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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Understanding the aftermath of r/wallstreetbets

A couple days back, I wrote up my best understanding of what happened with /r/wallstreetbets and meme stocks like Gamestop, trying to show how all the different, seemingly contradictory takes on the underlying financial stuff could all be true.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/28/payment-for-order-flow/#wallstreetbets

In the days since, a new series of contradictory takes has emerged, these ones disputing the meaning of this bizarre financial spectacle, and likewise what response, if any is warranted as it unfurls.

I think that all of these takes can also be true, and as with the trading itself, reconciling them requires that we widen the frame.

Let's start with Jimmy Carter.

In 1978, Carter's IRS created the 401(k), a tax-sheltered account for people who wanted to gamble on stocks to fund their retirement.

That was a fringe proposition at best.

The normal retirement system was a "defined benefits" pension where your employer guaranteed you a certain monthly percentage of your salary from retirement to death.

The vast majority of Americans wisely prefered a guaranteed payout to a tax-advantaged gambling account.

Obviously, right? On the one hand, you have the guarantee of a pension (maybe even inflation-indexed); on the other, you have a bunch of bets, that, if they go wrong, leave you literally homeless and starving.

When gamblers remortgage the family home and cash in the kids' college funds to play the tables, we consider them to have a mental illness, a pathological condition that harms them and the people around them.

Giving up a defined benefits pension in favor of a 401k is just the same kind of bet - staking all the money that will support you when you exit the workforce on the movement of stocks and bonds.

Who would do that voluntarily?

Pretty much no one. But the transition from defined benefits to 401k was not voluntary. Finance ghouls like Ethan Lipsig wrote memos to major employers like Hughes Aircraft showing them how they could ditch their pension obligations by moving workers to 401ks.

In the 80s, Reagan created a bunch of legal tools that allowed employers to coerce their workforces into giving up the security of a pension and force them into gambling their salaries on the prayer of a win in the markets.

This was insanely, amazingly great for the finance sector, in three ways:

1. It made companies more profitable. Guaranteeing that the workers whose labor made your company viable wouldn't spend their dotage starving and homeless is expensive.

Helping fund wagers on shares is much cheaper. The finance sector represented the major shareholders of the companies that transitioned to 401ks. The savings were transferred to these shareholders and the finance sector got commissions.

What's more, this temporary inflation of share prices disguised what was going on with the pension switcheroo: workers' defined benefits pensions were liquidated and turned into stocks, just as stocks were going up because their pensions had been liquidated!

Their legs had been amputated out from under them, but so subtly that they didn't yet feel the pain - and now their bosses cooked their legs and snuck them into their dinner, and everyone marveled at how full they felt after that hearty, meaty meal.

2. 401ks brought a lot of suckers to the table. The market was - and is - dominated by "sophisticated investors," AKA predators, who knew all the ways to fleece the rubes who had no idea how any of this worked.

The predatory nature of finance only increased over time. Hedge funds, for example, exist to find unethical practices that are legal (thanks to loopholes in the rules) and exploit them until they are illegal.

3. 401ks created a political force outside the finance sector that would lobby on its behalf. Transforming America into a nation of stockholders meant that workers had to choose between supporting rules that protected their jobs and rules that protected their retirement.

For your pension account to grow, you had to support policies that permitted finance ghouls to offshore your job, or misclassify you as a contractor, or eliminate the safety rules that prevented you from being maimed, or take away your right to sue for compensation.

Every time there's a particularly ghastly bankruptcy driven by PE or hedge funds - Toys R Us, Sears, etc - it emerges that at least some of that money is coming out of a union pension fund.

That's marketization - turning the once obscure, boring business of market-based capital allocation into a matter of import to everyday people.

Marketization begat financialization.

While marketization is primarily about capital allocation (who gets what money), financialization is about bets. Sometimes those bets are about things - businesses, houses, coal and timber - but things are limited. Mostly the financial market consists of bets on other bets.

Bets are infinite. Every time you make a bet, you create inventory for a market in a bet on the outcome of your bet. And that's inventory for a new market: bets on the outcomes of bets on the outcomes of bets.

It's called Wall Street Bets for a reason.

Bets need referees, someone who decides who the winner is. In sports, it's a major scandal if a referee is caught wagering on one of the teams in a match. In the financial markets, it's the norm - referees that lay wagers on the outcome of the contest they're overseeing.

Let's take stock:

Workers are forced to play the casino, and if their bets fail, they spend their old ages homeless and starving;

The vast majority of casino games are wholly abstract - bets on bets on bets - and require layers of refs;

the refs are all crooked.

Every couple of years, we have a massive, systemic financial crisis, and every time that happens, the finance sector lobbies for a no-strings-attached bailout, abetted by suckers who hate the finance sector but fear starving in their old age.

We're about to be engulfed in the second-largest crisis of our lifetime - the reckoning from trillions in capital market gains propped up by the Trump administration's policy of buying all corporate debt as a covid stimulus.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

(the largest crisis of our lifetimes is a few years off, as the climate emergency piles losses on losses, stranding tens of trillions in assets, from fossil fuels to obsolete gas-stations to literally underwater coastal real-estate to whole towns incinerated by wildfires)

That's where we're at: a crooked casino that we've trusted our futures too, a crisis on the horizon, and a bunch meme-stock "players" who have thrown the normal weirdness of the market into stark relief through a spectacular stunt.

A lot of people are angry at Robinhood, the stock-trading platform at the center of all this. Robinhood froze trading on meme stocks, and has only allowed it to come back in a useless, performative trickle that is seemingly calculated to prevent more meme-stock gamesmanship.

Is Robinhood just another crooked ref? Yes…and no. The meme stock run upset the stable cheaters' equilibrium whereby cheating never escalated to the point where the game just collapsed.

For example, the total short position on Gamestop exceeds its total stock issuance.

Translation: there were more Gamestop shares promised between bettors than exist. When the game stops, all those promises come due, and they literally can't be paid off because there aren't enough tokens in circulation to settle all the debts.

Robinhood halted trading in part because the big fish upstream of Robinhood also halted trading, because they have even more at risk than Robinhood does if the game collapses - they the refs for MANY players, all the same size as Robinhood or larger.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop

But remember, the refs are cheating. And they are both downstream and upstream from other games in which the refs are also cheating.

And the games, as a whole, encompass our economy, including the solvency of the "real economy" (the people who make masks, deliver groceries and drive ambulances), and whether you spend your old age homeless and starving.

So the people who say, "Don't blame Robinhood, they didn't halt trading to help billionaires, they halted trading to prevent the game from collapsing are right."

But they're not the only ones who are right.

Also, there's the people who say that meme stocks aren't making money for little guys at the expense of the big guys. They're right too.

First, because these stocks will all need to be converted to cash, and that means selling them.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/the-gamestop-bubble-is-going-to-hurt-a-lot-of-ordinary-investors/

When the selloff starts, the price will plunge, because even if the stock was undervalued before, it's certainly overvalued now. Every bubble produces wealth for its early bettors who sell out to later players who lose everything when they can't find a sucker later on.

From Beanie Babies to subprime, bubbles burst and leave suckers holding the bag. If you just heard about meme stocks last week, you're too late to make money off of them.

There's another version of the "this isn't little guys, it's big whales" that's *also* true: the main beneficiary of the meme stock runs is giant funds who magnified and the bets from r/wallstreetbets and got out smart and fast.

https://twitter.com/zatapatique/status/1354904995901136896

So given all this, what can we make of calls (from parties as varied as AOC and Ted Cruz) to investigate Robinhood and other retail brokerages to see whether they're honest refs, or in the tank for billionaires?

At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith calls this a "fatuous uproar," saying that the Senate has more important things to do during the racing-out-of-control pandemic than to investigate a literal penny-ante grift.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/01/the-fatuous-uproar-about-robinhood-and-gamestop.html

Do we really care who the winner is in "a beauty contest between Cinderella’s ugly sisters" ("clueless new gen day traders versus clumsy shorts")?

Smith is right too.

A speculator-v-speculator contest that falls apart when the crooked ref halts play to prevent collapse - who cares who "wins?"

But here's how they can all be right - the "who cares" and the "goliath v goliath" and the "bubble" and the "Robinhood is a plutes' honeypot."

*If* there's hearings, and *if* those hearings expose the absurdity and corruption of the system, *then* there is a chance to build the political will to make real, systemic changes when the crisis comes.

And there's a real crisis coming: two, in fact. The covid junk bond financial crisis, which is due very soon, and the climate crisis stranded asset emergencies, which will unroll with increased tempo and intensity for decades to come.

The half-century cycle of "addressing" finance crises by increasing financialization MUST stop.

If the meme stock spectacle gets us to pay attention to hearings that reveal the irredeemable rot of the system, then it's a unique chance to spread *real* "financial literacy."

And that literacy is the necessary (but insufficient) precursor to taking action when the time comes - and the time is certainly coming soon.

#pluralistic

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sophiealyla · 4 years

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The Impacts of Plastics | A talk by Kate Copeland (Globe Foundation)

The Globe Foundation is a non-profit environmental CIC organisation established Feb 2018. They opened their first eco shop in April 2019 being zero waste and palm oil free.

During Grad+ week I attended a talk held by co-ordinator Kate Copeland discussing the impacts of plastics. This talk will help contribute to my project as it informed me on the

There is no such thing as thrown away, everything with waste we consume does not evaporate into thin air it ends up on landfill which can transport into nature.

Every year 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced – 40% of that being single use binned after.

By 2050 it is estimated there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.

While this plastic is sitting in landfill it is also letting out harmful chemicals into the air; we are all consuming fossil fuels daily. Every 30 seconds 1 person dies from diseases caused by waste.

Why Plastic is a bad material:

Attracts harmful chemicals

Harms wildlife – invasive species, poisoning

Enters food chain

Uses fossil file and natural resources

Image 2 shows a list of items the average person would not suspect to contain plastics.

The UK produces so much waste that China has come to a decision to not take our rubbish over anymore.

Supermarkets are slowly working to make a change. Tesco allows customers to bring their own containers for zero waste meat and fish. Waitrose have launched their UNPACKED campaign where food is stored in refillable containers.

Terra Cycle is a company that “recycles the non-recyclable”. For example, Sue, a volunteer from Globe collects soft plastics such as small packets and moulds them into new objects such as soap dishes which stops them going to landfill to sit for many years.

How does she do it:

Plastics are sorted by type and colour

Cleaned using eco-friendly solutions

Plastic is then shredded and stored

Heat and compressed to create products

Products are then sanded and finished

Plastic type and project logo stamp applied

Product available for community purchase

When creating reusable containers, I need to think of alternate materials that are sustainable for the environment considering the issue; the reformation of already harmful plastics is an interesting idea that can be explored thoroughly.

I was also introduced to biomaterials during Jane’s lecture on “Designing for Purpose” in which new materials are created that degrade back into the earth naturally and a lot quicker than plastics. This could be another path to think about.

#sustainability #globe #globefoundation #plastic #environment #plasticfree #designresearch

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climatemovement · 7 years

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Do Not Slow Down

I’m back. It took me several days to reopen this blog because of how daunting I knew it would feel to reconnect with the climate movement after the last several months. When Trump was elected almost a year ago, the entire world put up our fists like we’re boxers in full crouch trying to fend off a madman. Since then, we’ve been hit hard, again and again.

This summer was unprecedented.

The United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement and revoked the Clean Power Plan as Trump called climate change a hoax.

Meanwhile, hot temperatures broke summer records in western North America and the Lucifer heatwave scorched Mediterranean Europe. Alaska’s melting permafrost continued to accelerate and the Svalbard ‘doomsday’ seed vault flooded after soaring temperatures in the Arctic. Forest fires raged across the Pacific Northwest, Greece and Portugal. British Columbia’s fires released triple the past record of greenhouse gases. Brazil saw more forest fires in September than any month on record. Siberia’s boreal forest burned in the worst fires in 10,000 years.

Hurricane Harvey became the costliest disaster in US history. Hurricane Irma surpassed the theoretical maximum strength for a hurricane and extinguished Barbuda. “Irma is now gone off the scale—it is now a Category 5+ with 175 mph sustained winds,” wrote the Antigua Meteorological Service in a tweet that still brings tears to my eyes. “May the Lord bless our souls.” Maria pounded Puerto Rico into ‘apocalyptic’ conditions and Ophelia slammed western Ireland with the strongest eastern Atlantic hurricane on record. September was the most active month for hurricanes ever recorded.

To top it all off, the bees are fucked. Just off the top of my head.

Good news stories feel few and far between—but they are there. Cities across the USA and countries around the world responded to Trump’s abandoment of Paris with defiance and increased resolve to meet their emissions targets. Activists defeated TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, the British Columbia government joined First Nations and municipalities in the legal battle against Kinder Morgan, Midwestern farmers and activists are still standing against Keystone XL and a group of young people in Minnesota are charging against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline. More than 40 Catholic institutions made the largest ever faith-based divestment from fossil fuels. Australia announced the world’s largest solar thermal power plant and the world’s first floating wind farm began operating in Scotland.

A group of teenagers and children moved ahead with their court case against the US government, California cities sued 35 fossil fuel companies for negligence, Portuguese schoolchildren started crowdfunding to sue 47 European countries for inaction on climate change. Nearly 1,000 climate change court cases have been filed in 24 countries in an international effort to force governmental action, and people organizing all over the world to block fossil fuel projects.

To quote Al Gore, we’re going to win this.

So this is a post to say I’m back and I’m angry and I’m terrified. We’ve got to stay as loud and as active and as unrelenting as we possibly can—for every single person whose life was lost this summer and for every single summer still to come. This fight will take every single one of us. This fight will define our generation. Everything is at risk.

Do not fall silent. Do not slow down.

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sociologyquotes · 7 years

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90 companies are to blame for most climate change

from the article Just 90 companies are to blame for most climate change, this 'carbon accountant' says by Douglas Starr

“Last month, geographer Richard Heede received a subpoena from Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Smith, a climate change doubter, became concerned when the attorneys general of several states launched investigations into whether ExxonMobil had committed fraud by sowing doubts about climate change even as its own scientists knew it was taking place. The congressman suspected a conspiracy between the attorneys general and environmental advocates, and he wanted to see all the communications among them. Predictably, his targets included advocacy organizations such as Greenpeace, 350.org, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. They also included Heede, who works on his own aboard a rented houseboat on San Francisco Bay in California.

Heede is less well known than his fellow recipients, but his work is no less threatening to the fossil fuel industry. Heede (pronounced "Heedie") has compiled a massive database quantifying who has been responsible for taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. Working alone, with uncertain funding, he spent years piecing together the annual production of every major fossil fuel company since the Industrial Revolution and converting it to carbon emissions.

Heede's research shows that nearly two-thirds of anthropogenic carbon emissions originated in just 90 companies and government-run industries. Among them, the top eight companies -- ranked according to annual and cumulative emissions below -- account for 20 percent of world carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement production since the Industrial Revolution.

[Visit article page to view interactive graphic charting years of annual emissions]

[...] The results showed that nearly two-thirds of the major industrial greenhouse gas emissions (from fossil fuel use, methane leaks, and cement manufacture) originated in just 90 companies around the world, which either emitted the carbon themselves or supplied carbon ultimately released by consumers and industry. As Heede told The Guardian newspaper, you could take all the decision-makers and CEOs of these companies and fit them on a couple Greyhound buses.

The study provoked controversy when it was published in 2013, with some complaining that it unfairly held the fossil fuel industry responsible for the lifestyle choices made by billions of consumers. "It's a cop-out to blame the producers of products that we have demanded, and benefited from, for more than a century," wrote Severin Borenstein, a business and public policy expert at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, in a blog post.

Others, however, saw the study as a turning point in the debate about apportioning responsibility for climate change. With traditional environmental issues, such as river pollution or toxic waste, it has always been possible to identify perpetrators who could be targeted for regulation or enforcement. But greenhouse gases are emitted everywhere, in every process that involves combustion. "For decades there's been a persistent myth that everyone is responsible, and if everyone is responsible then no one is responsible," says Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington, D.C., who also serves on the board of a nonprofit that Heede co-founded. "Rick's work for the first time identifies a discrete class of defendants."

Heede's carbon accounting is already opening a new chapter in climate change litigation and policy, helping equip plaintiffs who believe they have suffered damages from climate change to claim compensation. "Rick's work really helps connect the dots," says Marco Simons, general counsel of EarthRights International, a Washington, D.C.-based legal group that defends the rights of the poor. "He hasn't sought out the spotlight, but I think his work is tremendously important."

Heede tallies carbon obsessively. When we discussed my plans to fly out from Boston to Sausalito, California, where his houseboat is anchored, he did a quick calculation and told me that my share of the flights would add 716 kilograms of carbon to the atmosphere. "And if you'd driven an average car the trip would be 1.78 tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide]" he added, apparently riffing on his own compulsiveness. During my visit I noticed that when he boiled water to make noodles for lunch he put a frying pan on the pot instead of a lid—to preheat the pan so it would use a tiny bit less fuel to heat up the stir-fry. "It's a practice of mine to figure out how I can minimize energy use."

He was born in Norway into a long line of watchmakers, which may contribute to his own meticulousness. At 15, he and his parents immigrated to the United States. His father was a consulting engineer, but the younger Heede wasn't keen on "fixing problems that should not have been created in the first place"—which, he admits, is exactly what he's doing these days.

Heede has spent most of his life in Colorado, and he has the solid build and weathered face of someone who has spent lots of time in the mountains. He earned undergraduate and master's degrees in geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and then joined forces with Amory Lovins, the soft-energy guru who co-founded the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, and his administration moved to gut subsidies for alternative energy sources, claiming that they were not economically competitive. Heede tested that assertion, analyzing the federal budget to find the hidden subsidies to the coal and oil industries, even including the cost of treating workers who developed black lung disease from coal mining.

Contrary to Reagan administration claims, Heede showed that the vast bulk of federal energy subsidies went to conventional energy sources. He wrote a report, testified to Congress, and wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. "I don't recall getting any calls as a result," he says. It was an early taste of working in obscurity.

In 2003, he left the Rocky Mountain Institute to form Climate Mitigation Services, a consulting firm specializing in surveying and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. One of his early clients was Aspen, Colorado, a rich and progressive ski town whose leaders wanted to act decisively to reduce emissions. They hired Heede to do a baseline greenhouse gas inventory with the broadest possible scope—including not only activities within the city, but the cars and airplanes that annually brought in hundreds of thousands of tourists … in short, Heede recalls, "everything that uses energy as a result of Aspen's existence."

The exercise raised fascinating questions, Heede says: "What is a community, and what is a boundary? There's leakage everywhere: airplanes, trucks, cars, visitors. How do you quantify that stuff?"

Heede interviewed airport managers and checked their logs to find out which aircraft served the more than 178,000 annual passengers, calculating fuel consumption and emissions for each flight. Standing at the main bridge into Aspen for hours at a time, he categorized the cars that went by—sedans, SUVs, trucks, vans. Then, he used his records to estimate emissions from the 13,000 vehicles tabulated by an automated counter each day. In the end, he determined that in 2004, Aspen was responsible for more than 840,000 tons of carbon emissions—"roughly equivalent to a large, diesel-powered aircraft carrier running flank speed at all times." This and subsequent reports enabled the city to reduce its emissions despite a growing population and economy.

Aspen was an early test of Heede's ability to gather information and see beyond obvious boundaries—the invisible ripples from every project that affect the infinitely interconnected atmosphere. In the early 2000s, for example, an Australian firm proposed building a liquefied natural gas terminal off the California coast. It seemed a good way to transition to a low-carbon "bridge" fuel. But, Heede says, "They hadn't done any work on life cycle emissions." When he tallied all the direct and indirect emissions—from the gas extraction in Australia to distribution in California—he found that the project would have produced nearly a third more carbon than anticipated. His analysis helped persuade California officials to vote it down.

Later, he tackled targets that produce bigger but more diffuse ripples. Several U.S. cities and environmental groups were suing the Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, alleging the institutions were financing projects that would damage Earth's climate. The plaintiffs retained Heede to analyze the carbon emissions resulting from the banks' loans and investments around the world, from a gas project in Central Africa to a coal mine in Poland. He found that the projects were directly and indirectly emitting nearly 2 billion metric tons of CO2 per year—almost 8% of the world's emissions. The plaintiffs won: The banks agreed to conduct environmental impact statements, create carbon-sensitive policies, and increase their financing of renewable energy projects.

Meanwhile, a new idea was coalescing in the environmental law community. For years, attorneys had litigated so-called environmental justice cases to redress the fact that poor people disproportionately suffer from pollution. By the early 2000s, it was becoming clear that the poor will also face the heaviest impacts of climate change. But how do you structure a liability case when the entire world takes part in the carbon economy? Can a Pacific Islander whose town has been flooded sue 7 billion people? Searching for more specific culprits, Peter Roderick, head of the Climate Justice Programme for Greenpeace International in London, commissioned Heede to study ExxonMobil and quantify total greenhouse emissions across its history.

He would have to follow a tangled corporate path. Founded as Standard Oil by John D. Rockefeller in 1870, the company became one of the world's largest multinationals until 1911, when the Supreme Court split it into several "baby Standards." Decades later, two of the largest of those firms merged to form ExxonMobil. Heede tracked down production figures in annual reports scattered among university archives on two continents, supplemented by court documents, news reports, and academic and industry papers. Then he converted production volumes to CO2 and methane. He included direct emissions, for instance from the fuels used to run the company's operations, and indirect emissions released by the combustion of its products.

After 15 months of research, Heede concluded that ExxonMobil and its precursors had directly or indirectly emitted 20.3 billion metric tons of CO2 and 199 million metric tons of methane. Friends of the Earth calculated that the quantity represented between 4.7% and 5.3% of humanity's industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1882.

"I thought, 'This is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind,'" Roderick recalls. "But I knew it was just a small part of the big picture."

Roderick commissioned Heede to look at the entire fossil fuel industry. To make the project manageable, they limited it to companies that produced at least 8 million tons of carbon per year, the so-called "carbon majors." The research took 8 years. Money from the original grant ran out, and after the crash of 2008 Heede's consulting business collapsed. He maxed out his credit card, borrowed against his Colorado house, and scraped by, enlisting graduate students in several countries to photocopy and send him papers, which he checked and double-checked with a watchmaker's precision. He filled shelves with binders of information and spent thousands of hours entering it into spreadsheets, working alone, often until midnight. "I take pleasure in that kind of stuff," Heede says. "I like to pay attention to detail."

Sitting at dual monitors in the captain's cabin of his houseboat, Heede takes me on a tour of his data set, a seemingly endless series of color-coded and cross-indexed spreadsheets. Each sheet lists hundreds of entries, with columns showing the year and total production volumes for products such as crude oil, natural gas, and varieties of coal. Clicking on a company's name opens additional spreadsheets with the company's year-by-year production, plus screenshots of its annual reports for verification. Color-coded flowcharts display the evolution of companies as they separated or merged. The flowcharts from Russia are particularly ornate, as they incorporate the transformation of companies after the fall of the Soviet Union. (Heede got production data for the Soviet companies from Central Intelligence Agency analyses and the International Energy Agency.) Detailed annotations reveal his methods and calculations. The structure of these charts, so layered and interlocking, seems almost medieval in its complexity, and Heede seems monklike in his devotion to compiling it.

The result, peer reviewed and published in Climatic Change, showed that just 90 companies contributed 63% of the greenhouse gases emitted globally between 1751 and 2010. Half of those emissions took place after 1988—the year James Hansen of NASA testified to Congress that there was no longer any doubt that global warming had begun.

The data "just blew me away," says Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University and co-author of the book Merchants of Doubt, which compares the fossil fuel industry to the tobacco industry in its efforts to raise doubts about science. "Everyone talks about this as a problem since the Industrial Revolution, but I now think that's incorrect," she says. Heede has shown that the roots of the problem are more recent and easier to trace. In 2011, Oreskes joined Heede in creating the Climate Accountability Institute, a nonprofit devoted to quantifying the contribution of fossil fuel companies to climate change and investigating their alleged attempts to obfuscate the science.

Other people criticize the work as oversimplified and naïve. David Victor, a political scientist and energy policy specialist at UC San Diego and a co-author of the 2015 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, doesn't question Heede's numbers but says his approach is wrongheaded. "It's part of a larger narrative of trying to create villains; to draw lines between producers as responsible for the problem and everyone else as victims. Frankly, we're all the users and therefore we're all guilty. To create a narrative that involves corporate guilt as opposed to problem-solving is not going to solve anything."

Heede concedes that the responsibility is shared. "I as a consumer bear some responsibility for my own car, etcetera. But we're living an illusion if we think we're making choices, because the infrastructure pretty much makes those choices for us." He focused on fossil fuel companies, he says, because unlike industries that produce greenhouse gases as a byproduct (such as the automobile industry, which has adhered to increasingly strict mileage standards), the mission of fossil fuel companies is to pull carbon out of the ground and put it into commerce.

His data, together with an emerging line of research that uses computer models to discern how likely it is that a given storm, flood, or heat wave was related to human-caused emissions, are now driving efforts to allocate responsibility for climate change. Last year, for instance, several nongovernmental organizations in the Philippines filed a petition with that nation's Commission on Human Rights. It asks the "carbon majors" to take remedial actions on behalf of typhoon survivors in the islands, which suffer devastating storms that may have worsened as a result of climate change. "Heede's report is one of the bedrock pieces of science and research that helped form our campaign," says Kristin Casper, litigation counsel for Greenpeace's Global Climate Justice and Liability Project in Toronto, Canada. In late July, the commission sent orders to 47 of the world's largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies, asking them to respond to the human rights charges in the petition. Similar actions and lawsuits are proceeding in several other countries.

Now, Heede is extending his carbon accounting into the future, quantifying the potential carbon release from future fossil fuel exploration. Like the other recipients of Representative Smith's subpoena, he has no intention of complying with what he calls a "campaign to intimidate us and stop scientific research." At the same time, he confesses an admiration for the fossil fuel industry, which has made "fantastic efforts to find resources for the betterment of humanity," often in the harshest environments. They've done such a good job that we haven't paused to reflect on the unintended consequences, he says. "And now we have to cope with the result."

#climate change #global warming #corporations #exxonmobil #greenhouse emissions #fossil fuels

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ninety9percent · 5 years

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Comments on Joe Biden’s Ad soliciting donations

Joe Biden sponsored this ad on FB. There were interesting comments. Sharing some. Not surprisingly only “Vote Blue No Matter Who” people support him. Comments are being presented as is - no editing. First his ad:

As a top Democrat, you’ve been selected by the Biden for President campaign to share your top priorities with Joe! We need your answers by midnight tonight, so don’t delay. Click below to begin the survey:

MaryBeth Sjostrom Pasmore

✅Opposes Medicare For All ✅Opposes legalizing marijuana ✅Supports the death penalty ✅Wrote the 1994 crime bill ✅Voted for DOMA ✅Voted for NAFTA ✅Voted for Iraq War ✅Voted for PATRIOT Act. Takes money from health insurance, corporations. ... no, I won't vote Joe.

Jenny Miles

Sorry Joe, you are exactly the opposite of what's needed. Too many reasons: 1. “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break... No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break.” 2. “Trump is not a bad man” 3. Biden praises former Republican Senator who was forced to resign after 19 sexual harassment complaints. 4. Referred to immoral moneylenders as Shylocks - insulting and offending Jews 5. Supported attacks on Anita Hill (who had accused Clarence Thomas of “ inappropriate sexual behavior“) and refused to call witnesses who could testify in support of her claim. 6. Wrote 1994 Crime Bill heralding “the era of mass incarceration“ 7. Wrote 1995 Omnibus Counter Terrorism Bill “ allowing the Government to use evidence from secret sources in deportation proceedings “ (despite claiming to oppose that section he introduced the bill), and included 1st Amendment violating “anti freedom of association” provisions (became Patriot Act) 8. Opposed marriage equality; “ No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage” (has since changed) 9. Voted in 1999 to repeal Glass Steagall - leading to (as expected) the financial crisis 10. In 2001 voted for Patriot Act, emphasizing that it was essentially a copy of his 1995 Omnibus Counter Terrorism Act 11. In 2002 Voted for “illegal” Iraq War 12. In 2005 Voted to end bankruptcy protection for students [ Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) ] 13. In 2018 Presented George Bush with Liberty Medal “presented to individuals for their commitments to veterans “ 14. “I am not Bernie Sanders. I don't think 500 billionaires are the reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't bad guys”. 15. Supported Civil Asset forfeiture, even without an arrest or conviction 16. Pushed for “Cabinet Level Drug Czar” to punish “drug crime” 17. “The punishment should fit the crime. But I think [marijuana] legalization is a mistake. I still believe [marijuana] is a gateway drug.” 18. Opposed spending money on drug research (including medical) on any Schedule 1 drug 19. Supported and introduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses that saw “the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 11% higher than for whites. Four years later, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 49% higher”. 20. Despite the strong anti drug stance, his daughter was arrested for drugs (and a decade later caught on video allegedly snorting cocaine), but there is no evidence of a conviction or asset seizure. 21. Again, despite the above, when his son tested positive for cocaine, there was no conviction and no asset seizure. 22. Supported Militarization of the Police - that had no effect on reducing crime, but is correlated with higher rates of police discrimination against minorities (blacks) 23. Unable to “think of any reason not to run for President” 24. MBNA Credit Card Company in his home state was his biggest donor between 1989 amnd 2000. Biden voted against a measure requiring credit card companies to warn consumers of the consequences of making only minimum payments (and others). MBNA hired Biden’s son, Hunter, as a lobbyist straight out of law school, and later hired him as a consultant from 2001 to 2005 — the same years Biden was helping to pass the bill 25. Ukraine’s biggest private gas producer (whilst under investigation for corruption) hired his son to serve on its board while Biden was acting as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine policy. 26. A mid-sized construction firm Hill International won a $1.5 billion contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq had Biden’s brother, James, as its executive vice president, despite lacking any experience in residential construction prior to joining the firm. 27. One of the Senate’s top twenty-five earners of outside income — and, along with twenty-two others on that list (of top earners), voted against a bill to limit such earnings. 28. In 1979, after receiving donations from Coca-Cola, Biden cosponsored and voted for legislation that let the soft-drink industry get around antitrust laws. 29. The same year, he voted against a measure before the Judiciary Committee to expand consumers’ rights to sue over price-fixing — one of only two Democrats to do so. 30. Has a very close “revolving door” relationship with lobbyists 31. Vehement opponent of school busing implemented to tackle racial segregation 32. Opposed a deficit reduction military spending freeze, and supported an increase in the retirement age 33. “I have the most progressive record of anybody running" 34. Has NOT signed pledge not to accept money from fossil fuels industry 35. “rejection of the whole movement of black pride.” 36. After being accused by seven women of “inappropriate touching” , hugs kids, and makes jokes about it. 37. Offered Ukraine $1Bn to sack their prosecutor 38. Supports a number of anti abortion measures 39. Proud of his support for the death penalty for a wide range of offenses 40. No statement on pledge rejecting corporate money 41. No statement on GND (Green new Deal) 42. No statement on fossil fuel money pledge 43. No statement on support for universal healthcare 44. No statement on "free" college education 45. No statement on abolishing Electoral College 46. No statement on supporting whistelblowers exposing government criminality 47. No published tax returns for 10 years 48. No declared statement opposing Israel genocides in gaza

- via Dennis Freeland

Lindsay Shugerman

Don't run. Please don't run. We don't need another corporate paid shill. Medicare for ALL, no fracking, free public college, livable wages (for real), end to Citizens United and lobbyists buying power. Renewable energy, not oil. In other words, NOTHING you support.

Matthew Pace

There is only one priority. Get the Orange Menace evicted from squatting in the WH; stabilize the government and pass it off to peaceful elections in 2024. The insanity in the WH has to end.

Josh Ruppert - Matthew Biden is just as bought why don't you research before running your mouth. Biden is put as a candidate because the DNC wants to loose. If Bernie wins their slush money goes bye bye.

Hugh Stearns - This anti-intellectual trope is brought to you by the DNC. How, before the primary, does it make any sense to interject anyone but Trump? Of course, we want anyone but Trump. This is an attempt to suggest that we must suffer another centrist candidate or risk losing to Trump. This is the same argument that was used against the more progressive candidate last time. If we want to beat Trump and future Trumps we better think critically about the elitist element of the Democratic Party and question their authority.

Allen Heinzer

My top priority is for Biden to withdraw and support Bernie

Allen Heinzer - Biden is a republican lite there is no establishment democrats they all just democrats in name only Fdr was a democrat Look up his record If democrats would run on that they’d never lose

Allen Heinzer - Ask yourself if he is a democrat why didn’t him and Obama give us universal healthcare when they had super majority in all 3 branches

Nancy Hollister Kozlenko - Allen Heinzer I hope you support who ever represents the Democratic Party and not go off in a huff if your guy or gal doesn’t win. That’s how Trump got in!

Lin Bower - Martha Korte Get real,Bernie is a back stabber.He was such a good friend to Hillary until she beat him .Then he wasn’t.A person like that is not Presidential material.

D Kim Sayre-Arnold - Gary Bailey And Bernie WAS THE SPLITTER IN 2016!!! HE NEEDS TO STICK TO HIS OWN PARTY, and please, stay out of mine.!

Pamela Jarvis - Allen, that about sums it up. Biden announced his run at $2,000 a plate fund raiser with corporate CEO's. I am voting Bernie. I may be old but I am hanging with the young progressive's choice..feel the Bern

Tammy Fox Sorry

my top priority is getting Bernie Elected.

Charlotte Arnold - Bernie cost us the last election. Republicans have a lot of crap on Bernie they are going to release if he wins the primary. Bernie will not win.

Lezli Magnani - Charlotte Arnold Bernie did not cause that loss!! The DNC shoving Hillary down people’s throats caused that loss. Again, the clearest candidate that can beat Trump is being ignored by the corporate democratic party. Joe will not be shoved down our throats either. Please just follow the money-look where Joe is getting his money from-always follow the money

Rebecca Sake - D Kim Sayre-Arnold once you take your corporate owned Republicans out of our Democratic Party then you’ll see Bernie is in the right place. And Bernie didn’t split anything, your candidate was too weak to win. #BernieWouldHaveWon

Rebecca Sake - Me too, #HealthCareForAll will only be attainable with #Bernie2020 Biden is backed by big pharma & Comcast. He's not a man of the people and he's out to make his corporate donors happy.

Rebecca Sake - Kim Crane they weren’t her votes to begin with. And every chance she had to earn those votes were blown by her own decisions, remember she said she didn’t need the progressive dems. You can think he took away millions of votes all you want, doesn’t make it true. The truth is, she never earned the votes she needed to win. End of story. Stop blaming everyone but the one who lost the easiest victory ever.

Rebecca Sake - Kim Crane actually it was Hillary supporters who, in larger numbers refused to vote for Obama. In 2016, Hillary failed to even try to court progressive votes. Most of us had very specific reasons to not vote for her, and her cheating her way into the nomination made it very easy to vote third party. A very small percent voted Trump but the majority voted third party. Btw you earn votes, they aren’t given because of the fear of the other candidate. It might also surprise you to know Hillary helped trump in the early primaries because she felt he’d be the easiest to beat. You guys forget that a lot while you’re trying to shame people for not voting for the most owned candidate in history. Your lack of insight and foresight is more to blame for a trump presidency than our educated choice of voting.

Anita Concilio

Health care Joe - and parity for women in the workplace and as citizens of the world. Child care, education, and for goodness sake, job training for the families in the midwest who have lost manufacturing and farming. Oh, and also, immigration reform, like amnesty maybe? Middle class needs some significant help. And campaign financing reform, oh, the list is so long. But I have faith that a Biden administration would focus on the things that will make America respected again.

Nicole F Sharpe

Joe, your time has come and gone by. You've made too many "bi-partisan" compromises that have hurt too many people, especially women, in your need to be liked. We can't trust you to do the right things in office because we know you'll cave to political expediency at the people's expense. You may get the DNC nod but you won't be elected, and we need a candidate that can be elected. Please bow out of the race now and put your support where it will do some good instead of sapping the strength of more viable candidates

Ashley Smuts Pizzuti

Joe - what are you going to do about your history with student loans? I know you love those lenders. We know your history. But you are very out of touch with a problem you helped create.

Mary Nikas

We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created," said Biden, then a fourth-term senator from Delaware so committed to the bill that he has referred to it over the years as "the Biden bill." "They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale," Biden continued. "And it's a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society." In the speech, Biden described a "cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally ... because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity." He said, "we should focus on them now" because "if we don't, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now." Biden added that he didn't care "why someone is a malefactor in society" and that criminals needed to be "away from my mother, your husband, our families."” https://www.google.com/.../biden-1993-speech.../index.html

Laurence Bridge

Medicare & the cost of long term care is the most important concern for those of us who having worked and saved all our working life,can end up in a facility that was once called the workhouse.Untrained staff, disgusting food,left to lie in our own waste ,to the tune of thousands of dollars from our life time savings,for these disgraceful places called LONG TERM CARE, perhaps our politicians should be forced to take a long look at the Chinese system,who treat the elderly with dignity in the twilight of their lives.

Cathy Sullivan

i'm going with .. go away Joe Biden .. we can't afford to lose to trumpy again. Make sure Hillary leaves with you

Deborah Birdsong

#NoJoe No more corporate democrats who run their campaigns using special interest monies! #OverturnCitizensUnited#Bernie2020

Mary Nikas

“Biden, by contrast, has been a bag man for big corporations for his entire career. Delaware is like the Luxembourg of U.S. states — a tiny tax haven and flag of convenience for corporations who own the local political system outright, and Biden is no exception. His economic policy career has been one disgrace after the next — sponsoring or voting for multiple rounds of financial deregulation, trade deals that savaged the American manufacturing base, and bankruptcy "reform" that made it much harder to discharge consumer debt (and nearly impossible to get rid of student debt). It's no surprise at all that on the same day he launched his campaign, Biden held a fundraiser including several corporate lobbyists and Republican donors at the home of a Comcast executive.”

Jeffery Ansani

Perfect example of his stupidity. Did he send this to all the "disaffected" white working class males who voted for trump in 2016 whose votes he needs to capture to beat trump? He's so arrogant he thinks his mere presence in the race is enough. And secondly, if I'm a Right Wing Fuckhead I use this to Demonstrate that he doesn't give a FUCK about ALL Americans' concerns. Like taking candy from a baby dinosaur. It's a transparent attempt to bolster small donor roles, nothing more. Seriously! All he has to do is look at the polls. We overwhelmingly FAVOR a Green New Deal, money OUT of politics, Medicaid for ALL, sensible gun laws, reasonable and humane immigration reform, free college, and just about every other Progressive proposals. WAKE THE FUCK UP DEMOCRATS! And when you do, smarten up too. These people have failed you for thirty years while Bernie has been FIGHTING for you. He's the only choice. For Robert Paul PaulKarla Jen Lynn Jannon and any others who may be thinking Joe is a good option. He's not. Look at the polls. Not the candidate polls but the issues ones. You'll see very clearly, he's out of touch. Don't argue with me, he's not the one.

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narcisbolgor-blog · 6 years

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Trump races against clock to roll back major Obama-era environment rules

The administrations lengthy slate of rollbacks will slow progress on reducing air pollution and greenhouse gases that warm the planet, health experts say

Donald Trumps administration is racing against the clock to rescind or rewrite every major pro-environment policy enduring from Barack Obamas presidency but the government will probably not be able to usher those changes through the courts before the next presidential election.

Green-minded states and advocates cannot sue until regulations are final, and it could take years for the courts to rule. In the interim, the lengthy slate of rollbacks will slow progress on reducing air pollution and greenhouse gases that warm the planet, health experts say.

Bruce Buckheit, who worked in the Environmental Protection Agencys enforcement division under both Democratic and Republican presidents, said the first year of the Trump presidency was a bunch of press releases, but now were getting to the point where theyre actually doing things.

The timetable that theyre rushing toward is to try to get these things done in time so that the judicial review process is done before the end of the Trump term, Buckheit said.

Sheila Olmstead, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an adviser to Obama, said the White House plowed on with executive orders and regulations to ease protections for the environment in a 180-degree reversal from the Obama years, even as it saw early setbacks on healthcare and immigration campaign promises.

Trump officials are weakening a rule that would speed a shift away from electricity made from burning coal which causes early deaths and spews heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They are also loosening standards for how companies discard coal ash, despite the fact that it is spilling into waterways in North Carolina following Hurricane Florence.

Trump agencies are freezing mandates that new cars use less gasoline and pollute less, and they are cutting limits on potent methane gas released by the oil industry. They are rescinding an effort to give the federal government jurisdiction over more waterways. The EPA is also rejecting science that shows some pesticides make people sick.

Theyre moving forward on many fronts, said Alan Krupnick of the environmental group Resources for the Future. I think they could well be saying we want to just throw as much stuff out there so if a Democrat wins in 2020, or we lose in the interim, itll take a longer time to undo things.

Jeff Holmstead, a partner at the law firm Bracewell, who was in charge of the air office in George W Bushs EPA, agreed Trump rules might be left in legal limbo, but said the administration is trying to make changes stick.

If Trump is a one-term president, you may very well end up in the same situation the Obama folks did in the administration where a number of things they promulgated were still pending in the courts and the Trump administration chose not to defend them, Holmstead said.

At the heart of the Trump administration rollbacks is a fundamental disagreement about how to count the costs and health benefits of regulation. Critics of the administration also charge that the government is doing the bidding of fossil fuel corporations. Most Trump officials dont acknowledge man-made climate change, although agency analysis has recognized temperatures could rise 7F (about 4C) by 2100.

In most of its reversals, the Trump administration argues the costs of rules were higher and the benefits lower than Obama officials predicted.

Trump officials want to ignore many pollution reductions that exceed a rules specific goal.

For example, Obama-era rules would have shut down coal plants earlier than expected. That would lead to fewer greenhouse gas emissions and cleaner air.

But Trumps EPA would count only the small impact the single rule would have on slowing climate change, without considering wider benefits.

The US government also wants to consider only the benefits to the US of curbing climate change, ignoring the benefits elsewhere that are far more vulnerable, such as island nations facing rapidly rising seas.

Holmstead, who represents power companies, argued that government agencies under Trump are being much more honest and transparent, with their accounting by giving a range of estimates to emphasize uncertainty. He said cost-benefit studies are not an exact science.

But many air experts say that kind of thinking ignores how much air pollution shortens lives.

Costs are very well understood and theyre very well documented, said Miles Keogh, executive director of a group that represents state and local air regulators, the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. What we dont do very well is the benefit of protection. The impacts are extremely distributed both in terms of whos impacted and when theyre impacted, whereas the costs are very concentrated, and theyre very easy to document and measure.

David Doniger, climate director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the Trump administration is rolling back the rules as a delay tactic.

He said: In some ways they are a retreating army, trying to destroy the railroad tracks as they retreat,. They cant think they can win this, in the sense of a permanent hold off of the need to address climate change.

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

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dixonministry · 7 years

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If I Ruled The World

The world would be quite a bit different if I were its supreme dictator. Oh yes, I am in favor of a dictatorship, as long as that dictator is me! And here's how it would go.

A few disclaimers before we begin: 1) Keep your expectations low when you read this. You won’t like everything I list but you won’t hate it all either. This is due to me being neither a liberal or a conservative solely but rather bits and pieces of each. 2) I am making this rant for my own entertainment and the entertainment of the few people who enjoy it when I rant. I am not making this in hopes of starting a debate on what is right or wrong, stupid or smart. If I sound like an idiot to you, cool. Let me sound like an idiot in peace! With that said, keep your lame ass argumentative comments out of my inbox. Thanks. Ok on with the rant!

First of all, I'd have to setup a single worldwide government. The current rulers of all current nations would become representatives of their respective countries on my World Senate. Of course, being a dictator I don't really need a Senate, but it's nice to have. As long as they know that anything they decide can get shit-canned by me, then it's all good. Not Bush though. And definitely not T.rump. I would pass a law that no-one in the Bush/T.rump family is ever allowed to enter politics ever again. I'd make 0bama the President again so he could be the American Senator, cuz I liked him. It goes without saying that I'd first pass all sorts of Youth Rights laws. Every age-based law would be abolished and replaced by laws that actually make sense. For example, the driving age would get axed and be replaced by a more rigorous driving test. In fact, we have way too many stupid drivers out there as it is, so the WHOLE driving test would have to be retaken by everyone. I would bring back beheading as the favorite execution style. Lethal Injections are for pussies. What the fuck is scary about getting a shot that puts you to sleep? Fuck no, if you did something bad enough that you deserve to die, you're gonna lose your head, bitch! Murderers get the death penalty, period. No life imprisonments for assholes who kill people. You kill someone, you die, that's all. (Note: DP would however only occur with a substantial amount of concrete evidence) Rapists get the death penalty. If she said no, then it's NO, motherfucker. If you beat your kids, you get put in chains in the middle of Times Square and people can pay $1 for one punch or kick. The beatings stop when someone draws blood (cuz we don't wanna kill your ass). On the 3rd offense, an angry mob gets to beat your ass into a coma. If you come out of it, your kids can decide whether you should live or die. If you molest a kid, whatever part of your body touched them gets painted with acid. Then you go to the chopping block! If you steal from someone, you lose your rights and freedom for 1 year and become your victim's endentured servant. On the 3rd offense, you will work until you have paid for 10 times the value of the item stolen or for 5 years, whichever comes first. Marijuana is legal in Salt’s World. It will be tightly regulated and heavily taxed, because if you're gonna be a pothead, you're gonna fucking pay for it. Growing your own shit or selling it without a license will be considered stealing from the government and you get the punishment for theft (see above). Drunk drivers get no chances. First offense of drunk driving means you lose your license for life, in theory. I say "in theory" because it will work sort of like a life sentence in prison works. You can be brought up for "parole" and a committee will assess whether you deserve to get your license back. Such assessments will occur once every 10 years. If you beat your wife, I annul your marriage and place a restraining order against you. I don't care if she gives me that brainwashed crying bullshit "but he loves me, he didn't mean it, really he doesn't abuse me." You hit her, you lose her, and that's final. I will have my government scientists figure out an alternative to abortion that everyone can live with. Preferably, I'd like to see us be able to remove an embryo and continue to grow it in a lab. People who're trying to adopt always want babies and they always have to wait years for one. Not anymore. Furthermore, it seems that adoption is frowned upon due to it being so difficult to get approved and those who do get approved have a predisposition for choosing pretty, white INFANTS. Under my control, a new process will be drawn up to make it not only easier to adopt regardless of sexuality, marital status, etc but make it so that people don’t get to “select” which child they want. First come, first given, end of story. If you really want a child, you wouldn’t be that gdamn picky anyway. If you don’t want your child, that’s fine and well. We will literally take it out of your stomach (same concept as aborting) and grow it for you. Real abortions will only be allowed if a health risk to either mother or child comes up. This is how I would attempt to find middle ground, a compromise if you will. My government will fund cloning research. I want to be able to clone stem cells and body parts. If this can be done, maybe sick and dying patients won't have to wait year after year for suitable donors. In a world where everyone is part of the same government, there's not much need for massive armies. A global police force will be instituted as the next step above Federal officers. So, it would go, local cops, state cops, federal cops, global cops. Without an army to feed, clothe, etc. a shitload of money would be freed up to make people's lives better. There won't be anymore fucking hunger in my world. Every single farm worldwide will be required by law to give 5% of their yearly output to the government for distribution to the poor. They will, of course, receive a humongous tax break for doing this and any farm that voluntarily gives in excess of 15% will pay no taxes at all. Yes, I know this will make the cost of food rise globally. Too bad. You pay a dollar more for your T-bone and you can just cry about it, but at least some little Ethiopian can have some fucking potatoes that night. And in retrospect, under my administration, the percentage of poor people in the world should lower dramatically if not disappear altogether if you play your cards right. But until this global shitshow is corrected, that’s what would have to happen. Medicine will no longer be big business. All wealthy citizens under my rule will see a tax increase, which will pay for everyone's healthcare. No more private insurance companies, it's going government-issue, baby! And, by the way, under my rule the words "government issue" won't be a synonym for "piss poor." No one should be groaning about this because the minimum wage will also see an increase to an actual living wage proportional to the cost of living that will make workers and their families happy and also boost consumer sales, thus increasing the profits of businesses everywhere. The lack of insurance plans employers now have to provide for their employees will free up some of that extra cash. We're dismantling nuclear weapons and using their radioactive components as fuel. What the fuck do we need nukes for when all the world is united under one government? I will pass a law stating once and for all that all sentient life on this planet is entitled to equal treatment and protection under the law and that no law may be passed which contradicts this. Gay marriage: Legal. If you file a stupid lawsuit, we throw you in jail for 3 months. This includes suing the tobacco industry when you're the one who lit up 50 times a day for 30 years, moron. You also can't sue because you're fat. Watch what you eat and exercise if it bothers you so much! I will force Microsoft, Apple, and all those Google people to work together and create "The Uber OS." It'll run Windows programs and Mac programs (all versions) and Google programs (all flavors). All the drivers will work interchangeably. They will all be told that if the OS ever crashes, they each lose a family member! Mwahahahahaha. (kidding obvs). Every citizen will be allowed to carry a sidearm, as long as the sidearm is worn in plain view (like the old west). Every citizen carrying a gun had better remember the price they'll pay for murder. Unless it's self defense or defense of another's life, don't pull that gun! Significant resources will be diverted to build subway systems. City-wide, State-wide, Nation-wide, and World-wide systems will be built. Any system that is Interstate or beyond must be supersonic. The World-wide system must reach speeds of Mach 2 or greater (don't try standing up on the train, bitch!). The purpose of this subway network will not only be to facilitate free travel across the globe, but also to provide countless millions of new jobs that should adequately handle our planet's homelessness and unemployment problems. I should've mentioned taxes earlier, but here it is. The worldwide tax brackets will be as follows: everyone making 10k or less will owe 12% (you can omit the extra 2% with a financial hardship exemption form but it should be noted that no full-time adult worker should be making that much under my leadership so this should be doable without a person’s quality of life taking a hit), everyone making between 10,001-99,999 will owe 15%, everyone making $100k-$200k will owe 30%. Everyone over 200k will owe 50%. Surely you don't think the money for all these great improvements is just gonna fall from the sky? Recycling will become mandatory. We throw away far too much shit. Why chop down a rainforest when there's enough paper in a city dump to fill a library 10 times over?! We will also have to become far less dependent on fossil fuels. I'll work out a timetable for eventually outlawing fossil fuels in favor of electric, solar, and nuclear power. Go back to that city dump and imagine how many atoms are sitting their going to waste when we could be smashing them and reaping the benefits. Prison overcrowding? No problem! Legalizing weed and making drugs a medical issue instead of a criminal one should take care of this problem for the most part and as for the rest, well, Antarctica is just sitting there not doing a damn thing, it's time we put it to use. Remember the penal colony "Rura Penthe" from Star Trek VI? Yup, it'll be something like that. No guard towers, no fence, nothing. If you wanna escape, go ahead. You'll just freeze to death, idiot. Otherwise, you'll stay right there in prison and serve out your sentence. Imagine how many new jobs a prison that size will create? And the cost of feeding them will be negligible. They'll have giant heated greenhouses for growing everything they eat. They don't work to grow it, they don't eat. In other words, a prison sentence means you serve your time as a farmer in the middle of frozen fucking nowhere. Jon Stewart will be appointed as my press secretary. At least all my press releases will have the whole world laughing their asses off. Minimum Wage will be increased to $12.50/hr. I think Ronald McDonald can afford to buy used overhauls for a while so that his employees don't have to shop at the Salvation Army. Corruption in government would be gone. No one is allowed to spend more than $500 on their election campaigns. They can put up a fucking website and do grassroots shit. That way there's no big corporate donations and shit to deal with. Plus, politicians are gonna become like preachers: We give them a place to live and a minimal salary, that's it. No big bucks, no fancy cars, nothing. It's not gonna be about the money. All the money we cut from politicians can go to teachers, cops, firemen, etc. Y'know, the government employees who actually fucking DO something worthwhile and give back to society. Pro Athletes get capped at $90,000/yr. None of this being a rich bastard because you play a fucking game. Maybe then, only people who LOVE the sport and DON'T corrupt it will find their way in. Just like with the politicians, when it's not about the money only people who actually give a fuck will want the job. Ninety grand a year is still a damn good salary. It's not like they'll be poor. The RIAA and MPAA will be told once and for all to shut the fuck up about Peer-to-Peer. They should've jumped on the bandwagon when it got rolling, now they can just suck it up. By the way, musicians and actors are capped at $60,000/yr. They can still have the royalties on their music, movies, concerts, commercial deals, etc. Wouldn't be fair to take that away from them. However, the industry will still be encouraged to develop better copyright protection methods so that all the true geeks can still enjoy the immense thrill of breaking a copyright protection scheme only days after it's implemented. They've gotta have something to do on a dateless Saturday night. Wouldn't want to rob them of that. We'll be having a government-sponsored betting pool on how long it takes the industry to figure out that copyright protection is fucking useless (they spend years developing some new state-of-the-art system and once it's released, a 13yo breaks it in 2 days... get a clue). SPAM will be made illegal! The punishment for spamming is 5 years in the Antarctic Prison Colony! I think that just about covers the basics. Of course, I could probably go on all fucking night with this shit, but if I kept going I'd never get this rant posted. Just know that there's like a billion more cool things I'd do. I might just have to make a sequel to this rant. Until then....... Salt for president 2020.

#text #weekly rant #salt rants #I mean it #stay out of my inbox

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topsolarpanels · 6 years

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The war on coal is over. Coal lost | Dana Nuccitelli

Dana Nuccitelli: Coal cant compete with cheaper clean energy. The Trump administration cant save expensive, dirty energy.

Last week, Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced ,” the war against coal is over .” If there ever was a war on coal, the coal industry has lost. According to a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, many old American coal power plant are being retired or converted to natural gas, and new coal power plants aren’t being built because they’ve become more expensive than natural gas, breeze, and solar energy:

The share of US electricity coming from coal fell from 51 percentage in 2008 to 31 percent in 2016 — an unprecedented change. New UCS analysis finds that, of the coal units that remain, roughly one in four plans to retire or convert to natural gas; another 17 percent are uneconomic and could face retirement soon .

Natural gas has now outstripped coal to supplying 32% of US electricity( up from 21% in 2008 ), and solar and gust are up to 10%( from 3 % in 2008 ).

Evolution of the American power grid mix since 1960. Illustration: Carbon Brief

This trend will continue. As old coal plants continue to retire and be replaced by cheaper renewables and natural gas, their share of the US electricity supply will continue to plummet, and coal will become a fossil fuel in every sense of the word. That’s why American companies continue to invest in inexpensive, clean renewable energy. As a outcome, our air and water are becoming cleaner, Americans are becoming healthier, and our carbon pollution is falling.

brad plumer (@ bradplumer)

Two more coal plants to close in Texas. Believe that attains 12 this year nationwide: https :// t.co /8 n1kUQUJSc

October 13, 2017

The shift away from coal poses a challenge for regions in which the local economy depends on the fossil fuel, but the transition is inevitable. A wise economic policy would involve fund programs to help those regions adapt to the change( Hillary Clinton proposed one such plan during her presidential campaign ). A recent analyze showed that Americans are willing to pay a carbon tax with some of non-respendable revenues going to assist displaced coal employees. The Trump administration has instead opted to try and slow coal’s inevitable decline.

Trump is desperate to burn more coal

The Trump administration seems hell-bent on causing as much global warming as possible. First there was the historically irresponsible decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, joining war-torn Syria as the only world countries to reject the treaty. Then just a few weeks ago, Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced a plan to effectively take coal out of the free market and instead subsidize it with taxpayer dollars to bail out the industry and keep uneconomical coal power plant open. The hypocrisy operated thick- as Perry called for propping up the coal industry with increased taxpayer subsidies, Pruitt called for an end to subsidies for renewable energy:

I would do away with these incentives that we give to wind and solar. I’d let them stand on their own and compete against coal and natural gas and other sources, and let utilities make real-time marketplace decisions on those types of things as opposed to being propped up by taxation incentives and other types of credits that occur

Soon thereafter, Priutt announced that Trump’s EPA will repeal the Clean Power Plan. That policy represented America’s most significant effort to cut its carbon pollution, but had been mired in a legal combat over whether the scheme outstripped EPA’s regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act. Rather than let the courts choose the instance, which many experts felt the EPA would win, Pruitt stopped defending the example in court and aimed the program.

The problem is that according to the US Supreme Court, the EPA is legally required to regulate dangerous carbon pollution. Pruitt’s EPA may propose a dramatically weakened scheme that probably wouldn’t survive national courts challenge, or he may only try to run out the clock on Trump’s term. As with the disastrous Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they don’t have a replacing scheme. In the meantime, states and environmental groups will take his Clean Power Plan repeal to court.

Eric Schneiderman (@ AGSchneiderman)

I will sue to stop the Trump Admin’s irresponsible and illegal #CleanPowerPlan repeal, which threatens NYers public health& surrounding. pic.twitter.com/ utm5Q 0VWrF

October 9, 2017

Pruitt’s Clean Power Plan repeal justification is largely based on bogus economics, which the Trump administration is use to reduce government estimations of the ‘social cost of carbon .’ This figure- which estimates how much a ton of carbon pollution expenses society in terms of damages caused by climate change- is integral to many government policies. A majority of economists think the government’s estimation is too low, but Pruitt’s EPA manipulated the math by dismissing the costs of America’s carbon pollution to the rest of the world, and by using a high discount rate, which essentially says we care more about saving money now than avoiding climate injuries and suffering for future generations.

However, because renewables and natural gas are now cheaper than coal, an analysis by the Rhodium Group found that the US will satisfy the Clean Power Plan target of cutting carbon pollution from power generation 32% below 2005 levels by 2030 despite its repeal.

US power sector carbon dioxide emissions projections without the Clean Power Plan in place. Illustration: Rhodium Group

That being said, with the Clean Power Plan in place, the US likely would have beat its targets. As this excellent tool created by Carbon Brief depicts, many countries like California and Idaho are ahead of the curve, but other states like Texas and West Virginia would have been forced to accelerate their transitions to clean energy, had the Clean Power Plan been enforced.

The ball is in Congress’ court

The good news is that none of the Trump administration’s moves are permanent. The next chairperson can rejoin the Paris climate agreement, have the EPA draft new regulations to regulate power plant carbon pollution, and rewrite the social cost of carbon based on real science and math. As Citizens’ Climate Lobby Executive Director Mark Reynolds wrote TAGEND

Those who cheer the EPA’s move should remember that President Obama initiated the Clean Power Plan in 2015 in the face of Congress’s inaction on climate change. Without effective legislation to combat climate change, a future chairman could just as easily go down the path of executive action and the rules of procedure again. The best answer here is for Congress to pass legislation putting the market to work on solving climate change .

There’s been some movement in this direction. A group of Republican elder statesmen in the Climate Leadership Council called for a revenue-neutral carbon taxation, which would grow the economy. Senator Lindsey Graham( R-SC) recently called for a price on carbon pollution and is said to be working with Senator Whitehouse( D-RI) on climate legislation. The House Climate Solutions Caucus is now up to 30 Republican and 30 Democratic members and is trying to craft a bipartisan replacement for the Clean Power Plan.

The Trump administration is taking every possible step to burn away our future, but fortunately the transition to a clean energy economy is unstoppable, and many of his party members are coming to grips with that reality.