‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial

Revisiting the Simon-Ehrlich Wager 40 Years On

Climate ‘Weeds’ versus ‘High Altitude’ Survey

Greenland and the 1950s Climate Consensus

Solar Power Costs 2-3 Times As Much As Wind, Fossil Fuels and Nuclear

Our midcentury climate goals require radical change today

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We’re 10 months into 2020, and businesses are still making adjustments to the new realities of large-scale telework (which, if you’re not in the IT biz, is just a fancy term for “working from not in the office”). In the Before Times, telework was an interesting idea that tech companies were just starting to seriously flirt with as a normal way of doing business—whereas now, most businesses large or small have a hefty fraction of their workforce staying home to work.

Unfortunately, making such a sweeping change to office workflow doesn’t just disrupt policies and expectations—it requires important changes to the technical infrastructure as well. Six months ago, we talked about the changes the people who work from home frequently need to make to accommodate telework; today, we’re going to look at the ongoing changes the businesses themselves need to make.

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Essentially, Massachusetts voters are deciding on whether or not to add “mechanical” vehicle telematics data—realtime updates from a car’s sundry sensors transmitted to an automaker’s private servers—to the list of things OEMs have to share with independent mechanics. Telematics data was purposefully excluded from the original 2013 law, but as cars have gotten more computerized over the last decade, that gap in coverage has grown more pronounced.

The ‘right to repair’ fight is typically framed in terms of farm equipment but it really extends across the hi-tech universe.

The Other McCain lays in out.

Politics is not about debate. Politics isn’t about compromise. It is not about “image.” Ultimately, politics is about power.

This is something Republicans have a habit of forgetting. Because the Republican Party represents the respectable middle class, its leaders tend to be concerned with bourgeois respectability, an encumbrance which does not inhibit Democrats. Having assembled a coalition of the aggrieved and impoverished — including criminals, drug addicts, perverts and decadent intellectuals — Democrats unapologetically advocate the selfish interests of their constituent groups, whereas Republicans seem almost embarrassed by their own middle-class supporters.

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Jeez, who would want him?

And who would pay anything to get him back?

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The pitfalls of radically changing the election system to mass mail-in balloting in the weeks and months leading up to an election are more apparent by the day. Yet the mainstream media keeps telling us there are no problems, have never been problems and never will be. Twitter and Facebook automatically add “context” to legitimate news posts about voting troubles to explain that everything is safe and secure no matter what you just read. News organizations question whether they should call winners on election night or wait days – perhaps weeks – for stray ballots to be counted.

There’s a reason why we vote in person.

Severian shares.

Pyrrhic victory. Like most of the rapidly-dwindling band of people who are capable of thinking for ourselves, I regard the Kung Flu freakout as a mostly manufactured event. The initial freakout was real enough — Boomers still control the culture, and Boomers are nothing if not obsessive about their last few minutes on the stage — but it was quickly co-opted by cynical political operators as a great way to damage the Bad Orange Man and his booming economy. And it worked: record unemployment, lots of businesses closing. But it might turn out to be the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

The great online-ening of the past year has shown just how useless so much of the modern “economy” is. To take just the most obvious example, ask any teacher how important face-to-face instruction is. If you’d asked them before March, you’d be forgiven for thinking that teaching is some kind of super-skilled, rocket scientist-level job that only years of training and fanatical, monk-like dedication can prepare you for. Post-COVID, and “education” means “log in, look at the powerpoint, and answer the multiple choice quiz… you know, whenever you feel like it. Or don’t, it’s all good, because following schedules and completing assignments is racist.”

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We have the technology. (For those not In The Know, “EULA” stands for End User License Agreement.)

Weekly Energy and Climate News Roundup #426

25-Year Study of Nuclear vs Renewables Says One Is Clearly Better at Cutting Emissions

The Battle Between Renewables And Nuclear Is Heating Up

A Geological Perspective of Polar Bears

INSANE: NY Times Climate Reporter Links ‘Fossil Fuels and White Supremacy’

Jack Butler points out the dirty little secrets of the Crust.

That Barrett’s background is distinct in this way is not in itself a reason to place her on the Court. But a serious assessment of modern American life ought to consider why her background is so unique — that is, why so many people who end up holding positions of political and cultural power, whatever their origins, tend both to go through and then be molded into similar shapes by a set of common elite institutions.

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We have the technology.

ZMan draws a parallel.

America is now a corporation, rather than a country. It is why the public space is being transformed into something that looks like a corporate training center. You don’t go there to express an opinion or advance your interests, but to learn the latest policies. The person in charge sees herself as a facilitator, using behavioral techniques she learned in graduate school, in order to help you reach your potential an employee.

Just look at how the big social media platforms censure people. It is not traditional censorship we would see in an ideological state. Instead, the first violation gets you a day off to think about what you have done. The next violation gets you a longer bit of time off, which everyone knows means you’re on the list. The next downsizing means you get let go, regardless of your performance. Finally, like an employee that never fit into the corporate culture, you’re fired from the platform.

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I actually heard an ice-cream truck (didn’t see it, but I heard it) the other day. That’s the first time in decades. Brings back good memories, though.

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This George Will column is called “Republicans, are you tired of winning yet?” Oddly, Will makes no real effort to assess the extent to which, from a conservative Republican perspective, America has been winning under President Trump.

Study: “mitigation costs of limiting global warming … are higher than … avoided damages this century”

A Coronavirus Vaccine Could Kill Half a Million Sharks, Conservationists Warn

Do they really care about science ?

This article from the New York Times is an overview of how the Crust recruits new members and succeeds in brainwashing a considerable part of what ought to be Middle America.

Obviously, this guy went to Yale after the rot set in, so his experience doesn’t match those of us who went there in ‘the good old days’ (which weren’t all that good, just less bad than now). To a considerable degree, ‘wokeness’ is simply an attempt by parvenus to blend in with what they think is the Upper Class, especially black kids who have been promoted beyond their competence — they come to think that the way to success is to be activist assholes, and for the most part they’re right.

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In recent decades, “racial disparity” has become the central framework for discussing inequities affecting African Americans in the United States. In this usage, disparity refers to the disproportionate statistical representation of some categorically defined populations on average in the distribution of undesirable things—unemployment, low wages, infant mortality, poor education, incarceration, etc. And by corollary logic, such social groupings are also found to be statistically underrepresented in desirable things—wealth, income, educational attainment, etc.

…

This way of thinking about injustice and what does and doesn’t call for remedial action has its roots in enforcement of anti-discrimination law in the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying disparate treatment or outcomes that correlate with racial difference can be a critical step in validating a complaint. However, the inclination to fixate on such disparities as the only objectionable form of inequality can create perverse political incentives. We devote a great deal of rhetorical and analytic energy to the project of determining just which groups, or population categories, suffer or have suffered the worst. Cynics have sometimes referred to this brand of what we might term political one-downsmanship as the “oppression Olympics”—a contest in which groups that have attained or are vying for legal protection effectively compete for the moral or cultural authority that comes with the designation of most victimized.

Women and minorities hardest hit.

Freeberg digs up an old corpus dilecti.

Once again, I’m venturing into a college town, a stranger in a strange land. This is where you can finally find one or two Biden/Harris signs. Which isn’t so bad, but there’s a prevailing sentiment that Bernie Sanders is an okay guy and might still have the right idea. Months after he took the money & ran. People can’t figure out what smells.

Resentment appeals to people, especially to people who pay attention to politics only occasionally. I suppose it’s like a smoothie, that first sip is enticing and delicious. Nobody wants to suck away at it all day, but that’s okay because with politics people only pay attention long enough to form an opinion. They can’t see what their resentments are doing to them, and to the rest of us.

Read it.

The scientific method remains the best way to solve many problems, but bias, overconfidence and politics can sometimes lead scientists astray.

…

Matt Ridley has published an article in the WSJ What the pandemic has taught us about science, that is highly relevant for climate change as well as for Covid-19.  It is excellent, I agree with and endorse every word of this.

The paper is behind paywall; Dan Hughes kindly sent me a topic of the text.  Here are extensive excerpts.

Whenever anyone asks ‘How are you?’ I always respond ‘Compared to what?’ Try it sometime.

Without nuclear power, the world’s climate challenge will get a whole lot harder’

‘Real and imminent’ extinction risk to whales (BBC ‘News’)

On Hannity’s show, Trump reveals his corrupt, panicky endgame (Washington Post)

Virtue, Wherefore Art Thou Signal?

“We need to change”: Astronomers Admit Their Outsized Contribution to the Climate Crisis

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The world is full of amateurs.

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On Thursday morning, ABC News correspondent Alex Perez was again doing his part to stoke racial strife as he informed viewers that a police officer in Milwaukee will not be charged for shooting a 17-year-old African American teen, Alvin Cole.

As Good Morning America ran a full report showing a clip in which a protester called the shooting a “murder,” at no point were viewers told that Cole had fired a handgun before being killed by Officer Joseph Mensah.

‘The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War’

Climate migration: what the research shows is very different from the alarmist headlines

The Guardian: Climate Denial is an Extreme Form of Avocado Buyer’s Guilt

Nights are warming faster than days. Here’s what that means for the planet.  (Popular ‘Science’)

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Unions for for fungible labor. If your labor is sufficiently fungible to justify forming a union, then it’s just the sort of thing that companies nowadays get from overseas, where rates are cheaper and employees are less whiny.

Suck it up, buttercup.

jRead it.

I guess Biden is the Beijing Candidate. He’s certainly got the Communist vote.

ZMan does his weekly podcast.

We are a little over three weeks from the most consequential election in the history of the republic, according to the media. In reality, this election will probably not be all that interesting or consequential. Few elections make much of a difference, when viewed in the grand scheme of things. The great fear of democracy was that it would lead to wild swings in public policy. In reality, democracy results in a shadow elite maintaining their preferred course, regardless of the election results.

There are some exceptions. In 1960, the Illinois Democrat Party rigged their election in favor of Kennedy. If Nixon had won, there is a good chance Vietnam would not have happened as it did, which would have changed the arc of the 60’s. The anti-war movement was the energy of the cultural revolution. It also means Johnson’s Great Society would not have happened. Probably something else would have been passed, but it would not have been that program.

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I guess they just couldn’t stomach giving it to Trump. I, for one, am curious just where exactly in the world this transnational Crustian ‘food program’ has brought peace — in the Middle East? In the Caucasus? In Africa? In the Balkans? In Asia? Just … where, exactly?

UPDATE: Nobel Picks World Food Program Over Trump

Trump’s three nominations for his Middle East peace deals, the Abraham Accords, are not up until 2021.

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In the last few months, the Trump-Pence team has held a plethora of press conferences and “pool sprays” taking hostile liberal questions, while Joe Biden’s campaign calls a “lid” on the press many days, and has “lidded” Kamala Harris from the national press since she was picked in August.

So it’s a little perverse that when Harris finally showed up for big-league questioning at the vice presidential debate, moderator Susan Page of USA Today gave her little-league questioning.

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In recent years, the number of Californians leaving the Golden State has exceeded the number of new residents moving in, and the mass exodus has created business opportunities for companies offering to help disillusioned residents settle elsewhere in the United States.

Two of those companies are LeavingTheBayArea.com and LeavingSoCal.com, started by Scott Fuller, a real estate broker now residing in Arizona. Fuller told Fox Business that he got the ideas for these companies by working with a lot of clients who were “getting fed up and tired of what’s happening in California.”

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And about time, too.

Kepco E&C teams up with shipbuilder for floating reactors

S. Beaufort polar bear population stable since 2010 not declining new report reveals

The Guardian: “Intensive farming worldwide threatens Paris climate accord …”

Climate change could mean fewer sunny days for hot regions banking on solar power

PBS Still Pumping Out Hatred of Humanity’s Negative ‘Imprint’ on Planet Earth

Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says  My, what a surprise.

New book: Climate Change: The Facts 2020

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This should prove amusing.

Evidently he doesn’t have enough work to do and feels time hanging heavy on his hands.

On the other hand, it gives him three hours to talk directly to 20 million people, so that must be worth something. (Cue complaints to the FEC.)

BBC does the work American ‘media’ won’t do.

Harris: “Trump said ‘there were fine people on both sides’ in far-right protests.”

Verdict: The quote is correct, but President Trump said in the same press conference that he wasn’t referring to neo-Nazis or white nationalists.

Kamala Harris brought up President Trump’s controversial comments following far-right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Violent clashes left one of the counter-protesters dead.

According to a transcript of a press conference on 15 August, President Trump did say – when asked about the presence of neo-Nazis at the rally – “you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

However, at the same press conference, Mr Trump went on to say “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Not one American media outlet pointed out that this central claim of the Biden/Harris campaign is a barefaced lie.

ZMan looks behind the curtains.

Obviously, the managerial class is working hard to get the evil Donald Trump voted out of office next month. Note that there is very little in the way of a propaganda campaign in favor of Biden and Harris. The former is mostly in hiding and the latter has been completely forgotten, despite the fact she is the actual candidate. The goal of the information campaign is to play a form of three-card Monte, in which the public never actually sees the option placed in front of them.

Instead of a conventional campaign on behalf of the candidate, we have a social proof heuristic through the use of polling and media coverage. Everywhere you turn there are polls telling us how everyone hates Trump. Polling, we’re told, says he is facing a historic defeat next month. The media is full of stories about how this group or that group is angry or disappointed in Trump. They have created an environment in which people are ashamed to say they are voting for Trump.

Read it.

Government by anonymous tips.

If COVID-19 pushes people to the suburbs, how can we make them more environmentally friendly?  The suburbs or the people?

Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change  (The New Yorker, noted scientific journal)

Spreading Asbestos Fibres and Running Fans Might Help Combat Climate Change

Surprising science – There’s no such thing as clean energy

German Prof: Climate Science Politicized, Exaggerated, Filled With “Fantasy”, “Fairy Tales”…”Paris Accord Already Dead”!

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The Russian Collusion Hoax was apparently a Clinton campaign maskirovka operation.

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A new study led by University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Brian Fields explores the possibility that astronomical events were responsible for an extinction event 359 million years ago, at the boundary between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods.

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Going to college isn’t about learning, but about credentialing — for most students anyway. They take a smattering of courses, the content of which they quickly forget, have fun, and blow through a great amount of money. At the end, a school gives them a piece of paper attesting to their “education.”

To many employers, that paper is now “required.” They seldom care about the content of the individual’s supposed studies, but merely that he made it through. What if there were a better device for signaling trainability without the huge cost?

British universities grant their degrees based on examinations. The three years a student spends at the university is devoted to attending lectures and working with a tutor, and the degree depends on the outcome of a series of in-depth exams extending over about a week. This ensures that the recipient actually can do what the degree says the recipient can do. I like this system a lot. It is much superior to the collect-enough-boxtops approach modern American colleges use.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Philosophy’s goal was once to learn how people can flourish, how they can employ their lives to the best effect. As the West has become increasingly wealthy, though, Philosophy has become unmoored. It has ventured off into beliefs that are not only contrary to human flourishing but are contrary to human survival.

Take, for example, the postmodern’s non sequitur: There is an infinite number of ways in which to interpret a text (which is true), and no interpretation is better than another (false). The example I like to use is a text on defusing a bomb. While it’s true that there is an infinite number of ways in which to read the text, there is only one that will keep you alive.

We can only indulge this belief if someone else defuses our bombs for us. In other words, post-modern thought is a belief system born of the privilege of not having to perform countless humdrum tasks that are needed for bare survival.

CNBC.

Less than you might think.

Climate change is drying the lifeblood of Navajo ranchers as their lands become desert

Scientists: Nuclear Energy is a Waste of Time

Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change

Carbon Tracker Fantasy: “Cleanup of abandoned oil and gas wells could cost Texans $117 billion”

When Evolution Is Infectious

Asbestos could be a powerful weapon against climate change (you read that right)

Earth’s Optimal Temperature?

The dimmest state of the Sun: TSI and Global warming