Bullseye, I wondered if the sources of information you use a lot are also the ones that push very misleading info about the war in Ukraine.
As for Germany looking crazy for closing nuclear power plants… This is another case of some media not reporting the whole picture.
From having a share of 22.2 percent in total electricity generation in 2010, the contribution of nuclear decreased to 11 percent in 2020. At the same time, renewables such as wind, solar PV and biogas provided around 45 percent of power generation in 2020.
Remember, someone told you in a different thread that Germany depended on a lot more in Russian Gas than it was in reality. A lot of the nuclear energy was phased out taking into consideration other sources of local power. The current crisis (and using coal as a temporary stop gag) depends a lot IMHO on Putin seeing what was coming in places like Germany and realizing that he needed to act now, or he would lose any leverage soon. Well, it did not work as he wanted, Germany is supporting Ukraine and accelerating the changes in energy generation.
We should never forget that a lot of what many on the right depend on information is not as great as they think. And related to the OP, a lot of the sources of info the supporters of the Freedom convoy are using are not so reliable.
The issues might be more complex. Nuclear power remains a good option for Canada. Russian behaviour regarding Ukrainian nuclear plants may have given the Germans second thoughts, but I think their environmental groups have political power and popularity and have had so for years. I could be wrong.
I don’t know enough details to judge them. Clearly the recent conflict implies energy priorities may have been misguided for some time.
Ukraine also exports a lot of food and this doubtless affects many industries.
In The Economist at the end of June, there is a long technical report on “the right way to do energy transition”, which takes the Ukraine fiasco into account.
While it has several good articles, these imply Germany made the decision to shutter nuclear plants in 2011 as “an overreaction” to events in Japan. They have already replaced some of their output with renewables, up to 45%.
Your link implies that keeping nuclear in Germany would require 3-5 years of operation to recoup costs as expensive safety checks are needed. They are essentially likely to continue doing business with Russia.
Russia had contracts to build several nuclear reactors in Finland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria. The conflict has made all these countries change their minds, now seeing Russian built reactors as too great a security risk.
You can’t replace nuclear power with renewables. Nuclear is baseload power. Renewables are intermittant and variable. Coal can do it, but they are only adding 1 GW of coal against 4 GW of nuclear being taken offline. The difference will be made up by natural gas.
You can make an argument for taking those plants offline in a few years. But to do so during a war when there already energy shortages and where you are already under threat of having your main energy source cut off is sheer stupidity. Germany is just increasing the leverage Russia will have over them, and increasing the likelihood of severe energy shortages in Europe this winter.
Likewise, when we are at risk of serious energy shortages in a time of war, it’s time for an ‘all of the above’ strategy. Build more wind and solar, AND build nuclear as fast as you can. Re-open drilling in areas where oil can be brought online relatively quickly. Fast track construction of some new refinery capacity.
We need to develop methods to increase food productivity to address food shortages, not reduce productivity by abandoning advanced farming techniques including nitrogen fertilizers.
As noted already, you missed that Sri Lanka gave up on not using fertilizer last year, the problems now are more related to the crazy Putin’s war that is preventing wheat and even fertilizer to come to many countries.
It’s pretty much the same people;
Those who would rather believe insane conspiracy theories, rather than scientific research that shows that vaccines are effective and safe, or scientific research that shows that CO2 emissions are going to greatly increase the average temperature of the planet, leading to terrible consequences.
It’s an anti-science movement, helped along by certain industries who want to maintain short term profits.
Farming isn’t anywhere near as simple as ‘dump on more nitrogen, grow more food.’
Timing of nitrogen applications, form of application, availability of other nutrients, availability of water, nature of the specific crop are all involved. Plants growing with lots of available nitrogen may produce high weight but poor nutrition, or lots of vegetative mass but little fruit/seed, or be more attractive to pests and therefore produce less crop. Some crops produce their own nitrogen, plus some for the following crop. Applications at the wrong point in the season, or at what turns out to be the wrong point in the season due to varying weather, or in amounts beyond what the crop can use due to lack of other requirements, are likely to wind up in wells and streams as harmful nitrate pollution; especially so when applied as synthetic nitrogen, which is also made by processes contributing to greenhouse gas production.
Working out ways to farm which provide the most nutrition per acre while doing the least damage is complicated work, as the right answer’s going to depend on the particular crop, soil, climate, and weather combination; down to the specific varieties of the crop. It’s work well worth doing. It’s quite possible that some proposed and/or actual regulations will make doing that work harder instead of easier; but knocking the entire attempt on the grounds that reducing synthetic nitrogen use will automatically lead to starvation shows a lack of understanding of the issues.
You know what definitely reduces crop production? Flooding, drought, and fire. All of which are unquestionably increased by human-induced climate change. For that matter, so is pest pressure, as pests and diseases move into northern areas they previously couldn’t survive in, and/or produce more generations a year than the season used to allow.
As this article notes, however, such measures need to be accompanied by concessions from the fossil-fuel industry and the politicians they own, to accommodate more energetic climate-security measures in future. Climate change isn’t going to pause itself just because some humans decided to have a war and drove up energy costs for everybody.
And GIGObuster has a point about the asymmetry of your assessments of the levels of “crazy” in different participants. When governments trying to mitigate climate change institute energy policies you don’t like, you say they’re “crazy”. When Putin invades Ukraine, you argue that the energy policies you don’t like somehow made him do it? As though Putin and Russia have no metric for sane and rational policy decisions other than “whatever we might conceivably be able to get away with?”
“I’m gonna invade this neighboring country because my other neighbors haven’t designed their energy policies to prevent me from doing so” is a mindset that qualifies for “crazy” in most reasonable people’s book.
Likewise, when farmers in the EU protest government emissions policies, you’re shrilling in alarm that this is some kind of fatal warning about how “crazy” those policies are. When the BLM movement protests American policing policies, you shrug and call the BLM leaders Marxists. So much for public unrest being a wake-up call for misguided public policy, huh?
Your criticisms of specific policy initiatives, not all of which are wrong or based on misunderstanding of your sources although some of them are, would be more convincing if they weren’t so obviously and systematically biased.
Only when they are actually crazy. I have said all kinds of supportive things about various climate policies. I have supported a carbon tax. I’m a fan of elextric cars for many applications.
But cratering 30% of your food supply when there are food shortages IS crazy. It show a complete lack of understanding of the costs and benefits involved with climate change policy.
Trying to replace baseload power with intermittent power is crazy.
Mandating ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions country-wide by 2035 is crazy. It can’t happen. You’ll destroy the economy and people’s lives trying, far more than what climate change would do, because climate change at least harms us more slowly and gives us time to adapt.
Shutting down nuclear plants in Germany when Europe is already bracing for severe power shortqges is also crazy. Self destructive. Opening coal plants in exchange for closing down nuclear is the opposite of what we should be doing. From a global warming, energy security OR economic viewpoint it is madness.
‘Somehow’? I said exactly how: It gave Putin leverage over Europe, and especially Germany to stay out of the war. And gas sales to Europe also gave him the money to pay for the war. The Ruble is stronger today than it was before the war, largely on the strength of gas sales to Europe.
Biden pulling out of Afghanistan also helped. When he did it I predicted on this board that it would embolden the worst actors in the world.
Of course they do. But it wouldn’t have mattered if they didn’t have the hard currency to pay for the war, or had to worry about Europe entering the conflict. Germany indeed has been dragging its feet helping, fearful of Putin cutting off their gas.
Because they are. Reducing nitrogen fertilizer by 30% will reduce crop yields by almost as much. The Netherlands is a farming country that feeds a good chunk of the world. We are already getting warnings about starvation-level food shortages in parts of the globe. Sri Lanka devastated its farm economy by trying to force them away from nitrogen fertilizer.
When bad climate policy causes countries to fail and misery to break out, I’d call it crazy. And unworkable. Governments that try it will fall or become autocratic You are now fucking with people’s means of existence. Food and energy security are absolutely essential to civilization, and ideologues going too far are threatening both.
I call them Marxists because they ARE. Cwrtainly the leaders of the movement are. And I called ‘defund the police’ crazy, not the protests themselves. And guess what? It WAS crazy. The people who have been paying the price, as I predicted, are the poor people in the cities where crime has been skyrocketing since the riots. Mostly poor black people, whose lives also matter. Thousands of people are dead that would not be dead if the riots had never happened - almost all of them black.
I assume you’ll accept VOX as a cite?
From 2014 to 2019, Campbell tracked more than 1,600 BLM protests across the country, largely in bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protesters. His main finding is a 15 to 20 percent reduction in lethal use of force by police officers — roughly 300 fewer police homicides — in census places that saw BLM protests.
Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.
Note that this does not include the huge riots in 2020 and 2021, which will make those numbers worse.
This has always been the effect of riots and street protests. They devastate the communities around them - some of which never completely recover. But the mob and the media pat themselves on the back for their ‘awareness’ and move on to the next Current Thing while murders spike and poor black peoole live in fear and their neighborhoods and schools crumble.
And here we get to the part where I am the only SDMB poster continually harassed for not being more ‘balanced’, despite the fact that I concede far more to the left of this board than almost anyone on that left is willing to concede to the right. This is a partisan, adversarial board when it comes to politics. It’s bloodsport, complete with a ‘pit’ for personally attacking people you don’t like.
I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that if I agree with the consensus I’m less likely to post a ‘me too’ agreement? Especially for people who delight in attacking me personally whenever they can get away with it? So I tend to post when I don’t agree, which to you makes me ‘one-sided’. You know, the guy who is okay with carbon taxes, pro-choice, pro-trans, pro-gay, and hates Trump.
As noted many times before, the arguments are more crazy when one knows how exaggerated the fearmongering against change is getting.
Some people say transitioning to clean energy will simply cost too much - “leave it to future generations.” In Edinburgh, Scotland, Richard Alley explains that if we start soon the cost of the transformation could be similar to that which was paid for something none of us would want to do without - clean water and the modern sanitation system.
It would be better then to get solid arguments that half-baked ideas from right wing sources of information that give you a lot of misleading numbers. While the point here appears sensible, the reality is that many points from the right are still not recognized as what they are by some people: Arguments designed to still delay the change that is needed.
I never said it will ‘cost too much’. I said trying to do it in the timeframes mentioned is impossible. Trying to do it anyway, regardless of the damage, is crazy.
For example, I have been arguing that Germany’s climate plan was going to fail for about a decade on this board, to much derision. Well, here we are. They have abandoned their climate targets, are opening up coal plants, have the highest energy prices in Europe and have put their energy security in the hands of one of the worst dictators on the planet. A total freaking disaster - for Germany, and for the climate. Amd totally avoidable.
And yes, I see many on the right (or moderates as they think they are) ignoring how they can be misled by the misleading talking points from right wing sources. It is also important to realize that (as I have seen many times in the past) crucial modifiers or caveats mentioned in the research, that is not coming from right wing sources, are grossly ignored.
Homicides also rise where police funding maintained
Yet homicide rates are also increasing in cities that didn’t cut spending.
In Houston, a city led by a Democratic mayor, killings have increased, but so, too, has funding for police.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Fresno, California, have also seen more killings so far in 2021. Both cities have Republican mayors.
Meanwhile, other types of crime are down, according to preliminary statistics and researchers who say crime initially dropped around the world after the pandemic began. While cities are reporting jumps in their homicide rate, there’s been no similar increase in other crimes, like burglaries, robberies or drug offenses.
That’s not what you’d expect if calls to defund the police were leading to a rash of crime, Abrams said.
“Any theory explaining the rise in homicides would also have to explain why we haven’t seen a spike in other kinds of crimes,” he said.
So why are killings up?
Economic losses and personal stress brought on by the pandemic are one suggestion. COVID-19 also disrupted in-person education and many community programs designed to quell violence. It put a strain on police departments, hospitals, courts and other institutions tasked with dealing with the impact of crime.
Other possibilities include rising gun ownership and the protests over police killings that could have emboldened criminals. Then there are the host of factors that contribute to localized violence, including gangs, drugs and poverty.
Oh, you mean the study that also points at how there was more to be researched and that it could be missing some important items?
One other possible explanation for the increased murder rate is that law enforcement officials are the ones voluntarily reducing their interactions with the community and as a result emboldening criminal activity. One way to observe whether police are reducing their efforts is to see whether the share of property crimes cleared falls over this period. In other words, are police not trying as hard — either because they are demoralized or angry at public scrutiny of their behavior — to solve low-level crimes that are reported to them? Campbell observes a 5.5 percent decline in the share of property crimes cleared, which is consistent with police reducing their efforts immediately following the protests.
The good news is that even if Campbell’s finding about the increase in murders following BLM protests holds up to further scrutiny, the effect doesn’t appear to last for long. By year four, Campbell no longer observes a statistically significant increase in murders, indicating that whatever is going on with murders is hopefully not long term.
None of Campbell’s data covers the protests in 2020 or the rise in murders in 2020. As German Lopez explains for Vox, “some experts have cited the protests this summer over the police killings of George Floyd and others,” but Covid-19 made the year so unusual that experts are cautious about drawing any conclusions yet.
That just riffs of the ones that declared that many moves to stop contamination in our rivers, removing phosphates from the same, ending acid rain, telling industry to stop using CFCs, would end our economies.
The derision remains to your sources of information that miss a lot just to get a misleading narrative going, this is happening because of the criminal madness of Putin. Still, the solution is to accelerate the changes needed; one should, in the US and other western nations, stop riding with Putin and do the changes needed. Changes that now are necessary, again thanks to the madness of Putin.
Well, you kind of can’t avoid that when calibrating politics on a US-style left-right spectrum, since the left is far closer to a rational fact-based perspective than the right is. Sheesh, Sam, you want to pat yourself on the back for not being an out-and-out climate-denying Trumpist bigot, while complaining that the Board liberals aren’t making enough concessions to their climate-denying Trumpist bigot political opponents? That’s not as bipartisan a position as you seem to imagine.
I mean, I don’t disagree that some emissions policies may be too draconian for the current wartime situation and may have to be temporarily modified, and that Sri Lanka in particular made a bad mistake that was further severely exacerbated by the war. But you’re kidding yourself if you think that climate problems are going to be successfully addressed without causing sustained severe pain to a lot of people.
ISTM that you’re trying to tell yourself a convenient story about the current crisis being all the fault of these awful awful “radical left” environmentalists, never mind that the crisis has already been here for a while and is inevitably bound to get worse. Your designation of “crazy” to mean “policy that results in severe problems and suffering” is blithely ignoring the fact that by that standard, when it comes to the climate situation, there aren’t really any non-“crazy” policies left.
But for some reason, you don’t seem willing to say that the policies of those “worst actors” are “crazy”. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has caused huge suffering and immiseration for Russians, not to mention humiliating military and political defeats for Russia (including some of the NATO enlargement that Putinistas said the war was supposed to prevent).
But you don’t criticize Putin for his bad choices: no, according to you it seems to be all the fault of other countries’ policy decisions for “emboldening” him. They’re the only ones you’re willing to hold responsible, at least.
But, again, that doesn’t seem to bother you when “riots and street protests” are aimed at government policies you don’t like.
According to you, any community “devastation” caused by protests against burdensome emissions policies is all the fault of the policies themselves, not the protestors. But any community “devastation” caused by protests against racist policing policies is all the fault of the protestors, not the policies.
Yeah, I continue to think you’re not making a very convincing case for your own ideological evenhandedness here.
We already had this discussion, and your exaggerated characterization of it is still unjustifiable.
See, this is the sort of thing I’m talking about in my criticisms of bias in your posts that you want to dismiss as mere “partisanship”. Your posts typically combine some factually valid statements with some serious errors, misstatements, sweeping generalizations and emotionally loaded exaggerations. And the errors and exaggerations and other misleading effects are always leaning in the same direction.
