New Book - Unsettled Science

[LibertyBell]

On 6/22/2021 at 8:28 PM, raindancewx said:

The proposals you see from a lot of the advocacy groups would more than offset any 3% GDP hits. If you taxed oil companies heavily enough, with something like a wealth tax or special income tax, they would pass on the cost to consumers. My personal view is that scientists should stay in their lane, focus on improving your field, and leave social policy to better thinkers. A state like New Mexico gets 40% of tax revenue from an oil. You really want to confiscate that money from a school or a road to lower the temperature of the Earth by a fraction of a degree over a 100 years? It's bad ethics. There are actually states with far more share of their budget coming from oil companies than here. It's not just "states" either, there are entire countries reliant on oil money for their economic development, and their not domestic companies, so the taxes from us, or Biden's proposed "global taxes" would hit them pretty hard. Telling people that they are losing the high paying oil job because a scientist is concerned that the Earth will be hotter in a 100 years is also insane to do politically. We're supposed to be a country where the society at large decides how to proceed. This non-sense with a few people getting to dictate how the entire country is ripe with ethical issues and political illegitimacy. You can see it with COVID too, the governors all magically decided they could do emergency orders without consulting the "people" via the state law makers. I always like the wisdom of the masses, if you asked a bunch of barbers how to come up with any negative impacts from the climate warming, you'd have a much better solution that stripping states of their oil money, which seems to be your solution via taxing externalities. This obsession with oil companies is also bad ethics and bad economics, since we as a people who drive cars and fly on airplanes demanded that the oil companies provide their product as cheaply as possible. It's the same bullshit as when people talk about how much they care about human rights and they spend three hours on their Chinese slave labor produced Iphone yelling at people on Twitter who won't even pretend to agree. Apple could produce Iphones in the US if you were willing to spend thousands of dollars per phone. The modern world is built on people getting what they want even if they have to make some difficult decisions. It's not always pretty, but the foundation is grounded well.

Europe is also far less dynamic than the US with $7-$9 per gallon oil costs per gallon. That type of cost would destroy the US economy. Gas is a low percentage of costs for wealthier people but it would hit poor people and rural people hard. Frankly $640 billion is an irrelevant number and I don't particularly like their method for calculating it either. For a person making $40,000 a 3% hit per year, it's $100 a month. I would call that irrelevant next to the benefits that have been accrued via the processes that warmed the Earth - cars, airplanes, computing power increases, electrical grids, better buildings, and so on. The type of re-invention of society that is proposed to reduce greenhouse gasses would be extremely destabilizing, if for no other reason than it punishes people innocent of any major wrong doing for past mistakes. You're trying to make a moral argument that because of a culmination of past poor lifestyles, modern people have to live less luxuriously to save the Earth. It's the same ethical issue as slave reparations, or when modern Christians attack modern Jews for killing Jesus, or for calling young Germans in 2021 Nazis over something like an EU trade dispute. You're punishing people in the modern world for something you don't like that mostly happened in the past. It doesn't matter if changing the system would solve some of the issues, you're still advocating for a  "two wrongs make a right" type of setup. Ethically, the solutions that tell people they can't have the lifestyle they want because of a culmination of mistakes from prior generations amounts to hot garbage in both practical and political terms. 

at this point the economy needs to be destroyed

when things are destroyed they can be built from the ground up

all new cars must be electric and that will be the case in a few years

people dont want to work in the dirty fossil fuel cartels anymore, its less than a 20% job desirability rate- green energy pays far higher and is the highest growing job sector.  Not only that the fossil fuel cartels said that the pandemic destroyed them and they reached peak oil in 2019 and see only declines from here on.....see the pandemic does good things, nature corrects human stupidity.

 

and lol at high paying fossil fuel jobs, fossil fuel companies are laying off workers left and right they ditch their workers and pay their execs...where did you find this fantasy of that dirty cartel treating its workers well?  they are ditching them because they see the writing on the wall, their best days are behind them and the workers are the first to get cut

 

you want to talk about impacting the poor- dirty fossil fuels kill more poor people than anything else does and shorten longevity more than anything else

 

end fossil subsidies forever

 

 

[LibertyBell]

On 6/22/2021 at 8:28 PM, raindancewx said:

The proposals you see from a lot of the advocacy groups would more than offset any 3% GDP hits. If you taxed oil companies heavily enough, with something like a wealth tax or special income tax, they would pass on the cost to consumers. My personal view is that scientists should stay in their lane, focus on improving your field, and leave social policy to better thinkers. A state like New Mexico gets 40% of tax revenue from an oil. You really want to confiscate that money from a school or a road to lower the temperature of the Earth by a fraction of a degree over a 100 years? It's bad ethics. There are actually states with far more share of their budget coming from oil companies than here. It's not just "states" either, there are entire countries reliant on oil money for their economic development, and their not domestic companies, so the taxes from us, or Biden's proposed "global taxes" would hit them pretty hard. Telling people that they are losing the high paying oil job because a scientist is concerned that the Earth will be hotter in a 100 years is also insane to do politically. We're supposed to be a country where the society at large decides how to proceed. This non-sense with a few people getting to dictate how the entire country is ripe with ethical issues and political illegitimacy. You can see it with COVID too, the governors all magically decided they could do emergency orders without consulting the "people" via the state law makers. I always like the wisdom of the masses, if you asked a bunch of barbers how to come up with any negative impacts from the climate warming, you'd have a much better solution that stripping states of their oil money, which seems to be your solution via taxing externalities. This obsession with oil companies is also bad ethics and bad economics, since we as a people who drive cars and fly on airplanes demanded that the oil companies provide their product as cheaply as possible. It's the same bullshit as when people talk about how much they care about human rights and they spend three hours on their Chinese slave labor produced Iphone yelling at people on Twitter who won't even pretend to agree. Apple could produce Iphones in the US if you were willing to spend thousands of dollars per phone. The modern world is built on people getting what they want even if they have to make some difficult decisions. It's not always pretty, but the foundation is grounded well.

Europe is also far less dynamic than the US with $7-$9 per gallon oil costs per gallon. That type of cost would destroy the US economy. Gas is a low percentage of costs for wealthier people but it would hit poor people and rural people hard. Frankly $640 billion is an irrelevant number and I don't particularly like their method for calculating it either. For a person making $40,000 a 3% hit per year, it's $100 a month. I would call that irrelevant next to the benefits that have been accrued via the processes that warmed the Earth - cars, airplanes, computing power increases, electrical grids, better buildings, and so on. The type of re-invention of society that is proposed to reduce greenhouse gasses would be extremely destabilizing, if for no other reason than it punishes people innocent of any major wrong doing for past mistakes. You're trying to make a moral argument that because of a culmination of past poor lifestyles, modern people have to live less luxuriously to save the Earth. It's the same ethical issue as slave reparations, or when modern Christians attack modern Jews for killing Jesus, or for calling young Germans in 2021 Nazis over something like an EU trade dispute. You're punishing people in the modern world for something you don't like that mostly happened in the past. It doesn't matter if changing the system would solve some of the issues, you're still advocating for a  "two wrongs make a right" type of setup. Ethically, the solutions that tell people they can't have the lifestyle they want because of a culmination of mistakes from prior generations amounts to hot garbage in both practical and political terms. 

this piece of crap you just wrote is as much propaganda as much as anything the Nazis ever did, fortunately people who know better will correct you on all these fake points

 

[LibertyBell]

thank goodness we've banned dangerous fracking in NY and NJ and eastern PA after a year long scientific study and we've also banned new pipelines, looks like the unintelligent conservative cult out west is digging their own graves

 

[LibertyBell]

and LOL at politicians being better "thinkers" than scientists, these "planners" of yours wouldn't know science if it smacked them in the face, all they know is how to bend over to take bribes from the fossil fuel cartels.  Your take is way out of date, most people know much better by now than to fall for these dark money pandering politicians that spread the kind of propaganda you wasted your time typing out.

 

and yes the generation which actually matters does want these changes, it's only you archaic boomers holding on to the past who dont.

[TimB]

5 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

and LOL at politicians being better "thinkers" than scientists, these "planners" of yours wouldn't know science if it smacked them in the face, all they know is how to bend over to take bribes from the fossil fuel cartels.  Your take is way out of date, most people know much better by now than to fall for these dark money pandering politicians that spread the kind of propaganda you wasted your time typing out.

 

and yes the generation which actually matters does want these changes, it's only you archaic boomers holding on to the past who dont.

Maybe give him and these politicians an all-expenses-paid trip to the Tri-Cities area in Washington state for the next few days and put them up in a place without a/c and then have them report back to us with their thoughts on climate change.

[raindancewx]

16 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

and LOL at politicians being better "thinkers" than scientists, these "planners" of yours wouldn't know science if it smacked them in the face, all they know is how to bend over to take bribes from the fossil fuel cartels.  Your take is way out of date, most people know much better by now than to fall for these dark money pandering politicians that spread the kind of propaganda you wasted your time typing out.

 

and yes the generation which actually matters does want these changes, it's only you archaic boomers holding on to the past who dont.

First of all, I'm probably younger than you. Second of all, you never gave a solution for states like where I live where those mean old oil companies are literally paying for my infrastructure, or at least 45% of it. Do you have a way for the state to make up those revenues, or just some empty rhetoric? I'm trying to tell you that the type of taxation that would meaningfully make a difference for emissions would leave people worse off meaningfully. Nothing is free. The Democrats have had almost complete control of the state law making bodies and executive branch since statehood, if they had the slightest interest in changing policy, presumably they would have by now. This may shock you, but knowing about science doesn't make you a good economist or a good city planner. It doesn't even make you a good advocate for science really, since that involves communication. Politicians aren't the planners of society. The world is the culmination of hundreds of billions of decisions. My point is merely that the gist of these threads is that because scientists in the field are very concerned about Climate Change, but people like the book author, you know actual scientists, are not, it strikes me as insane to say "We should only listen to Climate Scientists on the Climate. Only they are experts. Oh, but they aren't experts in any of these adjacent fields like ethics, economics, international relations, but obviously we should still unquestionably accept their input unflinchingly". That's your position from the gist of your post.

https://www.abqjournal.com/2403026/nm-oil-output-at-record-levels-after-crash.html

Despite attempts to diversify New Mexico’s economy, the state currently gets nearly 45% of its total revenue – or more than $4 billion annually – from taxes and royalties on the oil and natural gas industries.

[LibertyBell]

11 hours ago, raindancewx said:

First of all, I'm probably younger than you. Second of all, you never gave a solution for states like where I live where those mean old oil companies are literally paying for my infrastructure, or at least 45% of it. Do you have a way for the state to make up those revenues, or just some empty rhetoric? I'm trying to tell you that the type of taxation that would meaningfully make a difference for emissions would leave people worse off meaningfully. Nothing is free. The Democrats have had almost complete control of the state law making bodies and executive branch since statehood, if they had the slightest interest in changing policy, presumably they would have by now. This may shock you, but knowing about science doesn't make you a good economist or a good city planner. It doesn't even make you a good advocate for science really, since that involves communication. Politicians aren't the planners of society. The world is the culmination of hundreds of billions of decisions. My point is merely that the gist of these threads is that because scientists in the field are very concerned about Climate Change, but people like the book author, you know actual scientists, are not, it strikes me as insane to say "We should only listen to Climate Scientists on the Climate. Only they are experts. Oh, but they aren't experts in any of these adjacent fields like ethics, economics, international relations, but obviously we should still unquestionably accept their input unflinchingly". That's your position from the gist of your post.

https://www.abqjournal.com/2403026/nm-oil-output-at-record-levels-after-crash.html

Despite attempts to diversify New Mexico’s economy, the state currently gets nearly 45% of its total revenue – or more than $4 billion annually – from taxes and royalties on the oil and natural gas industries.

They'll be wound down slowly, it's not like it's going to happen overnight.  I would give it 30 years to be completely transitioned by 2050.  With about a 50% cut by 2030.  Nuclear energy, specifically Thorium reactors, should also be involved.

 

https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/the-people-vs-agent-orange/

 

Besides Oregon, it’s also been found in New Jersey (Newark-Passaic River), Washington, Idaho, Montana, Northern California and several nations (Australia, Philippines, Indonesia, many others, with the same birth defects, higher cancer rates, etc. They are dumping millions of barrels of it into the ocean, that’s not really a clean up!

 

It's not just the fossil fuel industry thats the problem, the chemical industry is just as bad.

 

I dont know if you watch PBS much but I saw a very interesting documentary tonight on there, Independent Film : The People vs Agent Orange season 15 episode 22 and it's extremely sad that children of Vietnam Vets have birth defects from it and they get no benefits from the government! Not to mention children still being born in Vietnam and Laos who have some of the worst birth defects I've ever seen (being born with enlarged pancreas, bulging eyes, parts of their brains missing, limbs facing backwards, webbed fingers and toes, etc.) it's awful!  The US Govt was spraying there between 1962-1971 and was involved with burning thousands of pages of documents in 1971 when there was a large outcry and the spraying ended, but some of it was saved by whistleblowing scientists working at the Air Force and released later.   This was the largest chemical war, not WW1, and based on what happened, this was definitely a war crime, with over 500 adults and millions of children affected by horrible birth defects and/or cancer.  All they got for it was a $180 million settlement in a class action by Vets (but no benefits for their children who were born with birth defects because of their Vet dads' damaged sperm- very similar to the awful birth defects suffered in Vietnam and Laos) and the companies involved moved on with their dioxin laced 2-4,D concoction and later added glyphosate and atrazine to their toxic mix  in their Oregon spraying (they stopped 2,4,5-T spraying  since that had the highest concentrations of dioxin but it wasn't enough). The rest of it was about how it was still being sprayed in Oregon in the 70s and 80s and how there was a 50% miscarriage rate in Five Rivers, a town in Lincoln County, by a timber company to clear the brush. There were many lawsuits, the residents of the town even got threatened (either by the timber company, or Dow Chemical, they couldn't identify who the people were, just that they wore suits and followed them around and visited them and told them they need to keep an eye on their children!) that threat was later fulfilled when one of the houses there was burned down and 4 children died.....it was awful!  They showed the grave shared by the four children with the death of all four is listed as December 30th, 1977.  The state called it arson, but also an "accident" and the investigation was closed.  They finally stopped spraying when the whole state turned against them but have started using a different toxic concoction there that includes the different pesticides all combined together, which the people who sprayed are now reporting blisters in their throat and on their tongue, dead ducks in rivers and lakes, frogs with reversed limbs, a high rate of miscarriages (reported as involuntary "abortions") and children with frequent diarrhea and children born with birth defects like webbed feet and incomplete limbs or fingers/toes.  Similar to what happened in Vietnam and Laos.  Toxicity of dioxin is listed as similar to plutonium, and its half life is 2 billion years.

 

This stuff can be so sad and make one angry at the same time. Dow and Monsanto knew all about how toxic the chemicals they were spraying were according to their own internal documents, but to the public they were saying that they were less toxic than aspirin

 

 

 

 

The EPA was complicit in the cover up as they tried to destroy the internal documents pertaining to the chemicals but 200,000 pages of it had to be released because of a freedom of information act request and all of that was eventually uploaded by the people in the town to Poison Papers.  In addition to that the EPA was testing town residents for toxins and collecting dead and mutated animals, but the test samples mysteriously disappeared.  Yeah right.

 

 

 

 

Seeing those children with those awful birth defects and mothers with cancer in multiple organs and those companies just waiting for them to die so they wouldn't be sued was about as awful as it could ever get.

 

 

 

 

In 2017 Lincoln County got a court order to suspend spraying but in 2019 the state court of appeals overturned it saying that a county couldn't do something that went against what the state wanted to do, so the fight continues. The Vietnam case had its own lawsuit in France thats been going on for 7 years, but the chemical companies involved are trying to slow things down, they think that if all the people involved in it die from cancer and whatever else they got from the chemicals, then the lawsuit will go away.

 

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit made a great point, if corporations can be given declared "people" by the Supreme Court then they should have to suffer the same penalties as people do when they commit crimes, and for mass murder, it should be the death penalty.  They knew it was toxic, the papers proved they knew it going back to the 60s, and instead of stopping the spraying, they chose to cover it up.  As did their buddies at the EPA.

[chubbs]

From Sydney Morning Herald, Ruport Murdoch is switching away from climate denial in Australia. No word on his US media properties yet, i.e. Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/rupert-murdoch-newspapers-24-hour-news-channel-to-champion-net-zero-emissions-20210905-p58oyx.html