Climate purge: Trump demands list of Department of Energy climate negotiators

Hopefully climate scientists are busy making secure back-ups of all of their data.

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So, he’s Ra’s al Ghul?

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I had to Google to find out who the hell that was, but i couldn’t find any cross-reference with climate change.

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Well, it was a tiny bit of a stretch, but, as I recall, RaG felt the world was overpopulated and needed to be considerably culled. I think he favored germ warfare though. He had lots of plots though, so I may be over-exaggerating the importance of world-wide genocide in his schemes.

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In ethical terms, I believe it’s worse.

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I seem to remember a bunch of people telling me that Drumpf and HRC were equally bad. That was cute.

C’mon now. Numerous Bernie fanatics would drive by boing boing and inform us that “Theres no functional difference between the two parties.” Hillary or Trump, both are corrupt, same difference, Bernie or bust.

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How much damage can Trump cause in four years? Suppose that he gets his way and puts a four year hiatus on climate policy. What is the damage in terms of extra CO2 emitted under Trump that would be prevented by keeping to the Paris agreement? Can we afford four years of mismanagement?

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I distantly recall a great science fiction short story called “Examination Day” by Henry Slesar. If you want to read it first, link is HERE. (It’s very short.) Spoilers follow…

The gist of it is that a couple are worrying over their adolescent child because he has come of age and now he has to take The Test. Don’t worry, they assure him, he’ll do his best, he’ll pass, there won’t be a problem.

He naively and earnestly goes in to have The Test administered to him. He is given a truth serum and asked a series of questions measuring his intelligence. Later, the parents are sadly informed that he “failed” the test-- and is not returning home.

The twist: the son failed because he was too intelligent. In this dystopia, for the good of the social order, the government executes citizens who are found to be too intelligent.

EPA and DoE employees are almost certainly going to face this same fate, albeit it will just be their jobs and careers that are sacrificed.


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At least the Juggalos mostly only hurt themselves.

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Or more to the point, disrupting pipeline construction…

A small group of tree-huggers can do more to impact climate change, than all the world’s diplomats carefully negotiating non-binding rules that oIL companies can shrug off as irrelevent to their business intrests.

Hillary and Donald define the edges of the Overton window, but that window doesn’t seem large enough to leave the Bakken Oil in the ground. DAPL would have been shut down just as definitively as Keystone XL, if climate change were a guiding principal for government.

We are at war in Afghanistan to protect the Unocal pipeline (now called TAPI). If this much fuss can be made over a pipeline across the world, how hard do you think the government is going to fight to defend such a pipeline on US soil?

In terms of rhetoric, Trump and Clinton couldn’t be more different. They bluster and pontificate about much different things at a vastly different skill level. But dumb money motivates both of them, and the dumb money is betting on the future of fossil fuels.

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What do you have against the Insane Clown Posse? I’m not a fan of their music, but they do have a sense of humor.

(poking gently with stick…hee hee)

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No. You have to understand that with respect to climate, there are many degrees of fuckedness. Under the Paris agreement, we’re headed to a world that will stabilize somewhere below +3C sometime in the next century. Furthermore, there was some hope that international agreements could be ratcheted up over the next decade or so to bring this down further.

The Trump regime completely reverses all progress towards the Paris agreement. If his coterie of deniers and fossil industry interests have their way (and there appears now to be nothing to stop them), the Paris agreement is toast, and we’re headed to +5-6C this century, and further warming throughout the next century as earth system feedback loops get going.

In the first scenario, some regions become uninhabitable, and we lose a number of coastal cities to the ocean, but human civilization is likely to continue.

In the second scenario, most of the planet becomes uninhabitable, nothing in the ocean survives the acidification, and humanity faces extinction.

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So, if the extinction of humanity and most life on the planet is what’s at risk, what is the incentive of the average person to not make efforts to get rid of this administration by any means necessary? What does it mean to prefer an ethical solution or avoid punishment balanced against impending extinction? I am curious as to how people are processing the risk analysis here.

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Nothing. Just as the boomers sold us out to the grifters, much of the damage won’t be seen until kids reach adulthood and beyond.

It’s a slow rot to individual humans, but insanely fast for our species collective.

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In theory, yes. In practice, no.

The Paris Agreement is completely toothless, and it still wouldn’t get the job done even if it were followed.

We’re a long way past the point where non-binding agreements and hopes of future improvement are adequate for the challenge.

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OK, how about “the average person” who is already aware of this sort of thing? Like the participants of this topic. What is the incentive of, for example, climate scientists to leave the running of the world to people who are actively bringing about their extinction? I see it not unlike rushing a suicidal airline hijacker. Isn’t trying anything to force an improvement infinitely better than resigning to extinction?

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Climate scientists are literally banned from making factual statements in advisement to the EPA ( https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1030 ), so what magic scheme have you crafted that they are supposed to do?

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Nice caricature. Do you earn money on the side by sitting on the street and drawing cartoons like that?

(Just for starters, Sanders ran as a democrat.)

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