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July 2 - July 12, 2020
environmental scientists, journalists, and activists have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.
Greta Thunberg, in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”20
Don't be hopeful, panic! Panic always produces reasoned & thoughtful policies.
Lunnon. “In California, at the moment, millions of people do not have electricity.”
This is a complete lie.
“When you have people making decisions they are essentially compelled to make,” he said, “that’s what I’m referring to as ‘an unmanageable situation.’
This isn't logical. All decisions are compelled. Therefore, by this logic all choices are unmanagable. We know that is not true.
Economic development outweighs climate change in the rich world, too.
Scientists find that plants grow faster as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations.
Most of the small farmers I interviewed wanted to work their own plot of land.
This was also th aspiration of the first English settlers.
the humanity of whales.
Whales are incapable of humanity. They are not human, whales thus cannot have humsnity.
PETA doesn’t want to talk about farming. They want to end farming. They have absolutely no idea how the world actually works.”
Whatever its psychological origins, vegetarianism appears to stem less from a rational consideration of the evidence than an emotional rejection of killing animals,
Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human. There’s an important difference there.”
the first dead body I had ever seen,
What about mom? Did she not attend the funeral? It seems her claim is not an honest one.
nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.
new nuclear plants are behind schedule and above costs, but this is typical for large construction projects,
One of the major cost drivers for nuclear energy is the heavy burden of government regulation. Another is the litigiousss nature of the those opposed.
Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat.
All of which raises a question: if nuclear power is so good for the environment and necessary for replacing fossil fuels, why are so many of the people who say they most fear climate change so against it?
Oppenheimer explained that nuclear weapons had created a revolution in foreign policy. No defense against them was possible, only deterrence, or frightening away adversaries through the threat of assured destruction.
Perhaps in 1953, but technology changes as do the types of national defenses available.
really didn’t care [about nuclear plant safety] because there are too many people in the world anyway. . . . I think that playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.”
colonel Curtis LeMay,
General Le May. He hadn't been a Colonel sine the early 1940's.
When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”
The cost of buying and installing the latest Tesla Powerwall is more than $10,000. The cost of installing solar panels on top of that ranges from $10,000 to $30,000.4 Helen and I pay about $100 per month for electricity. It would thus take at least 200 months, or more than seventeen years, for us to recoup our investment.
the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.
Solar panels require sixteen times more materials69 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.70
Just as the far higher power densities of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today’s high-energy, urbanized, and industrial civilization impossible. And, as we have seen, for some advocates of renewables, that has always been the goal.
What is inappropriate is accepting fossil fuel funding while attacking others for doing the same. Even less appropriate is lying about it.
350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.99
It is hard to imagine a more “pay-to-play” relationship than the one between Steyer and his grantees. It epitomizes the cynicism of Washington, D.C. And it exposes the news media’s double standard.
environmentalists were “self-righteous, elitist, neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth . . . and who would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat, and rural blacks, to permanent poverty.”61
fear-mongering “seems like patronizing neo-colonialism to people elsewhere.”92
stories people tell about climate change don’t have much to do with science.
IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.
In response to the IPCC’s decision to let the exaggerators write the Summary for Policymakers, Tol resigned. “I simply thought it was incredible,” he said. “I told Chris Field, the chairman, about this, and I quietly withdrew.”
Quietly witfhdrawing is not goodx enough. Tol shouldx have made his wsithdrawal public.
“Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.”
The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.
the artificial things are as natural as the natural things.
Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into the environmental sciences.
nature gracefully, gradually self-regulates species and environments
This presupposes nature has innate intelligence. Thers is no evidence of such intelligence.
The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.
unless we do very, very disruptive actions, people do not want to talk to us.”
Happily, nobody saves mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and sea turtles because they believe human civilization depends on it. We save them for a simpler reason: we love them.90
So far, that's the most cogent reason I've heard yet for protecting them.
