We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
From the Atlantic article: "Laurison: In both the U.S. and the U.K., there’s a really strong, widely shared implicit belief—in the U.S., it’s the American dream—that success and worth are nearly identical, that if you are really rich, you must be really smart and hardworking, and if you are poor, you must have messed up in some really big way."
Exactly the sort of half-truth sociologists have specialized in for years, so they can promote their own biases. While one can find many people who believe this, the US also has many who hate the successful, and more still who define worth in any of a dozen other ways.
#1
Assistant Village Idiot
on
2019-02-28 08:42
(Reply)
Paying for the Green New Deal: So, spending 1% of GDP may not have done any good, and South Korea spending 5% of GDP might have done a little good. but we should do this anyway. Got it. Also note the assumption that this is an unequivocal good outside of cost, which is a rather large assumption right out of the gate.
#2
Assistant Village Idiot
on
2019-02-28 08:50
(Reply)
That's akin to saying 'we can spur more agricultural production if every year we burn 5% of our crops."
Oh wait, we do that. Never mind.
#2.1
another Guy named Dan
on
2019-02-28 10:31
(Reply)
Cash for Clunkers
A government program of which the Soviets would have been proud.
Assistant Village Idiot: Also note the assumption that this is an unequivocal good outside of cost, which is a rather large assumption right out of the gate.
It's actually a very reasonable assumption based on the scientific evidence for global warming.
In any case, graduated and certain change is much better than an overly expensive plan that will inhibit growth and lead to political inaction or retrenchment. The advantage of a carbon tax is that it internalizes the externalities of carbon emissions, and allows markets to find and develop the most efficient solutions.
It's actually a reasonable assumption because we say so and because we get to make up our own facts.
Hope that clears up any confusion on your part.
You're welcome.
There are two elements of fairness involved with any tax: How it is apportioned and how the proceeds are disbursed. Any proposal that I've seen allows for political manipulation of both elements (we should be exempt from the tax because we're special, we should receive a check because we're different...). It's the same intended to be gamed system as the current income tax is, as much to allow bureaucrats and politicians to control the levers of power as it is to collect revenue.
#2.2.2
Another guy named Dan
on
2019-02-28 13:15
(Reply)
Another guy named Dan: There are two elements of fairness involved with any tax: How it is apportioned and how the proceeds are disbursed. Any proposal that I've seen allows for political manipulation of both elements
Sure, but all taxes have that problem. The lack of a perfect mechanism doesn't mean there shouldn't be any taxes.
There is so much dishonesty and public graft in this issue that we would be incredibly stupid to go along with it. Every "alternative" energy source is heavily subsidized from 50% to 80% of the real costs paid for by taxpayers. In addition laws mandate that the rest of the costs be borne by rate payers who do not benefit from that energy. All of this is an attempt to hide the truth from the public. What they should do is simple, let the costs fall where they may, let the truth be known and then deal with the difficult problem of how to get costs down. One last point; in spite of the huge subsidies and the forced cost sharing to hide the true costs a few people are walking away with billions from this effort. This is by design because the government simply cannot do it right and too many politicians have too many fingers in the pie and there is outright criminal graft going on. Scrap the entire effort. Investigate where the money went and prosecute criminal acts. Turn this over to the private industry and let it be accomplished with openness and transparency.
OneGuy: What they should do is simple, let the costs fall where they may, let the truth be known and then deal with the difficult problem of how to get costs down.
Externalities are not built into the market price, in this case, the environmental damage caused by anthropogenic greenhouse emissions.
What are the environmental damage caused by anthropogenic greenhouse emissions caused by the alternative energy products from mining through fabrication, installation and maintenance? You act as though these emissions and pollutions don't exist. They happen, usually, far away in China so therefore they don't count. How about those externalities???
OneGuy: What are the environmental damage caused by anthropogenic greenhouse emissions caused by the alternative energy products from mining through fabrication, installation and maintenance?
Sadly it seems to intentionally leave out significant facts. So since you are ignorant of what those externalities are let me enlighten you; A PV system, all it's components, transportation installation and maintenance costs more in energy than that PV system will ever produce. PV and wind energy are net losers of total energy not contributors to total energy.
See if we go back far enough, say 20 years or so, we can find another dubious study based on computer models, "real" data, and other assumptions to prove our points are pointless.
"energy payback time is about 2 years for rooftop installations" WITH SUBSIDIES!!! This is the typical slight of hand of the proponents of PV. Without the subsidy PV never pays back it's costs. you would be better off investing that $40,000 in a mutual fund and paying your electric bills from the fund.
There have been a number of studies on energy payback time.
For instance see Bhandari et al., Energy payback time (EPBT) and energy return on energy invested (EROI) of solar photovoltaic systems: A systematic review and meta-analysis, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 2015; Fthenakis, How Long Does it Take for Photovoltaics To Produce the Energy Used?, Industry Communities 2012; Huang & Yu, Study on Energy Payback Time of Building Integrated Photovoltaic System, Procedia Engineering 2017.
Remember, the "green" fuel Ethanol forced down our throats by the enviros consumes more energy than it saves. as well as lessening efficiency of the petroleum products it is mixed with. And damages engines and emits carcinogenic fumes.
And anyone who relies upon an energy source that is subject to destruction by weather and pests is insane.
The left continues to show that it is more interested in a school policy than the kids impacted by that policy. They are willing to spend more money on failing schools than less money on educating children. NY spends over $21,000 per student and which includes knows how much for paying teachers not to teach because they can't be fired and getting substandard education in substandard facilities but somehow, the problem is that not enough money is spent on education. You would think that someone would consider that this socialist education model doesn't work, but not if you're a socialist.
The Schools of Education are captured by authoritarian socialists and until they cease to be the sole provider of teachers I rather think that the problem will only get worse. https://www.jamesmartin.center/2019/02/radically-transforming-the-nation-our-politicized-schools-of-education/
Agreed. I am a supporter of charter schools but I think they are regulated too much. I think that charter schools have to draw from the same pool of credentialed teachers that public schools do. I think they have more flexibility with regard to how they run the schools and maybe part of that concerns how they deal with teachers (hiring, firing, unions, etc.).
But to your point, not only are the education schools the worst in terms of academic rigor of any school in probably any college, but probably many are run and staffed by people who may have been able to secure a position in the gender studies, African-American studies, or feminist studies departments.
Aha! The entire RINO phenomenon is explained by a simple Roman army tactic. Those GOP elephants are terrified of the flaming pigs in their constituency. Wake me up when that pig is ready for the barbecue.
#6
Mike Anderson
(Link)
on
2019-02-28 11:58
(Reply)
Want a cheap Green New Deal? Then embrace a plutonium-based energy economy and prosper. Start building nuclear plants and only nuclear plants, and in 40 years you will have gotten rid of all others, gas, oil, coal, hydro, geothermal, solar, wind--all of them.
Make a suitable proportion of your reactors fast reactors, and you can use the waste from thermal reactors as fuel while at the same time breeding more fuel for the thermal reactors. The resulting metal would be less than useless for bomb-building--far, far cheaper to start from scratch. No long-lived waste, either.
Dig up the IFR machine out in Idaho, scale it up to a good fraction of a gigawatt output, design a similarly intrinsically safe thermal reactor, and start building them. Then you can have electric cars and electric railroads and convert every house to electric heat--when electricity is reliable and cheap.
The apocalyptic claims about AGW in the '90s and the 'best response' to the 'crisis' made little sense. IF you're looking to keep the lights on for a civilization that depends on 24/7/365 electricity, you DON'T go to windmills and solar. That's okay for a 'Mother Earth News' style farm - but THAT lifestyle assumes that there's civilization nearby so they can buy all the crap they need to pretend they're subsistence farmers in the 1800s.
Add in the annual pilgrimages by the 'Climate elite' in private jet so they and their fellows could discuss how to implement the low-energy lifestyles they wanted everyone ELSE to adopt, and after a while you start going "Okay, these guys are certifiably NOT serious about this 'ever so important' crisis."
So - nuclear power's the way to go, IF you want to keep the lights on. If they were REALLY serious about reducing CO2, it would have been on the table from the start - with the GREENS pushing the idea hard.
After all, if you've REALLY only got '5 years to save the planet', there's no time to fiddle about with pinwheels and shiny things. You go directly to nuclear power. Because it's about saving the planet.
But if you're just screwing around, you don't. Nuclear's icky. Wind kills endangered species. Solar kills birds. Tidal minces fish. So we'll go with... pretty much the status quo, and pretend we're saving the planet by building the occasional wind or solar farm.
However - I'm at a point where I think the 'elite' aren't particularly concerned with keeping the lights on.
Cheap energy is BAD. Because if everyone has access to what the 'elite' have - cheap transportation and communication, inexpensive consumer goods, sufficient food and drink, comfortable housing and reasonable medical care provided BY that cheap energy, just how 'elite' can you consider yourself when compared to the 'peasants'?
So the folks who make the policy will ignore nuclear power where they can, fight tooth and nail any builds where they can't, and persuade countries to shut nuclear facilities if at all possible. (Germany found out the hard way that wind and solar didn't keep the lights on in German factories. Now they're building brown coal power plants. Woo, big win there for CO2, eh?)
In the end, it's all about keeping the lights on as reliably and cheaply as possible. We'll see if the policy makers and 'elite' ever figure that out.
JLawson: Well, let's avoid putting them where there's Richter 9 earthquakes AND massive tsunamis!
Good idea, but much of the industrialized world is prone to earthquakes, including Japan, southern Europe, and the U.S. west coast. Nor are earthquakes the only hazard. The problem is that even though accidents are rare, they are extremely costly, which drives up the cost and uncertainty of nuclear power.
Actually, an all-nuclear solution has many of the same issues as an all solar/wind solution, but for the opposite reason. Nuclear plants have a lot of what is called thermal inertia. While they produce their power efficiently in a steady state, they take a long time to ramp up and ramp down.
In this case it is not the supply that's unpredictable, it's the demand. Absent an efficient way to store energy during low-consumption periods, you would have either a lot of wasted power during off-peak demand or else shortages during peak hours. While everybody charging their electric cars overnight may help to raise consumption at night, you still need to be able to provide surge production to meat peaks.
This is now done with gas turbine or even diesel plants, which have a higher cost per kilowatt hour, but can be ramped up on a moment's notice to start production. With today's technology, the combination of nuclear, heavy fuel, and light generation is pretty close to optimal. The problem is that if you retire the nuclear plants, you need to replace the base load generation with something that has a higher per kilowatt cost.
#7.2
another guy named dan
on
2019-02-28 14:09
(Reply)
QUOTE:
Tucker Carlson: just yesterday, the Post did it best to add to that darkness. The newspaper refused to run a single news story about Jussie Smollett's hoax.
We're a nation of radiophobics and are in the process of becoming carbonphobics. Instituting earth day in the worship of Gaia was the intent of socialists to bring this country to a level of mediocrity so that other dysfunctional countries could compete. Statism is a feature of authoritarian socialists...progressives are not progressive in anything but debt accumulation.
You got it right. It is difficult to bring peaceful rich democracies into socialism/communism without creating a economic or social crisis. If you want to know what the best "tell" is that the communist left is planning their move soon look for a national gun control effort. They must have that. Armed citizens won't load themselves into cattle cars or allow the elite to have all the food.
Kraft's Sabbath: Couldn't make sense of it; didn't care; gave up.
Bernie and Hillary: “This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity,” she said, adding that while it may not have been illegal, “it sure looked unethical.” DO the Dems have "integrity"? I think not. No way. Not happ'nin'.
What more can I say, but "RUN, Hillary, RUN in 2020!"
Are Democrats Bent on Suicide? I hope so. The Green Nude Eel is all hot air and handwavium. And what's the point, if the world will end in 12 years?
Trump has eliminated North Korea's reasons for hostility: Trump’s North Korea policy earns praise from experts. OHHHH NOOOOOO. I await the Gang of Z's total and mega take-down on this.
One employee said that the university “didn’t really give me a reason;” rather, the university “just told me they had to reach out to other people and they didn’t want to offend nobody, but I feel like the only ones feeling offended is us.”
Bernie and Hillary: “This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity,” she said, adding that while it may not have been illegal, “it sure looked unethical.” DO the Dems have "integrity"? I think not. No way. Not happ'nin'.
What more can I say, but "RUN, Hillary, RUN in 2020!"
Are Democrats Bent on Suicide? I hope so. The Green Nude Eel is all hot air and handwavium. And what's the point, if the world will end in 12 years?
Trump has eliminated North Korea's reasons for hostility: Trump’s North Korea policy earns praise from experts. OHHHH NOOOOOO. I await the Gang of Z's total and mega take-down on this.
Did the Roman military really light pigs on fire to send in the direction of their enemies?