Recent study project established by Climate Skeptic Richard Muller conclusively demonstrates that global warming is real and caused by human activity. Like there was any doubt.
Why aren’t we changing our activity?
We still ain't gonna admit we wuz wrong!
U.S. baking in record hot temperatures. Still no apology to Al Gore for mocking him on Global Warming from Rupert Murdoch’s minions.
Record-breaking heat in Baltimore, Washington and Philly. No apologies seem to be forthcoming from Faux News and Reactionary pundits who mocked Al Gore during last winter’s snowstorms. Blinded by ideology? Cherry picking the facts? Or just stupid? You decide.
For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use ’true (or full) cost accounting’ to adequately compute the total cost of fuels. Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel. The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.
So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax. In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.
The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!
For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type. How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody? Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?
We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy. We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.
But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.
*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells? Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?
Carbon limits are for the little people! Faster, driver!
Sir Richard Branson saw fit to lecture to world leaders currently debating carbon emissions limits at Copenhagen on behalf of the airline industry. “Reduction targets”, not carbon taxes is what he’d like. He’s also pushing the idea of moving the airline fleets to biofuels, something he terms green fuel.
Biofuels, you know – things like ethanol and bio diesel derived from industrial agriculture that require more energy inputs then they produce in outputs and exist only as pork delivery vehicles for firms like ConAgra?
Keep in mind this bullshit is from a guy who has made an a second fortune from running an especially carbon porky business, an airline. And if that weren’t enough, his latest venture is to fly fat rich tourists into space. Hey Sir Carbon Asshole, here’s a reduction for you – shelve your stupid space tourism and save the planet an additional 54,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually – and tell your rich buddies to go plant some trees on one of their 365 days of yearly vacation instead.
And while you’re at it, why don’t you make a real statement and shelve your new Formula 1 racing team. I don’t think the additional 50 tonnes of CO2 your car will emit per season will ‘tip the balance’ but talk about hypocrisy.
Sea level rise chart
Curious about when your coastal town or property will go back to the sea?
“To establish a timeline, choose a location … and find out its elevation. You can then use the graph to determine if the area will be underwater at any particular date between 1990 and 2100.”
Don't worry kids, Big Oil says a magical sea creature symphony awaits you!
Here is a distinction a country would want to avoid – first to disappear under the seas due to the rising sea level stemming from global warming. The population of Tuvalu has already started to abandon their sinking island as increasingly high tides smash up their houses and a salty water table kills off their crops.
So does the ‘country’ still exist after the last Tuvaluan has left? Do they keep their U.N. seat? How about their lucrative “.tv” top-level domain?
Joking aside, we should round up the prominent loud-mouth global warming deniers and shove them onto the soggy uninhabitable land as punishment for their crimes against humanity.
Limbaugh the Nazca denounces the liberal tree hugging alarmism
Well okay, maybe rampant deforestation created conditions for terrible erosion and floods that brought down the Nazca civilization, but otherwise…poppy-cock! Er…and of course the deforestation of Easter Island had similar consequences…oh yeah, and the Anasazi had a similar problem…but under no circumstances is that anyway comparable to today’s increasing desertification and global warming which of course have nothing to do with human activities and certainly won’t lead to the collapse of our civilization…
Sad news about the Great Barrier Reef:
“…the Great Barrier Reef could be “functionally extinct” within decades, with deadly coral bleaching likely to be an annual occurrence by 2030.”
The ‘big news’ today today was non-news – how the leaders of the G-8 agreed that they’d work to keep the global average temperature from rising 3.6 degrees F (even though it went up 1/2 that already). But as you’ve already suspected, they wouldn’t agree on any particular mechanisms to make that happen. More hot air we didn’t need.
To top it off, neither India nor China would agree to any climate management deal.
With leaders like these, who needs enemies? They’ll destroy the planet faster than any alien invaders ever could.