I posted about this last December, but I am posting this again since part of Trump's insane expansionism is based upon a continued reliance on fossil fuels. Energy independence makes more sense if we are talking about national security than relying on fossil fuels coming from other nations.
And Uruguay proves it can be done.
OK, time for a change from Palestine. And a bit of good news at that since this is indeed true. On the other hand, the US politicians and media are so in the pocket of big money that you wouldn't know this.
Fact check this if you don't believe me.
I would have thought that other countries would have followed Sweden's example from back in the 1970s. But, no.
The United States government is far too under the thumb of big business to do this, which is rather bizarre. I say that because being truly "green", instead of "greenwashing" is actually a great business strategy. Not only is it good for the environment, but it is also good for the bottom line.
Toss in things like recycling electronics is something which business is SUPPOSED to do, but it doesn't.
Maybe they think all the heavy metals out there in the environment making people dumber is a good thing.
Terroir is a French concept
to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop's specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.
Terroir is the basis of the French wine appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) system identifies an agricultural product whose stages of production and processing are carried out in a defined geographical area – the terroir – and using recognized and traditional know-how. The specificity of an AOC product is determined by the combination of a physical and biological environment with established production techniques transmitted within a human community. Together, these give the product its distinctive qualities.
The defining technical and geographic factors are set forth in standards for each product, including wines, cheeses and meats. Other countries and the European Union have similar labeling systems. The European Union's protected designation of origin (PDO and PGI) system has harmonized the protection of all geographical indications and their registration. When labelling wine however, producers may still use recognized traditional terms like AOC, and are not required to display the PDO and PGI logos or terms, mostly for aesthetic purposes.
OK, long definition, but what it ultimately means is that there are certain foods that are specific to an area. It's tied into the concept of slow food, which promotes local foods and traditional gastronomy and food production. Conversely, this means an opposition to fast food and industrial food production. Something which is better for the environment, and definitely better than being vegan and having your quinoa flown in from South America.
But he's basically talking about how the term "terroir" can apply to other regions, which is the short form of what I said above.
Anyway, check out the slow food movement if you like your food by region and season.
I don't really have a problem with driving in Paris since I usually take public transportation, but this popped up on my social media feed. It's your tough luck if you don't understand Italian.
I do drive, but it got me wondering what I would have to do should I decide to try driving in Paris again.
Which led me to learning that European Union regulations have been imposed on new cars, with the aim of improving air quality since 1992. This means that a car has to meet a certain Euro emissions standard depending upon when it is made. There are charts out there that explain which Euro rating your car is. Finding out whether your car is a Euro 6 diesel or a Euro 1 petrol, knowing your car's rating is more important than ever now, given the increasing number of levies and fines being introduced for older cars, especially diesels.
So, while people in the US are freaking out that there will be changes in automobile emissions standards with a push toward lowering them. That being tied to air quality.
The good thing is that older cars which are not as efficient will be eliminated.
But, yes, your cars in the future may not run on petroleum.
One thing I notice when I watch non-US media (Sky News Australia as an exception) is that they usually try to have opposing opinions. Not so in the US. I have yet to see a serious opposing opinion on the US media. For example, I have yet to see someone who voted for a third party in a discussion of why US politics is screwed. Even Joe Rogan has not interviewed Jill Stein.
That's pathetic.
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| OK, I wanted a picture of steak frites... |
Likewise, I heard a Fox News piece on "Climate Change" hypocrisy which didn't feature anyone who had a real idea what goes on in the environmentalist community. So, they were making it sound as if people who are Green are vegan.
Tu rigole ! I like to eat meat, but I don't do it that much for various reasons: more in line with my health than the planet. Slow food, on the other hand, which is traditional and regional cuisine that encourages farming of plants, seeds, and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem makes more sense to me than having people go vegan. I'm not alone in this since people who push veganism can be shouted down for a lot of reasons: one of which is that truly being vegan is actually a difficult thing to do. Food needs to be certified as vegan!
On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to knock local meat production while eating quinoa flown in from South America.
Anyway, if you really want to get down to it: not having children is the best thing you can do to fight climate change. That gets really interesting when the vegans start their attempts to get people to go on their diet.
The problem is that things are indeed an echo chamber without opinions being challenged.
A Pew Charitable Trust poll says a few interesting things about US attitudes toward climate change. A two thirds majority of people in the US support prioritising the development of renewable energy sources, yet most of them are not open to the idea of phasing out fossil fuels. I guess this is where I can bring in the Australians. Since Australians and New Zealanders have been using alternative energy for their vehicles and other purposes for some time now. The similarities come in that attitudes toward this subject tend to go along political lines in the US and Antipodes.
Sky News Australia and Fox News are a lot alike when it comes to climate. Which is totally different from European news, which is pretty solid that climate change is real and a problem.
And there is a divide between the "Democratic" and Republican parties about this issue, but even if people in the US accept climate change, they are still not as concerned about that than other issues (even though cities and transportation fit into this very well). Toss in that some people think that climate change doesn't effect them locally.
Which is amusing given my previous post: "the silver lining to climate change".
Despite all this people are willing to join international action to curb climate change.
Bye, Bye Red States. This is what you get for climate change denial!!!
This map is the climate resilience screening index map, which is a map of the climate resilience screening index, which is designed to be sensitive to changes in the natural environment, built
environment, governance, and social structure and vulnerability or risk
to climate events.
CRSI has been used to develop an index score for climate resilience at
the county level (scalable both upward and downward spatially) the
represents both the vulnerability of the entity to multiple climate
events and the potential recoverability of these entities from climate
events. The approach uses five domains (natural environment, built
environment, governance, social structures and risk) and 20 indicators
related to the domains. CRSI characterizes holistic climate resilience
throughout the US at the county level (2000-2015); ascertains the
relationships among those domains and indicators; and, provide
information regarding how that resilience score is constructed and the
actions a community/county can take to improve their climate resilience.
The short form: it's how badly you are screwed when the effects of climate change start becoming even more obvious. And hard to remediate: as in forget electric cars--you're gonna need a bike, or to walk.
The basic gist of it is that the town of Newtok, Alaska is the first North American settlement to move because of climate change. Ok, there are only 400 people who live there and they are Yup'ik, but this is not an isolated incident. South Pacific Islanders are seeing their countries since into the ocean.
So, if you don't trust the US government, in particular DoD and NOAA, maybe you might listen to a Yup'ik person tell you that climate change is real.
But don't trust me, as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration points out: NOAA Knows Climate. I would also point out that the Pentagon has made it clear that Climate Change is a national security threat. https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Tackling-the-Climate-Crisis/
Fox can call AOC and idiot, but it's hard to argue that NOAA and the US Department of Defence are ignorant on this issue.
On the other hand, "Kennedy" said something along the lines of if AOC is for clean power, she should be all in for Nuclear.
Who is calling whom an idiot? Does Kennedy know about Chernobyl? Fukushima? Does she understand why people were worried when the Russians occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant? Three Mile Island? I'm sure there are more reasons that people who know anything about nuclear power would never make a comment like that.
Jesus.
Personally, I would trust NOAA and DoD long before I would trust most of the clowns on Fox.
But the idiots at Fox News will probably be wearing scuba gear to take the subway before they might admit climate change is real. This is because they are either too (1) stupid, (2) dishonest, or (3) both to admit that climate change is real.
Tucker Carlson may have been the best thing on Fox News, but he is now free from their editorial bullshit.
NOAA Link: https://www.noaa.gov/noaa-wildfire/wildfire-climate-connection
Despite what the one right wing Pennsylvania Representative says: The Green New Deal is not an off switch for the economy. If anything, energy independence is a necessity.
And clean energy is the path to independence. That's GREEN energy for the Fox News Pundits and other right wingers who need to do a twelve step on their energy reliance.
The article that relates to the picture to the left points this out: https://investorplace.com/hypergrowthinvesting/2022/03/clean-energy-is-the-way-to-independence-and-huge-gains/
As someone who should have looked toward a career relating to the environment, I can tell you that the fossil fuel industry is already working to transition to clean energy. Note the amount of ethanol in your petrol the next time you are at the pump.
I've put my money where my mouth is and invested in solar panels.
Hillary Clinton should have said that failure to make the transition to clean energy will put a lot of coal miners out of work. People need to start looking to jobs in the clean energy sector.
But the above article points out something that the fossil fuel junkies miss:
Why the huge outperformance in clean energy stocks? The Russian invasion of Ukraine underscores the world’s need for energy independence. And clean energy offers the only viable pathway to TRUE energy independence.
It’s inarguable that energy independence is the ultimate goal for every country. No government wants their energy supply to be reliant upon another country – especially if said country is Russia, which provides about 40% of Europe’s natural gas supply.
At the end of the day, every country wants to produce its own energy. It’s cheaper. It’s more reliable and creates more jobs. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s safer.
I can go in depth about how Russia's best weapon against the west is its reliance on fossil fuels since
Maybe if the likes of Greg Gutfeld would shut the fuck up with their ignorance and learn something we might have a decent discussion here. But knocking something without any real knowledge of the topic is dangerous.
It's also the American way.
It's long past time for change.
“There was once a big atomic bomb
That wanted to be a bullet.
His friends all asked why, when he was such a big atomic bomb, he would want to be a tiny bullet.
"I miss", he sighed, "the personal touch.”
-- Tuli Kupferberg
A paper published in Nature shows that we have little chance of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless existing fossil fuel infrastructure is retired. Instead the industry intends to accelerate production, spending nearly $5tn in the next 10 years on developing new reserves. It is committed to ecocide.Sure, people can try to say that this is "liberal nonsense", but climate change has been on the radars since physicist Edward Teller told the American Petroleum Institute (API) back in 1959 that a 10% increase in CO2 will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. “I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
But the biggest and most successful lie it tells is this: that the first great extermination is a matter of consumer choice. In response to the Guardian’s questions, some of the oil companies argued that they are not responsible for our decisions to use their products. But we are embedded in a system of their creation – a political, economic and physical infrastructure that creates an illusion of choice while, in reality, closing it down.
Concerns about foreign interference should not distract us from interference in plain sight originating from within our own borders. That includes the actions of the Democratic National Committee, which biased its party’s own primaries, effectively disenfranchising millions of Bernie Sanders’ voters; corporate media that gave Donald Trump billions in extra free airtime because he was “damn good” for network profits, in the words of CBS’ CEO; or voter suppression schemes like voter ID laws, Interstate Crosscheck and felon disenfranchisement that systematically deny millions of Americans their constitutional right to vote.While there is no "constitutional right to vote" in the US despite it being the foundation of a democratic (or republican) society, I agree with the sentiments expressed by her.[1]
The cutting-edge tactics of the Cambridge Analytica scandal make alleged Russian social media meddling look primitive and insignificant by comparison. Cambridge Analytica is accused of using without permission the private information of up to 87 million people, assembling thousands of data points on individuals to craft micro-targeted messages in a campaign of mass manipulation with the scale and sophistication of military-style psy-ops. The actions of the Russian Internet Research Agency, on the other hand, appear to be the opposite of sophisticated and strategic. The lack of targeting, timing and relevance of the vast majority of their Facebook ads underscores the doubts expressed by investigative reporters who’ve suggested the Internet Research Agency may in fact be a “click-bait” factory intended to generate advertising revenue, and not an election meddling operation. The insignificant numbers of the Internet Research Agency’s social media posts - compared to the vastness of the social media universe - further diminishes the claim that it had significant impact on the election outcome. Facebook posts from the Internet Research Agency amounted to a mere 0.0004% of total Facebook content; Russian-associated tweets accounted for 0.02% of election related tweets, and Russian-linked Youtube videos had hit totals only in the hundreds, hardly the stuff of viral transmission.I agree with her that the internal US meddling and obstruction of democracy is far more of a problem than "Russian interference".
Or Louisiana, Florida, or Arizona...except maybe not so much ok, as under water or experiencing flash flooding, or expecting extreme weather in the near future.
The results echo a number of other recent surveys concluding that despite the talk of many of the party’s candidates, a significant number of Republicans and independent voters are inclined to support candidates who would back some form of climate action. It may also point to a problem facing Republicans seeking their party’s presidential nomination: The activists who crowd town hall meetings and Republican presidential caucuses and primaries might not reflect the broader attitude of even the Republican electorate.
...three prominent Republican pollsters to conduct the survey: Whit Ayres, who works for the presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida; Glen Bolger, a three-time winner of the American Association of Political Consultants’ “Republican Pollster of the Year;” and Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up).”
“At the moment some of the louder voices in the party are dominating this debate,” said Ms. Anderson in an interview. “But as we move out of the entertainment phase of the campaign and look at more of the policy platforms, there’s a way for Republicans to talk about this that depoliticizes climate.”On the campaign trail, the leading Republican presidential contenders question or deny human-caused climate change. In an interview on CNN last week, Donald J. Trump said, “I don’t believe in climate change.” In an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle this month, Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who, along with Mr. Trump, is at the top of many recent polls said, “There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.”
God speed the plow.... By this wonderful provision, which is only man's mastery over nature, the clouds are dispensing copious rains ... [the plow] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden.... To be more concise, Rain follows the plow.[1]The basic premise of the theory was that human habitation and agriculture through homesteading effected a permanent change in the climate of arid and semi-arid regions, making these regions more humid. The theory was widely promoted in the 1870s as a justification for the settlement of the Great Plains, a region previously known as the "Great American Desert". It was also used to justify the expansion of wheat growing on marginal land in South Australia during the same period.[2]
May 2005: Just as a global silicon shortage begins driving up prices of solar photovoltaics [PV], Solyndra is founded to provide a cost-competitive alternative to silicon-based panels.
July 2005: The Bush Administration signs the Energy Policy Act of 2005 into law, creating the 1703 loan guarantee program.
February 2006 – October 2006: In February, Solyndra raises its first round of venture financing worth $10.6 million from CMEA Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and U.S. Venture Partners. In October, Argonaut Venture Capital, an investment arm of George Kaiser, invests $17 million into Solyndra. Madrone Capital Partners, an investment arm of the Walton family, invests $7 million. Those investments are part of a $78.2 million fund.
December 2006: Solyndra Applies for a Loan Guarantee under the 1703 program.
Late 2007: Loan guarantee program is funded. Solyndra was one of 16 clean-tech companies deemed ready to move forward in the due diligence process. The Bush Administration DOE moves forward to develop a conditional commitment.
October 2008: Then Solyndra CEO Chris Gronet touted reasons for building in Silicon Valley and noted that the “company’s second factory also will be built in Fremont, since a Department of Energy loan guarantee mandates a U.S. location.”
November 2008: Silicon prices remain very high on the spot market, making non-silicon based thin film technologies like Solyndra’s very attractive to investors. Solyndra also benefits from having very low installation costs. The company raises $144 million from ten different venture investors, including the Walton-family run Madrone Capital Partners. This brings total private investment to more than $450 million to date.
January 2009: In an effort to show it has done something to support renewable energy, the Bush Administration tries to take Solyndra before a DOE credit review committee before President Obama is inaugurated. The committee, consisting of career civil servants with financial expertise, remands the loan back to DOE “without prejudice” because it wasn’t ready for conditional commitment.
March 2009: The same credit committee approves the strengthened loan application. The deal passes on to DOE’s credit review board. Career staff (not political appointees) within the DOE issue a conditional commitment setting out terms for a guarantee.
June 2009: As more silicon production facilities come online while demand for PV wavers due to the economic slowdown, silicon prices start to drop. Meanwhile, the Chinese begin rapidly scaling domestic manufacturing and set a path toward dramatic, unforeseen cost reductions in PV. Between June of 2009 and August of 2011, PV prices drop more than 50%.
September 2009: Solyndra raises an additional $219 million. Shortly after, the DOE closes a $535 million loan guarantee after six months of due diligence. This is the first loan guarantee issued under the 1703 program. From application to closing, the process took three years – not the 41 days that is sometimes reported. OMB did raise some concerns in August not about the loan itself but how the loan should be “scored.” OMB testified Wednesday that they were comfortable with the final scoring.
January – June 2010: As the price of conventional silicon-based PV continues to fall due to low silicon prices and a glut of solar modules, investors and analysts start questioning Solyndra’s ability to compete in the marketplace. Despite pulling its IPO (as dozens of companies did in 2010), Solyndra raises an additional $175 million from investors.
November 2010: Solyndra closes an older manufacturing facility and concentrates operations at Fab 2, the plant funded by the $535 million loan guarantee. The Fab 2 plant is completed that same month — on time and on budget — employing around 3,000 construction workers during the build-out, just as the DOE projected.
February 2011: Due to a liquidity crisis, investors provide $75 million to help restructure the loan guarantee. The DOE rightly assumed it was better to give Solyndra a fighting chance rather than liquidate the company – which was a going concern – for market value, which would have guaranteed significant losses.
March 2011: Republican Representatives complain that DOE funds are not being spent quickly enough.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI): “despite the Administration’s urgency and haste to pass the bill [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] … billions of dollars have yet to be spent.”
And House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-FL): “The whole point of the Democrat’s stimulus bill was to spend billions of dollars … most of the money still hasn’t been spent.”
June 2011: Average selling prices for solar modules drop to $1.50 a watt and continue on a pathway to $1 a watt. Solyndra says it has cut costs by 50%, but analysts worry how the company will compete with the dramatic changes in conventional PV.
August 2011: DOE refuses to restructure the loan a second time.
September 2011: Solyndra closes its manufacturing facility, lays off 1,100 workers and files for bankruptcy. The news is touted as a failure of the Obama Administration and the loan guarantee office. However, as of September 12, the DOE loan programs office closed or issued conditional commitments of $37.8 billion to projects around the country. The $535 million loan is only 1.3% of DOE’s loan portfolio. To date, Solyndra is the only loan that’s known to be troubled.
Meanwhile, after complaining about stimulus funds moving too slowly, Congressmen Fred Upton and Cliff Stearns are now claiming that the Administration was pushing funds out the door too quickly: “In the rush to get stimulus cash out the door, despite repeated claims by the Administration to the contrary, some bets were bad from the beginning.”
This week I've spent three days in Washington, D.C. Each day was well above 100 degrees, with a humidity so thick visibility was no more than a couple of miles. The air hangs over the city like a dirty brown blanket, trapping pollution and the smells of the city, reflecting them back to the street to remind us all of what the air would smell like if a soft breeze didn't so often carry them away.
