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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

No one expects professional football players to be atmospheric scientists, but can’t we hope that they’ll simply keep their mouths shut?

If I tried to tell an elementary school child that our clean air is going to China and that their bad air is coming back over here, forcing us to clean it back up, the kid would laugh me right out of the room.

The command of science held by most U.S. voters isn’t too impressive, but they’re not going to put up with total nonsense.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The cartoon here illustrates something that many of us see constantly in our daily lives: some people care about the environment and the quality of life we’re leaving for future generations.  And others just plain don’t.

An old friend likes to kid me: “save the whales.”

Re: my concerns about the environmental collapse that is raining down around us, he says, “I was born without that gene.” And I suppose he’s exactly right.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

From today’s Los Angeles Times: California cities ban new gas stations

Without realizing they were starting a movement in green energy policy, Petaluma leaders did just that when they questioned the approval process for a new gas station — eventually halting its development and others in the future. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

We’ve haven’t seen any mass defections to this point, but let’s show a bit of patience.

Watch what happens when there is plenty of credible testimony to the effect that Trump knowingly orchestrated an attempted overthrow of the U.S. federal government, and the indictments start rolling in.

Trump?  Trump who?  I don’t believe I’ve ever met him.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s very likely that, on top of the content of the meme here, tons of additional evidence will come to the fore.

But what if that doesn’t happen?  What if this is all we’re going to get, in terms of Trump’s criminality re: January 6th?

Well, possessing weapons on federal property is a crime, and abetting a crime is also a crime.

 

 

 

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

The meme here is essentially a lie, but it’s not 100% false.  It appears that abiotic oil, i.e., oil that derives from sources other than formerly living things, actually could exist, far beneath the Earth’s surface.

In any case, it has no bearing whatsoever on our world today.

If you think the entire oil and gas industry, the price of gasoline, the market cap of Big Oil, etc., is a lie based on a convention in 1892, I’m not sure what to tell you.

More here.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

A friend is calling for President Joe Biden to be impeached, based on his failure to provide Americans with enough cheap energy.  As source material, he cites this piece from Tucker Carlson.

I reply: (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Racism has always been an intractable part of American society, but, as portrayed in this Norman Rockwell painting, it hasn’t always been overtly celebrated by tens of millions of hateful and ignorant white people.

In 2015, Donald Trump entered the political scene, and this segment of our population instantly became huge supporters.

Where this goes from here is anybody’s guess, but, as they say, it’s hard to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Below is a presentation by the late Antonin Scalia, two-decade-serving associate justice of the U.S. Supreme court until his death in 2016.  The subject: What makes America such a free country?

He concludes that it’s the separation of powers, especially, the independence of the judiciary, and the bipanel (House and Senate) legislature, which share (roughly) equal powers.

In truth, there is nothing wrong with what he said here; in fact, it’s entirely noncontroversial.

Where Scalia’s influence on our lives gets interesting lies in his belief in “originalism,” the concept that our laws are constitutional if and only if they conform to the explicit ideas that the founders had about them in the late 18th Century.

This makes subjects like the Second Amendment particularly troublesome.  The founders talk about the “right to bear arms, ” but they said nothing about limiting the right to own nuclear weapons, nor the right of mentally disturbed individuals to own weapons of modern-day warfare that are designed to wipe out dozens of people in a matter of a few seconds.

Originalism seems just an indefensible excuse to prohibit the use of reason and common sense that might have been applied to make progress toward a safer, saner, and more just American society.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I’m sure many of us seniors, if we had the home ownership thing to do over, would opt out of the grass lawn paradigm.  According to this piece by PBS, that’s exactly what more and more Americans are doing each year.

Given the loss of bees, this seems like an exceptionally good idea.  How about some flower beds, fruit trees, and vegetables patches?

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