Have you seem these commercials? What are the oil and natural gas industries trying to achieve here? Who is this targeting? Is this an anti-green energy ad?
The ad pumps up a false dilemma IMHO, this climatologist points at the issues with those ads:
A *real *energy voter would be about renewable energy. The “energy sector” as defined by the likes of Chevron is about fossil hydrocarbon energy, which is both finite & toxic.
They’re evil. I know it’s considered silly to say it, but they are, even if they don’t mean to be.
Article doesn’t even include a link to the youtube, it’s here:
“Paid for by the national petroleum association”, thats pretty much says all that needs to be said. Renewables create jobs as well, by some studies more jobs than oil does.
More trash doom and gloom catastrophe talk from Hansen and parroted by the nihilist crowd. Whatever changes may come, I’d virtually certain the resiliency of modern human civilizations will be much better able to handle the changes than these death sayers think we will.
We can adapt faster than climate can kill us off, especially as we get wealthier (in fact, more people live in destitution and early DEATHS by living in poverty around the globe than climate issues, but then the environmentalists never claimed they were a HUMANITY focused interest group). And if you want to accelerate a shift away from coal and natural gas and oil (cars/planes/trucks) Then before you start talking about the shift away, how about first getting cost effective alternatives up and running?
I want the car market and eventually truck market to shift away from oil. But if we forced that now we’d all go bankrupt or put such a massive drag on the economy it would be WORSE than the benefits. So because I’m not some tantrum throwing environmental activist CHILD, I can wait, focus on supporting beefing up funding for battery research and third to fourth generation nuclear reactors, so we can find technological solutions that don’t require us to cut off our arms to sate some nature worshiping fetish over not perturbing SACRED mother earth, or allowing increased extinctions to occur for another 50-100 years while we are transitioning to the cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. It’s happened before man, it will happen after we are gone from this planet, it’s not the end of the fucking world you defeat ridden nihilists. God the attitude from some people. It’s all over, we’re all going to suffer disease and greater death and more starvation and more tragedy.
So what do YOU all want us to do about it? Green light ANY environmental policy under the sun? What does that entail? Details, not general platitudes and sentiments. Do you want us to shut down all coal plants and natural gas plants in the US? How soon? Within the next year? 10 years? How soon? Do you give a damn what that kind of turn over might do to our economy and capacity to push for the kinds of expensive technology and research budgets to get us away from the dirty energy FASTER because it makes ECONOMIC sense to switch away? That last should be the sum total of your focus, then you can bring down the hammer, but not before, NOT before you have something both cleaner and better and CHEAPER in every way.
The sensible path forward seems so obvious to me, but you just keep getting the doom sayers from the environmental left going nuts.
The spot I saw reminded me of the pro-BP spots that came out some years ago. Yuppiesh actresses pretended to be “real people” & spoke in a halting, “real” way about how we really ought to trust the energy companies. Quite annoying.
These ads came out after the big explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which was big news down here. Fifteen people died & many more were injured. Investigation revealed that BP had been negligent in several areas. Then the Deepwater Horizon blew. The extent of* that* disaster was really surprising; BP’s involvement was not.
Is the same agency producing this latest glurge? (And is it paying “concerned citizens” to post online, explaining why we really ought to trust the energy companies?)
The example of Syria shows how small changes can help cause a lot of trouble. You are only on the side of the ones that do not want to be prepared.
That BTW is miles apart from preaching doom and gloom. If we mitigate and prepare to adapt the problem can be managed indeed, it will not if people like Trump become president because he will even prevent the nation from even do the “preparing” part.
The example of Syria (even if you make the point that there is no evidence to blame the drought there that influenced the civil war, the fact is that the drought was made worse by the warming happening in the background) shows that you are only looking at half of what is going on. Indeed we can deal with the issue, unfortunately regions of the earth will be affected so much that the changes that will affect humans will take place suddenly (refugees, wars for water and food). So much for adapting faster. Again, notice that while we are likely to get better with adaptation the problem will bite us anyhow because we are bound to not help others to adapt faster (again as politics is a big factor to allow us to be ready or not, Trump then will make the doom scenarios more likely). And globalisation tell us that what happens elsewhere will also affect us in America.
All that BTW is looking to protect and help humanity from getting into a worsening situation. So your talk that environmentalists are not human focused is also wrong and just a right wing talking point really.
And that is another ignorant point.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/wind-and-solar-are-crushing-fossil-fuels
The rest of your tirade was just really repeating your sorry points.
But I have to add that the IPCC looked to contain the warming to increase to about 2 degrees from the start of the industrialize era as a concession to our modern age and advised to not stop turkey so as to not get us into a stone age. This was precisely to deal with most of the concerns that you launched and only shows that you are missing a lot of information in this issue. So even your general point of dismissing what was reported by the Climatologist is dead wrong.
Now, regarding the issue at hand:
You should realize that the fossil fuel industry behind the ad is really supporting yahoos like Donald Trump. As I noticed in a different thread you do not want that yahoo to become president, and we should indeed also prevent him from getting the keys to the EPA and the CDC (he is also an anti vaccine guy or an idiot that still thinks they cause autism)
The fossil fuel companies have an interest in having people like Trump to become president, they are counting that with his denial ideas the new EPA regulations to control CO2 emissions will be gone; never mind that many people will die of respiratory issues first and then most people will be affected by the rising seas and the changes and refugees that will get us quickly into violent situations.
They are counting to fool many into following the misleading information that you fell for and there is evidence already of their involvement in creating doubts.
Just like the tobacco industry did. And that is how we have to see this ad. It is the equivalent of the ads that in the past showed powerful strong men like the Marlboro Man smoking in the plains. Only for the main actor to die later of lung cancer.
The companies do not care for the future of humanity or individual humans*, they just care about their bottom yearly line.
There is one exception as Shell has come to openly accept what needs to be changed and to support alternative energy sources, virtually all other fossil fuel companies have decided to stop investing in renewal energy and to support FUD efforts like the ad we are talking about.
…we can adapt faster than climate can kill us off…
Over the next hundred years, residents of coastal Florida will develop fourteen-foot legs so they can walk to work and keep their shirt collars dry.
Practically all fossil fuel consumption in North America must end by the first week of November, 2020. That’s your deadline. Unless you want to start a chain reaction that will flood out of existence almost every coastal US city by 2070.
Is that clear enough? Now, tell me what economic gain is worth losing most of the Florida peninsula, all of Long Island and Manhattan, basically the whole Gulf Coast, and the homes and livelihoods of a majority of American citizens.
What % of scientists that have looked into coastal flooding of the coasts and Florida on the scales you are talking about agree it’s going to be that dire? What confidence level to they have in that particular prediction?
This is the kind of doom saying I am talking about. Most climate scientists agree climate change is influenced by man made causes, but they do NOT agree on the degree in anywhere near those same numbers. The farther out you go, the more chaotic and unpredictable the projections get, but you lay them out as near certainty.
Here is another. We have hundreds of millions of cars in the US. It takes decades to clear out the car fleet, say every 20 years the fleet is essentially replaced in virtual entirety. How are you going to have nearly every car driver, over the course of 5 years, stop driving unless they buy some brand new electric car? We are not going to all switch to electric immediately, it will take time to ramp up battery production (which I want) to eventually replace the demand coming from gasoline cars.
The environmental movement tosses out catastrophist bombs like this all the time, predicts death and worse if we don’t do X, Y, Z by THIS date. Or ELSE. THIS date passes, the sky has not fallen, the sun is still shining, it’s a little warmer but we continue on. Ah but right, not at the tipping point yet, like the chemical titration where once a certain threshold is crossed it’s all changed. Even if that occurs, we’d still be better off NOT ending all driving before we can switch out the fleet to electric (which we will NOT be able to do in 4 years my GOD the madness of this movement). Tesla hopes to produce a million electric cars a year by 2020. We are not going to replace the hundreds of millions of cars on the road in a few years. And what if it was technically feasible, what about some poorer person using a new car they just bought to get to work that uses gasoline? Woops, we all need to cut it all off immediately. Can’t afford to get a new electric car? Then screw you, you can walk, peasant. Or take the bus. Just make sure to drop the beef. Too much methane. Want to keep eating cows? Without a method of preventing methane release from their existence? Sorry, cut back on the cows. Here is some tofu.
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They can either move, drown, or build sea walls over time. The geo engineering would probably be cheaper than stopping cold all the economic activity gained from fossil fuel use. And besides, surprise surprise, building on the coasts of Florida is more dangerous. It used to be more sparse, but everyone wants to build near the water, prices are higher, and it’s also more prone to flooding.
I don’t know the breakdown, but the more radical into the environmental movement you get, the less concern there is over the welfare of humanity vs mother nature being preserved in it’s current slice. Because THIS particular slice is sacred and special and any extinctions happening at a faster rate at THIS time because of us is unforgivable and intolerable.
Personally, I don’t much care aside from a few species I’d want to keep around, but that’s me. I don’t hold climate as a sacred thing to never allow to be altered. In fact, if we have the capacity to engineer climate in the future, I think that is totally something we should do. I want mankind to get to the point where we know so much about the climate and how to manipulate it, we can terraform mars and reshape it to our image. But this is focused on what we want, not preserving the natural state as it happens to be unblemished by the hand of mankind as if there is some intrinsic worth there.
As to Syria, I don’t doubt that climate change contributed to the drought there. So what? You think that is what hurt Syrians more? The civil war was primarily driven by Islamists running wild and Assad asserting his power with Russias backing. Take those forces out, there is no civil war. At least not with those belligerents.
But on a more general point, you know what would have helped Syrians during the drought even more than a lack of climate change? Prosperity. GREATER energy use as a consequence of that prosperity. If Syria was a wealthier and more prosperous nation, they would be better positioned to handle climate effects like droughts. Not ALL areas of the globe are suffering a drought, they would buy food and have it imported. That’s one of the perks of a global economy, but they are too poor and destitute, and even without climate change fueled droughts, that is a bigger drag on life and health.
Take a non climate event. The tale of two earthquakes. Remember the Haiti/Chili earthquakes?
Both were large and devastating, but the Haiti earthquake was FAR more devastating in terms of loss of life. Part of that was because it had weak building codes, and was not hit recently with a large quake. Chile had been decades prior and mandated stricter building codes. But Chile could also more easily AFFORD the added expense of those more resilient buildings. The types and locations of the quakes were different, but had the prosperity and societies been reversed, the wealthier society would be in a better position to handle the shocks nature gives.
As for solar energy causing a diminution of coal and other sources, GREAT ! I am all for that. Sometimes there are still subsidies tilting the scales, but if solar gets so cheap that even without subsidies it beats out coal I think that is a wonderful thing, that is EXACTLY what we want since it makes the economic argument for a coal plant meaningless. Then you can get people BEYOND the nature worshiping crowd to switch over as well. See how that works?
It’s astroturfing. Oil company executives obviously are going to advance the financial interests of oil company executives. But that’s not really an issue that resonates with the general public. So they’re trying to create the illusion that there are groups of people out there who altruistically care about the welfare of oil companies.
And I would like a pony too, Humans can indeed mess up with no need of the environment helping. But/and in this case humans are helping making it worse. The issue is that right now the warming is in the background, but the influence on how it affect humans is increasing. I would rather indeed make this an easier to deal environment rather than making it harder when we can indeed prevent the worst effects from taking place.
The point that you miss, and you only show your ignorance, is that the change can be done faster by assigning the real cost of using the atmosphere as a sewer so as to make the change to take place even faster. And so we will have to deal with less wasted money in adaptation in the future.
It is indeed silly to call people like Nordhous (an economist) and other scientists as “the nature worshiping crowd” it is just a straw man made up also by conservative shrills. In fact I have seen the experts that I consult in this matter to be dismissive of people like Gaia worshipper James Lovelock.
In the end your reply does not touch at all the political pressure from the Republicans and the fossil fuel industry. That is a part of this discussion and the issue behind the ad the OP is talking about. Again, the Republicans are the ones that want to deny and stop any action on this front. And once again most of your discredited talking points are based on misrepresentations and false information coming from paid fake skeptics.
Indeed, Astroturfing is what is going on here, and people like Trump are glad that people like you are falling for those baseless talking points.
About those walls in Florida…
The porous limestone makes building effective sea walls or levees almost impossible. Now, remember about assigning then a cost to CO2 emissions to deal with issues like that one? It is considered because of issues like that one, because someone will have to pay; indeed there will not be a free meal, but somehow a lot of the people that want to prevent the needed changes do think that a lot of magic will make things possible. Like producing money to pay for all that very hard job ahead.
I’m optimistic that we can, but it will be possible if we make it easier and cheaper by keeping the ocean rise to lower levels than we are bound to get because the ice caps and over land ice are being lost at accelerating rates thanks to the warming caused by humans and their emissions.
Once again: if we increase the rate of change so we emit less global warming gases the less we would have to spend in items like protecting Florida.
And once again, I already pointed out that you are straw manning what scientists and ecologists are telling us, no one is seriously proposing that we stop cold turkey regarding the use of fossil fuels.
Someone above you just did suggest that is what we needed to do to avoid catastrophe. Muzzle your dogs, they are barking and slobbering all over whether you acknowledge them or not.
The point you miss is that your goal is to make fossil fuel use so punitive in terms of cost it make it more justifiable to switch away. I basically want a less steep tax on such things than people like you do. Because unlike most climate liberals, I am at least SOMEWHAT concerned over the costs this has to people not sipping hundreds of dollars in lattes each month where the costs of fuel and energy and the related increases in food costs put a greater burden and drag on them.
In the end, your desire to grind and tax dirty fuel will not be the driver to something better. The technological solutions are the ACTUAL solutions.
Cheaper electric cars that are cheaper to buy and operate > gasoline cars and everyone will switch. Once we have that technology, if you want to tighten the screws on dirty cars and ALSO give some equivalent or greater tax credit towards an electric car, then that would be fine. But NOT before you have a credible and relatively cheap alternative. And getting on the bus is not an answer. Maybe the eventual fleet of self driving uber electric cars might be.
And god help you if you try to take away beef. You better put in some of your own funds to that lab grown beef, because the abstinence model is not a pathway forward for energy use or consumption if you want to see human beings prosper.
“What percentage of scientists”? It only takes one. Reality is not consensual. It is discovered, not voted into existence. And climate change is reality.
Salvor, you wanted to know what policies we demanded. I gave you a specific policy—extremely specific, in fact. I wanted there to be no protest that this was overly fuzzy, so I went overly precise. In this way we can make demands and see them met.
We had the twenty-year warning, sixteen years ago. We didn’t take the necessary steps, and now, you know what, you’re right, we will not meet the deadline.
Florida will be destroyed. So will downstate New York. This is a fact. This is a reality. And short of wiping out a bunch of Americans, it is inevitable. We will not geo-engineer our way out of this.
Eat, drink, and be merry, smoke 'em if you got 'em, for in two generations the USA as we have known it is over.
It’s already too late. You’re like a cancer patient in metastasis who’s still pretending nothing’s wrong.
But clinging to fossil fuels *doesn’t *save humanity. It dooms human economies and cultures.
Anti-environmentalists cling to economic growth by any means attainable as if that were sacred. Who’s more stupid?
Syria was already crowded enough that that didn’t work.
What do you think prosperity is? Where is this prosperity you speak of, when livestock numbers drop by 80% or more, as they did in Syria between 2006 and 2011? If the USA had an 80% loss of, say, its corn and soy crops over five years, how long would we remain prosperous?
Prosperity is typically based on resources. Saying that prosperity will negate a five-year drought is like someone saying that the car with the hole in the bottom of the fuel tank would be fine if it were only driving at highway speeds.
:raises hand: Actually, that was what I said upthread. At this time, we are at the point that we have to stop fossil fuels “cold turkey” now.
We have dragged our feet too long, and we keep getting empirical results toward the pessimistic end of projections.
Yes, this sucks. Yes, tens of millions of Americans will have to die. Yes, this will entail a shooting and bombing war. Yes, it will destroy this polity and hurt like hell. But literally decreasing the land area of the USA and of the planet generally will be worse long-term.
We already blew our chance for a soft landing.