general, simply assign your own views the property of 'informed' and then come up with rather laughably 'scientific' measures to claim anyone who disagrees with you isn't, or is 'anti-science' or whatever it is.



Polls are showing that because higher education is increasing hostile to anyone that does not recite the appropriate leftist talking points at any opportunity. Leftist students feel entitled to riot, protest, and misbehave any time a viewpoint they don't like appears on campus. Leftist administrators refuse to stand up to this because their own intellectual conceits that their viewpoints are those of the 'educated' are more important to them than control of their institutions.

It is very entertaining how the left systematically excludes the right from fields like education and media (dressing this practice up as being 'inclusive' and 'tolerant') then claims the right is 'less informed' and 'hostile to education' and all the rest of it. It is question-begging on a societal scale. All you are doing is engaging in the usual leftist practice of shifting the Overton window to a place convenient to your own positions.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There is no particular reason why scientists should be the one controlling budgets, either, nor any one particular field of science. This fantastical view of scientists as being in unmitigated command of the facts at all times is contrary to the point of science. The entire reason to be a scientist is investigation and discovery, not to obtain a certain amount of data and then loudly lecture that the question is settled (precluding the need for further science). It is amazing how eager 'climate scientists' are to put themselves out of work.

There are a lot of questions of public policy surrounding energy policy beyond the concerns of climate, and the reason we have elected officials is to take this into account.

Furthermore, it is Congress that decides budgets, and there are no 'votes in key states' for Congressmen; they only care about votes in THEIR OWN state. That's who elects them. Yes, people in some states vote for oil and coal supporting Congressmen because they have to earn a living and would rather not see their jobs disappear with only ephemral promises of 'green energy' or 'job retraining' that we all know damn well will never materialize.

I mean, why bother? It's so easy to excuse yourself from having to care about anything else by dismissing them as racists who watch FOX News and must hate science.

This is why media measures of how 'informed' someone is are so meaningless - people tend to be pretty well informed about their own lives and what they see around them. When your proposed policy directly and negatively impacts that, and your only remedy is 'programs' that never seem to materialize, but yet (in regard to other issues) you are constantly denigrating the people you are negatively impacting and describing their understanding of their own situation as somehow 'uninformed' and 'anti science', it takes no particularly great intellectual capacity for these folks to realize you basically don't give a ****, at best, and are actively hostile to them at worst.

Yes, politicians from certain states vote certain ways on energy issues - because their constituents want them to. I realize you'd like very much for these people to go away, along with all the much poorer and far less informed people around the world who are likely to remain in extreme poverty if any massive climate control campaign is undertaken on a global scale, but perhaps we should just eradicate do-goodders and leftists and thereby lower the carbon footprint.

Or, since you folks are always so worried Donald Trump is going to start a nuclear war, how about those ideas that atmospheric debris following a major exchange could result in a massive temperature drop? Seems like a solution to me - incredibly reduced carbon footprint and global cooling on about 45 minutes notice. These ideas were created by 'climate scientists' too. Amazing how we could reverse all this with just a couple thousand megatons. In fact, its incredibly amazing how anything leftists don't like happens to line up with 'science'. What are the aggregate political views of the scientific community, again?

Oh, no wait, they're scientists! How dare we think they might have any groupthink or motives beyond the pure quest of knowledge?

Let me clue you in - even in highly abstract areas such as computer science and mathematics, proofs get published which are later debunked for error, often ridiculous error. These are fields almost immune from political influence and yet hubris abounds. It abounds even more in fields that are pet political causes.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

There is not enough facepalm for this thread.

It's good of you to improve the situation with this enlightening and intellectually stimulating comment. I'm sure we will be able to proceed more productively in the future.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is entirely amusing.

No wonder humanity cannot improve. We are stuck arguing about the weeds instead of tending the crops.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

And when Trump tells you his numbers, its based on polls like this insane ****.

I mean, there are push polls, and then there are things like this:
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/landing/20 ... CSI1bxwIZc

And yet, he is, in fact, getting record highs in mainstream polls. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-approval-rating-hits-record-high-in-new-poll/

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The increasing amount of micro plastics in everything from plastic that is breaking down is a huge ?? that maybe we should think about trying to reduce. I suspect that it's not going to be good thing you and everything you eat is contaminated with microplastic. But this is why honesty from environmentalists is important. People remember the lies forever. Unfortunately, environmentalism is an irresistible vector for certain parties that want to attack "capitalism" in any way they can.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn