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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here are a couple of comments on the story at left:

My wife and I owned a horse-breeding ranch when we were younger, and virtually all our employees were Latinos.  There is no question that these folks are by-and-large honest, family-oriented, and extremely hard-working people.

The fellow telling the story is the typical Trump supporter, in that in order for something in our society to be deemed “bad,” it has to happen to them. People being arrested by armed, faceless kidnappers and deported to torture-prisons while their little children are swept away didn’t seem bad at all–until these gross violations of human rights and international law affected his business.

The line “I might have f***ed up” is actually kind of funny. Pal, you f***ed up the moment you voted for an overtly racist criminal sociopath to lead what was once a great nation.

We’re at approximately the one-eighth mark through Trump’s second presidency.  We actually do see a diminution in his support, perhaps due to the epiphanies of folks with construction companies who need honest workers.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

If I had to pick a virtue that the president has none of, “decency” is as good as any.

Other valid choices include class, honor, trustworthiness, empathy/kindness, fairness/sense of justice, responsibility, sense of loyalty, and regard for the well-being of others.

As a reminder, the United States has never had a truly terrible human being in the White House; this is uncharted territory.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This period of American history will never be forgotten, as much as we wish it could be.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The sad truth is that most voters in “red states” don’t believe that there’s anything that needs “fixing” in their lives, and that goes double if the people proposing to do that fixing are the “radical leftists” in Washington.

It’s true that folks from the heavily Trump-dominated states in the South and Midwest are at the bottom of the rankings in terms of things that most people around the world hold valuable.  Don’t most of us like good health, education, and economic opportunities?  Do we really like to be sick, ignorant, and poor?

The only inference I can draw is that people like to be right, and they hate being wrong.

Heap on top of that the influence of evangelical Christianity, and nobody really cares who’s dying young, and living in abject ignorance.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Outside of the moral depravity of Donald Trump, had it ever occurred to a U.S. president to punish the people who happen to live in states that voted against you?

This sociopathic behavior is one of the main defining forces in the United States today.  If you happen to live in a “blue state,” and you’ve suffered a disaster, whether it’s a tornado or hurricane, an epidemic, a wildfire, you’re a fool if you think that the federal government is going to help you, and you’re only marginally better off if you live in the Deep South where racism and ignorance is the law of the land and almost all voters love Trump.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Have you ever wondered how to spot a fake, even if you’re not trained in science?  Here’s a good example.

Solar PV is ~25% efficient. 12 times that is 300%. So this device outputs 3 times more energy than what came into it??

Most of today’s kids who are old enough to swim and ride a bicycle understand that this is total crap.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I wrote a post earlier today in which I pointed out that the level of ignorance on the part of this former state senator from Pennsylvania is truly staggering.  Yet that’s not the most revolting aspect of his character.

IMO, it’s his intellectual arrogance.  He knows that there are thousands of people who have been studying the causes of global warming and the various possible ways of dealing with it since the subject of climate change came on the scene in earnest in the late 1970s.  Instead of simply learning from the scientists, like you and I do every day, he said, in essence: “I don’t give a s***.  I have invented my own ideas, even though the slowest high school student would find them laughably stupid, and I aim to foist them off as valid.”

Blatant dishonesty is far worse than ignorance, in my view.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In any given month, I meet an average of three or four Brits, and I can’t remember a single one who thought Brexit was a good idea for the country.

Now, keep in mind that I’m not meeting the typical Brit; the people I come across are generally highly educated folks, wealthy enough to enjoy travel internationally.

According to what I’m told, those who favor Brexit are their equivalent of the MAGA Trump supporter, i.e., ignorant racists who welcomed Brexit for its capacity to block immigration.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

There is no doubt that the United States needs a much stronger educational system, though, as a practical matter, what we need even more is a voter base that refuses to elect the most ignorant people imaginable.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

As much as I favor environmental sustainability, there is nothing in the meme here that I agree with.

Investors must treat the crisis as an economy-wide threat?  No. Investors have money, and they can use it however and wherever they think will do them the most good, whether that means monetary profit or the satisfaction of doing what’s good for the world, or some combination of the two.

The investment world hasn’t responded decisively?  Again, no. Think of all the money that’s going into decarbonizing our transportation and energy sectors.  That means alternative fuel (especially electric) cars and trucks, renewable energy, and nuclear.

It’s all fairly impressive, especially considering that the fossil fuels industries essentially own the U.S. law-making processes.  This group of gargantuan corporations are ~125 years old, enormously profitable, and receive 7+ trillion dollars (worldwide) of subsidies annually.  They use our atmosphere are their own private sewer, and no one even thinks about asking them to pay to clean up after themselves.

$7 trillion is a lot of money, regardless of your standard, which makes the article linked above from the International Monetary Fund worth your time.

Another issue here is improving our use of land, which basically translates into moving away from beef, so as to enable us to stop destroying the Amazon rainforest.  As anyone could have guessed, however, the financial pressures here are analogous to those in fossil fuels, where the industry is putting a full-court press against plant-based and lab-grown meat, and has declared an all-out PR war.

Taking into consideration the economic pressures being applied by the industry incumbents, clean tech is actually doing fairly well.  But will its progress be sufficient to avert catastrophe?

No one knows.

Maybe the answer depends on how people like you and me react and get involved.

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