No shock, but hell,
This will piss off lots of budding authoritarians. I hope she has security.
There’s a kind of paradox that every observer of global warming muat experience: on the one hand, it’s no good sugar-coating the issue and pretending that humanity’s efforts so far are going to make a significant difference in the outcome…
And on the other hand, getting so deep into despair that it becomes impossible to creatively address the situation.
Dreamers like Elon Musk are not helping things any, when they assert that there’s a narrow, closing window for humanity to accomplish grand, expansive projects like colonizing Mars. These kinds of fantasies are an attractive nuisance, since its so much more fun to think about that, than the far more realistic disaster scenario’s that some of us are already experiencing.
Yet the shrinking time window is a realistic frame for yet another unaddressed project: nuclear waste disposal. If the hundreds of temporary nuclear waste storage repositories are not consolidated into a few permanant facilities -within this window of time- then its quite likely they never will be, and all of them will become chronic, ongoing hazards that hamper human efforts to recover from the climate disaster.
And this remains true, whether or not you believe that nuclear fusion is “just around the corner”, or if you believe that deeper investment in fission power is the only way to stop the accelerating carbon emissions. We still must cope with the short sighted choices made in the last 70 years, regardless of what else we end up doing.
sigh. Because she needs to work on her anger management. SMFH.
The stuff she has to put up with is just unreal.
“Greta’s power will be in making more Gretas” -David Roberts
I love that! Je suis Greta!
Worse Case Scenario Architecture is actually a thing now:
Alternate Title: Some Ag Leaders are Grudgingly Realizing They Can No Longer Profit from Climate Denial
Long article, but it shows American railroads were in deep with climate-denying industry associations. Railroads have a long association with coal of course, but the article says that recent estimates still have coal amounting to about 1/3 of all rail freight carried.
The sources which the article draws on:
http://www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/uploads/2/8/4/0/28401609/cdl_utilities_report_fall_2019_.pdf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/soin.12333
The Association of American Railroads helped lead the GCC through this period. Richard Briggs, then the executive vice president of the rail association, was the GCC’s chairman in 1995, and Edwin Harper, the rail association’s president, was GCC’s secretary in 1996, according to IRS documents. All four of the big railroads were themselves members of the GCC in one or both of those years.
In 1997, the GCC spent more than $13 million on ads opposing the Kyoto Protocol, an international climate treaty. When President George W. Bush formally withdrew from Kyoto in 2001, a senior State Department official told GCC that it had changed history: Bush “rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you,” she wrote in a memo.
In 2009, as Congress was debating an aggressive bill to reduce carbon emissions, Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia received a memorable letter from the leader of the local NAACP office. The letter revealed an intimacy with arcane electricity data that would make an energy lobbyist shiver with pleasure. “Our state gets 56% of its electricity from coal,” it told Perriello, a first-term Democrat in a vulnerable seat. It asked him to amend the legislation to “protect minorities and all your constituents from unaffordable energy cost increases.”
Soon, nearly identical letters arrived from other local civil-rights groups. The letters were fake—forged by a public-relations firm subcontracting for the clean-coal coalition. The coalition had learned about the fake letters within days of their being sent out, but said nothing until after representatives had voted on the bill, a congressional investigation later found.
For non-metric users, 50° C is 122° F. Roasty toasty indeed!
Before anyone hears this from your right wing uncle,
Figures of speech translate poorly.
Is it wrong of me to kinda be okay with the more violent meaning of it?
I love that she used a non-apology format to apologize, which I’m sure was not accidental.
