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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

At left is a reminder of how anxious Trump supporters are for a distraction from current events at the White House.

If you were to flick on Fox News right now, there is an excellent chance you would be told about something that Biden did in his presidency that could be construed as bad or wrong.

Shouldn’t we be more interested in what’s going on today?

It’s also a reminder of a fundamental difference between the two men as human beings. Where Biden did his best to help those who needed it most, Trump’s first thought is to punish those who happen to live in states that voted against him.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

In this article in the New York Times, the author explains the overwhelming aggression with which the Trump administration is destroying the U.S. commitment to renewable energy.

Fortunately, there are market forces at work that put limits on the devastation.  For example, the low price of solar PV here and around the world has given rise to the use of solar panels as fencing, because in many places it’s cheaper than wood.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability
How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent?” David Brooks asks. “He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful.”
“What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?” Brooks continues. One answer lies in “a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.”
As much as I respect David Brooks, that’s a bit too highbrow for me.
A simpler explanation is that these 70+ million, largely uneducated people believe that Trump actually is making America great again, and that putting America first has more goodness to it than all his supposed immorality.  In particular, he’s eliminating wokeness/DEI, reducing the number of non-whites in the country, and using clever economic policies to bring back jobs from overseas.
Many of his supporters believe that it’s the “radical left-wing” media that unfairly portrays Trump as immoral, and that it’s “activist judges” who charge him with crimes, and use the law in other ways to stop him from achieving his goals for our country.
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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

There are people who thought Elon Musk and Donald Trump were going to team up and use some blend of competence, selflessness, and honesty to eliminate wasteful government spending so as to benefit the American people.

They are called “idiots.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

In a recent post I warned again the folly of solving problems that don’t exist, given that there are so many that actually do.

If you’re looking for the poster child of this phenomenon, let me introduce you to Trump advisor Marc Andreessen, and his assertion that “universities will pay the price for DEI.”

U.S. universities have been cranking out well educated young people for 400 years, and, generally, without too much trouble or controversy.  The issue that is actually of concern here, of course, is very few of these graduates are Trump supporters.  That’s because higher education provides the tools that are required to perceive that Trump is a sociopathic liar who has no more business running the United States than any other of the world’s criminal dictators.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

I met a young couple the other day who politely asked me about solar and wind, and the environmental problems they cause.

I responded that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”  In other words, there are no energy-related processes that are 100% free of negative environmental consequences.

Nuclear comes as close as anything, and may eventually win the day, if the promise of fusion or the fission of thorium can be realized.

Until that day, if it comes at all, solar and wind are offsetting the consumption of fossil fuels, especially burning coal, which has horrific consequences to all life forms on this planet.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

When I was in business, my sales team would occasionally write proposals for services that my company had never delivered, and someone would ask, “Craig, if we get this project, how will we deal with it?”  My normal response: “I’m not sure.  When and if the prospect signs off, I’ll figure it out then.  There is no reason to solve problems that don’t exist, when there are so many that actually do.”

The same applies to immigration.  These people pick our crops, clean our hotel rooms, bus our dishes, build our houses, do our gardening, and watch our children. Virtually all of them are law-abiding and hard-working.  They form a segment of our society that works just fine.

Want to talk about problems that do exist? The list might begin with environmental collapse, the end of U.S. democracy, the dismantling of the federal government so as to further enrich billionaires, lousy education, the rejection of science, healthcare, poverty, homelessness, and never-ending religious wars abroad.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I just met a guy whose career was drilling for oil; he’d been active all over North America and the Middle East for about 40 years until he retired ten years ago.

Naturally, I asked him for his thoughts on our civilization’s phasing out fossil fuels in favor of low-carbon sources of energy.  He responded, “If you’re asking me if I believe in global warming, the answer is that I don’t.  If it exists at all, it will take at least a million years to do any real damage to human beings, and by then, we will probably have disappeared through some other means.”

Now, this got me thinking.  It was clear that he honestly believed this; he isn’t getting paid by Big Oil to spread their propaganda.  It looks like the line from the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Boxer” that includes the line, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

If you try hard enough, you can still, to this day, find a few scientists who do not buy the almost universally accepted theory of anthropogenic global warming. It takes diligence, but it can be done, with enough motivation.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Don’t forget: we live in a country in which about half of our people approve of this, i.e., that the president can threaten to remove the citizenship of anyone he doesn’t like.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

As the ancient Greeks used to say, “The only people worthy of power are those who have no desire for it.”

Fast-forward to current-day America and behold that we’ve elected president the single most power-hungry person in our nation’s history. The fact that he’s also a sociopathic criminal only makes matters worse.

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