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Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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Robert Tulip

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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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Interbane wrote:Right, because trying to save the planet shouldn't get in the way of economic growth. Your reasoning has to twist and turn quite extensively to support some of the positions you hold.
I am personally very committed to practical steps to reverse global warming, as I have discussed quite extensively on booktalk. The problem is that the theory of emission reduction does not make sense.

Observing the climate debate over recent years, it is apparent there was popular support for climate action a decade ago, but this support vanished as soon as the view took hold that climate action would involve economic sacrifice. I am not talking about the morality of that view, but its realism.

Morally, biodiversity is priceless, and the sixth extinction now underway will be viewed for thousands of years as an immense planetary catastrophe. So the question is how to stop it.

My opinion is that the Democrats are all talk and no action. All their spin about emissions reduction is a Big Lie. They are just trying to pretend they care about the environment to get greenie votes. They are cynical and immoral.

By contrast, Trump is totally honest in his opinion that climate change is a Chinese hoax. While that may be a post-truth opinion, it has enough purchase to resonate with voters. And Trump will definitely be more open than the Democrats or mainstream Republicans to any climate action that could turn a profit for ExxonMobil and the other oil majors.

My personal view is that large scale ocean based algae production, the idea I have promoted to reverse global warming, has far better prospects under Trump than any other regime. Carbon mining as a climate strategy can aim to create a profitable new industry, with protection for biodiversity and climate stability as a welcome side benefit. What’s not to like?
It might seem like elegant and strong reasoning to you, but you're too close to it to see how wrong you are.
You will like this article by Elizabeth Kolbert on confirmation bias http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/ ... -our-minds
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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DWill wrote:Robert, you are claiming that what we see before us as disturbing, alarming behavior in Trump is really some kind of Machiavellian strategy by him, that he has a further end in mind when he rants and raves whenever he speaks.
Well no, I don’t see Trump as Machiavellian, in the sense his enemies imagine that he is a cunning and unscrupulous schemer. I actually think that Trump has been very transparent, arguing that corporate and personal tax cuts will drive growth, saving and investment, and that a war against Islamic Terror will stand up for civilized values. Both of these core Trump policies are regarded with religious anathema by the left of politics, and cheered by his supporters.
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DWill

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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:Robert, you are claiming that what we see before us as disturbing, alarming behavior in Trump is really some kind of Machiavellian strategy by him, that he has a further end in mind when he rants and raves whenever he speaks.
Well no, I don’t see Trump as Machiavellian, in the sense his enemies imagine that he is a cunning and unscrupulous schemer. I actually think that Trump has been very transparent, arguing that corporate and personal tax cuts will drive growth, saving and investment, and that a war against Islamic Terror will stand up for civilized values. Both of these core Trump policies are regarded with religious anathema by the left of politics, and cheered by his supporters.
Regardless of how his enemies imagine him, you have presented him as cunning, wily, and manipulative, which is a fair use of the word Machiavellian. The alternate view I favor is that he generally acts from the moment's emotion without strategy, or that his strategy is chaos, if that can even be called a strategy. Transparency is a trait I strongly question in him, considering his refusal to let us see his tax returns and judge whether he has conflicts of interests, especially regarding Russia. I think, however, that presidents are probably foolish to trumpet transparency, because they never end up being able to deliver. If fighting terrorism is anathema to liberals, why didn't they hate Obama, who dropped so many bombs? You're placing way too much importance on the use of the words "Islamic terrorism." Calling out that ideology will do nothing to fight terrorism more effectively; on the contrary it may simply help extremist recruitment.
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Interbane

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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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Robert wrote:I am personally very committed to practical steps to reverse global warming, as I have discussed quite extensively on booktalk. The problem is that the theory of emission reduction does not make sense.
Emission reduction isn't the only thing I was referring to. What about the sea of plastic in our ocean, and the potential for toxin release in industrial sites? These two issues alone may not be as large as climate change, but we need to pay attention to them. These items are consequences of growth, as you put it. An ungoverned economy. Is it a good position to say that any attack on this growth for the sake of the planet will fail at the point of delivery? You already said it, but it isn't defensible. It's a bad position.

There's also the matter of how people's understanding of these complex ideas evolve. If you simply quash every conversation of climate change at the federal level, then the conversation won't just stop being about emission reduction. It'll also abort any chance of the conversation evolving into talking about carbon capture. The conversation will stop.

Trump's plan isn't to redirect the conversation toward carbon capture. He's stopping the conversation entirely.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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DWill

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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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The reduction of environmental concerns to climate change hasn't been healthy. There remain huge questions of resource use and species preservation outside of the problem of global warming. Envisioning a human population of 50 bilion people is to write the death sentence for thousands of species, even if the planet didn't warm by a single degree.
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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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That's a great point, DWill. We're far too focused on that single issue.
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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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Envisioning a human population of 50 bilion people is to write the death sentence for thousands of species, even if the planet didn't warm by a single degree.
What evidence do you have to support this claim?
Which species will die and how did you determine their deaths will be directly related to a single degree?
Source?
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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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For evidence of "the death sentence for thousands of species" you might read The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert and peruse web sites such as The World Counts. Clearly thousands of species are doomed. I don't know where the 50 billion population number comes from, but increasing the human population by almost a factor of 7 would exacerbate that problem.
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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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ant wrote:
Envisioning a human population of 50 bilion people is to write the death sentence for thousands of species, even if the planet didn't warm by a single degree.
What evidence do you have to support this claim?
Which species will die and how did you determine their deaths will be directly related to a single degree?
Source?
I said that 1000s of species would perish even without any warming, in the face of a 7-fold increase in our population. What kind of evidence are you looking for? It seems like a pretty simple extrapolation. We're now losing species at many, many times the background rate of extinction.

I think, by the way, I was thinking of 50 billion because Robert had said the earth could support that many in prosperity.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Trump is a dangerous and deranged man-child. Write your representatives.

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DWill wrote:The reduction of environmental concerns to climate change hasn't been healthy.
Agreed. The lack of health in the understanding of environmental concerns is due to the way climate change has been understood on both sides of the debate, with ideology seen as more important than evidence and logic.

There are a series of major stumbling blocks in the climate debate which appear to be taboo, and which I think result from the fact that climate change is presented through the intensely political lens of emission reduction.

In practice, emission reduction means the assumption that humans are using too much energy and need to use less, as though we are approaching some sort of physical limit. The unspoken implication, among some of the climate lobby, is that our planet is above its carrying capacity for humans and we need to kill off a few billion people to save the planet.

Such an outlook is obviously morally repugnant so never gets asserted directly, but it seems to be at the background of the debate, poisoning the well for a sensible conversation about how ecology and growth could become compatible.

The idea that environmental concerns could be addressed outside the framework of climate change is wrong. Global warming is the primary environmental disrupter for our planet. When there is an elephant in the room, it will dominate the conversation.
DWill wrote:There remain huge questions of resource use and species preservation outside of the problem of global warming.
No there are not. All these huge questions are inside the problem of global warming, not outside it.
DWill wrote:Envisioning a human population of 50 bilion people is to write the death sentence for thousands of species, even if the planet didn't warm by a single degree.
My view is that humanity should move to the sea, building floating cities at massive scale. Saying the planet could support fifty billion is a way to try to shake open the very unhealthy and sclerotic conversation about population, which is indoctrinating young people in liberal circles into the insane idea that having children is evil.

There is so much abundant material in the ocean that we could shift to a sustainable economy, vastly bigger than the current world total, and still give back much farmland and forest on earth to managed wilderness and biodiversity. My view is that this is the decisive step needed to prevent human extinction, since failing to cross the threshold of the blue frontier is a recipe for conflict and collapse.

The ocean is more than twice as big as the total land area, and can be managed intensively as bluefield development using new simple technology. Considering that today the Netherlands may well be responsible for less direct destruction of biodiversity than Congo is, the problem is not population, it is poverty.

The sun pumps out ten billion times as much energy as hits the earth. The problem is not that we use too much energy, but rather that we manage our energy use badly.

And stopping fossil fuel use is not the answer. If we can convert the carbon in fossil fuels into useful products, we have the infrastructure for ocean cities. Built at a rate of seven cubic miles of solid carbon every year, such a project would rapidly stabilise the climate while providing a path of partnership with the fossil fuel industries.
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