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Climate change denial seems to be the de facto Biden Administration policy, much like his immediate predecessors
In climate reversal, Biden okays new oil and gas mega auction
https://news.yahoo.com/climate-reversal-biden-okays-oil-020427695.html
"solar forcing" is bull , earth, the sun, should be in a cooling period, not high warming period
the sun was still there when the earth was "snowball earth"
Climate change denial seems to be the de facto Biden Administration policy, much like his immediate predecessors
In climate reversal, Biden okays new oil and gas mega auction
https://news.yahoo.com/climate-reversal-biden-okays-oil-020427695.html
220+ Medical Journals Unite to Demand Urgent Action on Climate Emergency
"The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore nature," warn journals in unprecedented joint editorial.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...mate-emergency
Capitalism owns Congress and the political class, and Capitalism doesn't give a about AGW, only about amassing more Capital
You got the con, you & Biden. Go on,,,do your thing.
Chop/chop.
it's the greenwashing opportunity of a lifetime
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-wScientists are excited about an experimental nuclear reactor using thorium as fuel, which is about to begin tests in China. Although this radioactive element has been trialled in reactors before, experts say that China is the first to have a shot at commercializing the technology.
The reactor is unusual in that it has molten salts circulating inside it instead of water. It has the potential to produce nuclear energy that is relatively safe and cheap, while also generating a much smaller amount of very long-lived radioactive waste than conventional reactors.
Construction of the experimental thorium reactor in Wuwei, on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert, was due to be completed by the end of August — with trial runs scheduled for this month, according to the government of Gansu province.
Thorium is a weakly radioactive, silvery metal found naturally in rocks, and currently has little industrial use. It is a waste product of the growing rare-earth mining industry in China, and is therefore an attractive alternative to imported uranium, say researchers.
I'll boil it down, fart face...
President Trump: $2.29 a gallon.
Mother er Biden: $3.29 a gallon.
That's it & that's all.
"drill baby, drill"
says the far-left, Marxist-Leninist Biden admnistration
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-co...-lease-rod.pdfOn August 9, 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new reportdetailing observations of a rapidly changing climate in every region globally. This report doesnot present sufficient cause to supplement the EIS, at this time
doing nothing will have very large costs
Doing nothing has a cost? NO WAY.
some say yes
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/b...ange-cost.htmlBanks and companies in the eurozone risk economic loss and financial instability, the central bank said Wednesday as it published the results of its first economywide climate stress test, part of a major effort by policymakers to support the transition to a net-zero carbon world.
By the end of the century, more frequent and severe natural disasters could shrink the region’s economy by 10 percent if no new policies to mitigate climate change are introduced, the report said. By comparison, the costs of transition would be no more than 2 percent of gross domestic product.
“The short-term costs of transition pale in comparison with the costs of unfettered climate change in the medium to long term,” the report published on Wednesday said.
the "stress test" : https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/sc...488513e77e3e6d
spending money to the environment with an energy source that should be being aggressively phased out
special interest subsidized by ratepayers, by the order of a state in hock to it.
The IEA, hardly a bastion of wide eyed leftists, includes net zero goals into its 2021 modeling and emphasizes that continued investment in oil, gas and coal is counterproductive and not sustainable.
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-en...cutive-summaryThe energy sector is responsible for almost three-quarters of the emissions that have already pushed global average temperatures 1.1 °C higher since the pre-industrial age, with visible impacts on weather and climate extremes. The energy sector has to be at the heart of the solution to climate change.
At the same time, modern energy is inseparable from the livelihoods and aspirations of a global population that is set to grow by some 2 billion people to 2050, with rising incomes pushing up demand for energy services, and many developing economies navigating what has historically been an energy- and emissions-intensive period of urbanisation and industrialisation. Today’s energy system is not capable of meeting these challenges; a low emissions revolution is long overdue.
This special edition of the World Energy Outlook has been designed to assist decision makers at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) and beyond by describing the key decision points that can move the energy sector onto safer ground. It provides a detailed stocktake of how far countries have come in their clean energy transitions, how far they still have to go to reach the 1.5 °C goal, and the actions that governments and others can take to seize opportunities and avoid pitfalls along the way. With multiple scenarios and case studies, this WEO explains what is at stake, at a time when informed debate on energy and climate is more important than ever.
Biden begs OPEC to open the spigot
Glad that IPCC report was "a wake up call"
Which reality are you referring to?
Regulatory capture? Willful obliviousness to future economic/environmental harm?
This guy traces a sort of third path between political reform and replacing capitalism, namely, creating property rights -- a commonly held trust -- in co-inherited wealth
https://evonomics.com/a-new-capitali...rsal-property/Before we talk about universal property, we need to look at co-inherited wealth, for that is what universal property is based on.
A full inventory of co-inherited wealth would fill pages. Consider, for starters, air, water, topsoil, sunlight, fire, photo#syn#thesis, seeds, elec##tri#city, minerals, fuels, cultivable plants, domesticable animals, law, sports, religion, calendars, recipes, mathema#tics, jazz, libraries and the internet. Without these and many more, our lives would be incalculably poorer.
Universal property does not involve all of all those wonderful things. Rather, it focuses on a subset: the large, complex natural and social systems that support market economies, yet are excluded from repre#sentation in them. This subset includes natural ecosystems like the Earth’s atmosphere and watersheds, and collective human constructs such as our legal, monetary and communications systems. All these systems are enormously valuable, in some cases priceless. Not only do our daily lives depend on them; they add prodigious value to mar#kets, en#ab#ling corporations and private for#tunes to grow to gargan#tu#an sizes. Yet the systems were not built by anyone living today; they are all gifts we inherit together. So it is fair to ask, who are their bene##ficial owners?
There are, essentially, three possibilities: no one, government, or all of us together equally. This book is about what happens if we choose the third option, and create property rights to apply it.
Let’s startwith an obvious question: how much is this subset of co-inherited wealth worth? While it is impos#sible to put a precise number on this, estimates have been made. In 2000, the late Nobel economist Herbert Simon stated, “If we are very gen#er##ous with our#selves, we might claim that we ‘earned’ as much as one fifth of [our present wealth]. The rest [eighty percent] is patrimony asso#ci#a#ted with being a member of an enormously productive social sys#tem, which has ac ulated a vast store of physical capital and an even larger store of intellectual capital.”
Simon arrived at his estimate by comparing incomes in highly devel#oped economies with those in earlier stages of development. The huge differ##en#ces are due not to the rates of economic activity today — indeed, young economies often grow faster than mature ones — but to the much larger differences in ins utions and know-how ac u#lated over decades. A few years later, World Bank economists William Easterly and Ross Levine con#firmed Simon’s math. They conducted a detailed study of rich and poor countries and asked what made them different. They found that it wasn’t natural resources or the latest technologies. Rather, it was their social assets: the rule of law, pro#per#ty rights, a well-organized banking system, economic transpar#ency, and a lack of corruption. All these collective assets played a far great#er role than anything else.
The preceding analysis doesn’t include ecosystems gifted to us by nature, but Robert Costanza and a worldwide team of scientists and econ#o##mists took a crack that in 1997. They found that natural eco#systems gen#erate a global flow of benefits — including fresh water supply, soil formation, nutrient cycling, waste treatment, pollination, raw mater#ials and climate regulation — worth between $25 trillion and $87 trillion a year. That compares with a gross world product of about $80 trillion.
These calculations are precise enough to sug#gest that we are greatly confused about where our wealth today comes from. We think it comes from the fevered efforts of today’s businesses and workers, but in fact they merely add icing to a cake that was baked long ago.
WHERE TODAY’S WEALTH COMES FROM
The calculations also suggest that we should devote far more atten#tion to co-inherited wealth than we currently do. Nowadays, econo#mics textbooks don’t even mention such wealth, much less its mag#ni##tude. Nor do Wall Street analysts or financial report#ers. This is a grievous oversight that greatly impedes our understanding of our economy. It is like trying to comprehend the universe without taking dark matter into account, or ana#lyzing a business while ignor#ing over eighty percent of its assets.
In principle, not so outlandish as it sounds, consider carbon offsets
An archetypal, albeit theoretical, example of universal property is the ‘sky trust’ I proposed in my 2001 book, Who Owns The Sky? It is archetypal because it includes features of pension-like funds and fiduciary trusts simultaneously. In it, a fiduciary trust is charged with protecting the integrity of the atmosphere (or one nation’s share of it) for future generations. It auctions a declining quan y of permits to dump carbon into our sky, and divides the proceeds equally. A version of this model was intro#duced in Congress in 2009 by Representative (now Senator) Chris van Hollen of Maryland and re-introduced several times since.
The equities make sense
There are two kinds of property, he wrote: “firstly, property that comes to us from the Creator of the universe — such as the Earth, air and water; and secondly, artificial or acquired property — the inven#tion of men.” Because humans have different talents and luck, the latter kind of property must necessarily be distributed unequally, but the first kind belongs to everyone equally. It is the “legitimate birth#right” of every man and woman.
To Paine, this was more than an abstract idea; it was something that could be implemented within a laissez faire economy. But how? How could the Earth, air and water possibly be distributed equally to every#one? Paine’s practical answer was that, though the assets them#selves can’t be distributed equally, income derived from them can be.
How again? Here Paine came up with an ingenious solution. He pro#posed a ‘national fund’ to pay every man and woman about $18,000 (in today’s dollars) at age twenty-one, and $12,000 a year after age fifty-five. In effect, nature’s gifts would be transformed into grants and annuities that would give every young person a start in life and every older person a dignified retirement. Revenue would come from ‘ground rent’ paid by private land owners upon their deaths. Paine used con#tem##porary French and English data to show that a ten per#cent inheritance tax — his mechanism for collecting ground rent — could fully pay for the universal grants and annuities.
An important nuance here is that the rent would be col#lect#ed not only on a deceased per#son’s land, but on his en#tire estate. It would thereby recoup many of soci#ety’sgifts as well as nature’s. And in Paine’s view, there was nothing wrong with this. “Sepa#rate an indi#vidual from soci#ety, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot…be rich. All accu#mu#lation therefore of personal pro#perty, beyond a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes, on every principle of justice, of gra ude, and of civiliza#tion, a part of that accu#mulation back again to society from whence the whole came.” What Paine invented here, in my retrospective opinion, was a prescient stroke of genius. Long before Wall Street sliced collateralized debt obli#gations into risk-based tranches, Paine designed a simple way to mone#tize co-inherited wealth for the equal benefit of everyone. It is a model as relevant — and revolu#tion#ary — today as it was then.
Not much chatter here about COP26
https://ukcop26.org/
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