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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics — No Comments ↓

Fortunately for the state of North Carolina, most of its residents share the political sensibilities of the more productive and civilized states.  The author of the meme probably doesn’t know that California, if it were a country, would be the 5th largest economy on Earth. That’s something to be emulated and respected, not ridiculed.

Most of the population of North Carolina is within an easy drive to Raleigh or Charlotte, which are rife with great universities, top-tier financial service companies, and centers of technological development. And its Atlantic coast, with its Outer Banks, is a true wonder.

Now, if you want to find hillbillys, it’s not impossible.  Just head west.  You’ll notice quickly that the towns start to look like the one pictured at right.  Poor education, little affluence, horrible healthcare, but plenty of political rancor and Fox News viewership.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics — No Comments ↓

Lauren Boebert is a darling among the Christian right in rural Colorado.  And with this resumé, why shouldn’t she be?

Now is a great time in history to stretch our understanding of right and wrong.  After all, we live in a period in which the vast majority of Republicans are desperate to see former president Trump re-elected, awaiting trial, as he is, for criminal trials concerning the 88 felony charges he faces.

Nothing makes any sense from an ethical perspective; we’re simply going to have get accustomed to that.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science — No Comments ↓

It’s true that the physicists of the later 19th Century believed that they had discovered all the major, basic principles that govern the universe.  Then, of course, came Einstein, followed by the quantum physicists and all the theoretical stuff that has come along since.

Science remains thirsty for new discoveries, and we should not expect anyone of any stature in this arena to tell us that they have physics entirely “in the can.”

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics — No Comments ↓

Apparently, Trump’s legal team has run out of ammunition in one of the former president’s election interference cases, though what they’re asserting here is correct.

Unfortunately for them, there is something wrong with committing crimes, felonies, to be more specific. One would think that this would be obvious, but evidently not.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability — No Comments ↓

Great quote from public intellectual Garrison Keillor here.

Yet keep in mind that those working to weaken public education couldn’t care less about some notion of “community.” Whether these people are Christian fundamentalists, or some other form of small-government zealot, they have no real interest in anything that resembles inclusion or “oneness.”

In fact, they want to see the opposite: a hatred, or at least resentment of immigrants, the poor, the Spanish-speaking, Muslims, gays, etc.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability — No Comments ↓

News flash: If you’re a part of a “Christian movement” that demands that “the government be a part of God’s wrath,” you have deep-seated psychological issues that are unlikely to resolve by encountering some meme on social media.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles — No Comments ↓

When we look at new car sales in Norway, we see that only one in 10 is powered by an internal combustion engine.

Admittedly, Northern Europe has many positive geographic and demographic features: a strong supply of renewable energy resources, high gas prices, short driving distances, and, most importantly, a citizenry that honestly cares about sustainability, i.e., one that has a sincere interest in leaving behind a planet that fully supports life as we’ve come to know it.

By way of comparison, sales of new EVs in the U.S. run at about 6.5%.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics — No Comments ↓

It’s hard to imagine any self-respecting woman voting for someone who is proud of the work he’s done in removing the right to an abortion.

Who doesn’t love Betty White?  “If men could get pregnant, abortions would be available at Jiffy Lube.”

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change — No Comments ↓

Here’s an NPR segment on the “sexiness” of climate science, in which the concepts of geoengineering and nuclear fusion are explored.

The point is that, while things like covering large land masses with solar and wind farms may be practical, they lack the sex appeal of things like fusion, which offers what is essentially an infinite supply of energy in perpetuity.

The problem, of course, is that, where solar and wind are here now, fusion is likely at least a decade, probably several, in the future.

Looking at geoengineering, I suppose there are people who find the subject to be sexy.  Maybe these are BDSM enthusiasts; I just find the topic to be frightening.  Making wholesale and irreversible changes in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, and dealing with an eternity of unintended consequences, doesn’t turn me on.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change — No Comments ↓

At left is a meme supporting the mode of thinking employed by conspiracy theorists, i.e., that they, unlike the rest of us, “have the cognitive capacity to think critically for themselves.”

In fact, the reason that reasonable people trust science is that we’re aware that we lack the time and resources to conduct this research ourselves: formulating hypotheses, experiment design and execution, analysis of results, drawing conclusions, publishing findings, and having them peer reviewed.

Shortly after I entered the field of climate science and interviewed Dr. V. Ramanathan at the Scripps Institute, one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, a well-meaning guy suggested that I come to my own independent conclusions on the subject.  I respectfully pointed out that “Ram” (as he likes to be called, is one of tens of thousands of people who have made it their lifework to study this subject, each of which has a serious head start over me, including several decades of work, uncountable terabytes of data, and billions of dollars of surveillance equipment on and above the Earth.

I’m equally unqualified to “do my own research” in disease control, anthropology, molecular biology, and quantum physics.

If a few crackpots think this renders me intellectually deficient or gullible, I’ll have to learn to live with that.

 

 

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