(09-29-2019, 08:38 AM)David Horn Wrote:(09-28-2019, 08:55 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 28-Sep-2019 Burn baby
(09-28-2019, 08:11 AM)David Horn Wrote: Citing China is a joke. If any country is buying into renewable energy and electric cars, its China.
Building windmills and electric cars does not reduce carbon emissions, while a massive buildup of coal-fired electric plants massively increases carbon emissions.
Your beloved Communist tyranny in China is going to kill you.
Start counting down 11 years. Burn, baby, burn!
China started this century as an emerging though still backward country, and is already eating our lunch. Do they have a lot of coal-fired power plants? Yes, though they still generate less carbon per capita than we do, "advanced" country though we are. India, on the other hand, still has a larger per capita footprint, but they're where the Chinese were 15 years ago. Let's see how that changes, if it does.
We are going away from coal. It is always tempting to use a readily-available, cheap resource so long as one has it. Much of the advanced world has used up its legacy of coal and must turn to something else. With much larger populations than the United States, one-fourth the energy use per person in either India or China outstrips ours and the damage that such energy use does. Unless we have a huge increase in energy needs from air conditioning (which could become a necessity from about Minneapolis south instead of from about Kansas City south due to global warming), our growth in energy consumption per capita is likely to be stagnant. We are not going to drive more and we have all the appliances that we need. Besides, our cars, appliances, heaters, and computers are more efficient than they used to be.
India and China are both entering the era of mass use of automobiles. India is later in the process, having been late to introduce the expressway as an alternative to its infamous network of bad, dangerous roads. But both have cause (resource depletion and environmental degradation) to not go as far as we have. Note also that coal-powered energy production causes medical problems that will cost governments dearly in lost tax revenues and increased medical costs that will slow development.
Quote:We, on the other hand, have no excuse. We've suffered 45 years of reactionary politics. It shows. I hold Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as the two most responsible for letting the US go to hell. Today, the mantle has been passed to Trump and paleo-reactionary Republicans. If they get another 4 years, the mess they'll leave behind will far exceed the mess GWB left Obama. Yes, we're on the brink, but your analysis of why is simply wrong.
A 4T has a way of discrediting and ruining those who commit to bad 3T and 4T culture, politics, and business practices. Donald Trump is as crass a demagogue as there is, and he is more a neurotic than a competent schemer. I cannot say that the next Democratic President will have a more patient electorate than Obama had... but many of us Americans slept through high-school civics classes and are getting the lessons that they missed the hard way. The rest of us might wish that we had some odd sort of sleeping sickness that vanishes with the departure of Donald Trump from the political scene.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
