ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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Xavderion wrote:

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rojimboo wrote:

I have no idea what your point is. Perhaps use more words, you know, the stuff of coherent sentences?

You're blaming the US for their cumulative carbon emissions since the 1850s as the key factor for rapid climate change. I said that blaming them makes no sense unless you'd be fine with living at the standard of the 1850s. You said no we could decarbonise and keep our current standards of living (which is debatable but I can see that with a couple more decades of technological progress so ultimately I agree). Now my point is that we can only decarbonise and keep our current standard of living because of the technological progress and prosperity we achieved from 1850s onward, which would've been impossible without the industrial revolution and the pollution that came with it.

There's no current level of progress and prosperity without the pollution which came beforehand. If you went back to the 1850s and told the people to stop the industrial revolution and go green instead, they literally wouldn't be able to as they have neither the knowledge nor the means to produce solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric dams etc. at an industrial level. So their only two choices would be to either stay at their current level of progress or to industrialize and pollute to achieve enough progress to some day go green. I'm glad we went with the latter but maybe you disagree.

Absolutely speculative hogwash. Who says in this alternate universe that we couldn't have achieved greener energy earlier had we known how devastating fossil fuel use is?

That doesn't even matter slightly, since we cannot change the past to my knowledge. Your argument is literally academic, except not the good kind.

What matters now is what governments and people do now. The US is horrifically behind the curve, and Trump is actively destroying climate science on top of that.

"Science is a democrat thing" right?

At least let them do their jobs, and stop subsidising the oil industry to destroy the climate, the only one we have.

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rojimboo wrote:

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Xavderion wrote:

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rojimboo wrote:

I have no idea what your point is. Perhaps use more words, you know, the stuff of coherent sentences?

You're blaming the US for their cumulative carbon emissions since the 1850s as the key factor for rapid climate change. I said that blaming them makes no sense unless you'd be fine with living at the standard of the 1850s. You said no we could decarbonise and keep our current standards of living (which is debatable but I can see that with a couple more decades of technological progress so ultimately I agree). Now my point is that we can only decarbonise and keep our current standard of living because of the technological progress and prosperity we achieved from 1850s onward, which would've been impossible without the industrial revolution and the pollution that came with it.

There's no current level of progress and prosperity without the pollution which came beforehand. If you went back to the 1850s and told the people to stop the industrial revolution and go green instead, they literally wouldn't be able to as they have neither the knowledge nor the means to produce solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric dams etc. at an industrial level. So their only two choices would be to either stay at their current level of progress or to industrialize and pollute to achieve enough progress to some day go green. I'm glad we went with the latter but maybe you disagree.

Absolutely speculative hogwash. Who says in this alternate universe that we couldn't have achieved greener energy earlier had we known how devastating fossil fuel use is?

That doesn't even matter slightly, since we cannot change the past to my knowledge. Your argument is literally academic, except not the good kind.

What matters now is what governments and people do now. The US is horrifically behind the curve, and Trump is actively destroying climate science on top of that.

"Science is a democrat thing" right?

At least let them do their jobs, and stop subsidising the oil industry to destroy the climate, the only one we have.

Trump doesn't like science. Science is incompatible with his pathological lying.

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rojimboo wrote:

Absolutely speculative hogwash. Who says in this alternate universe that we couldn't have achieved greener energy earlier had we known how devastating fossil fuel use is?

I told you what's necessary for that. Now you have to explain how you would build all the things I mentioned (and achieve the knowledge to build those things) without industrialization.

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rojimboo wrote:

That doesn't even matter slightly, since we cannot change the past to my knowledge.

That's why it doesn't make sense to blame the US for their cumulative carbon emissions since the 1850s (you know, the past). That's my point.

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rojimboo wrote:

What matters now is what governments and people do now.

Again, that's my point.

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rojimboo wrote:

"Science is a democrat thing" right?

Only fake science like gender studies.

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rojimboo wrote:

At least let them do their jobs, and stop subsidising the oil industry to destroy the climate, the only one we have.

Removing subsidies wouldn't do much.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25467

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Xavderion wrote:

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rojimboo wrote:

"Science is a democrat thing" right?

Only fake science like gender studies.

THat's not what Trump said.

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rojimboo wrote:

At least let them do their jobs, and stop subsidising the oil industry to destroy the climate, the only one we have.

Removing subsidies wouldn't do much.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25467

Do my eyes deceive me??

How on earth did you stumble onto a Nature paper?

Well, in any case, my surprise and amazement notwithstanding, here is the reply to that paper, also in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01495-3/

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The authors found that removing all fossil-fuel subsidies would have a limited impact on global energy demand by 2030 (a reduction of about 1–4%). In addition, the share of energy from renewable sources would rise by less than 2%, and global CO2 emissions would fall by only 1–4% (under both low and high oil prices). Consequently, in most regions, the CO2 reduction from subsidy reform would fall far short of what is needed to meet the Paris climate pledges (Fig. 1). The exceptions are regions such as Russia, the Middle East and North Africa, where subsidies are heavily concentrated and pledges are less ambitious.

A study2 in 2017 estimated that if fossil-fuel subsidies had been defined more broadly to reflect undercharging for environmental costs and general taxes, as well as production costs, these subsidies would have totalled $5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global gross domestic product). Furthermore, the study suggested that if prices had fully accounted for production costs, global and domestic environmental impacts and general taxes in 2013, global CO2 emissions would have been 21% lower than they were, air-pollution deaths associated with fossil fuels would have been 55% lower, and government revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product would have been 4% higher.

Jewell et al. 2018 neglected this, and showed what basically amounts to the lowest possible scenario where fossil fuel subsidies (in a very strict definition, neglecting other studies) would not be used pro-actively to diminish emissions.

I too was at first surprised at Jewell et al. paper's findings, how could hundreds of billions of dollars not be enough to even make a dent in emissions reductions??

Turns out they define subsidies differently, and some of their assumptions are chosen for the lowest case scenario.

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rojimboo wrote:

THat's not what Trump said.

What did Trump say?

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rojimboo wrote:

How on earth did you stumble onto a Nature paper?

Hey look, condescending rojimboo is back. Sadly you still can't back it up. For example, Charan at least sounds smart enough to be legit condescending. You don't so you should probably stop.

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rojimboo wrote:

paper stuff

That's a stupidly broad definition of subsidies. They're one step away from saying that because a government doesn't forbid fossil fuels by law, they're subsidising it. I'm sure most people don't agree with such a broad definition.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

This is the exact opposite of how this works. Like, literally exactly the opposite of how radicalization online works.
...
Please, if you don't know how radicalization works (and you don't), don't hold court on it.

We fundamentally disagree on the source of radicalization, which is not a big surprise.

Why would I believe that someone radical enough to suggest violence in the streets as a source of truth on the question? What radicalized you?

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rojimboo wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

Speech is not violence.

The law disagrees with you even in the US. EVer heard of call-to-action?

I don't think you understand the law.

Taking the most egregious example possible of neo-nazi rhetoric:
"All white people should kill all non-white people"

... is not a call to action, and has already been decided as free (protected) speech in US court. Short of saying that a specific person should do a specific act at a specific time, it's not a call to action.

When an imam stands up and says that the jews must be erased, that's also protected speech.

The reality is that words are infinitely preferable to violence, and that speech is separate from violence. As long as people are talking, even if it's just yelling at each other, nobody is getting hurt. As soon as punches start getting thrown, though, then it's just chaos.

I don't agree with ethnonats, but I don't think their ideas are "so good" that the only way to protect people is to shut up the ethnonats through violence. I think that most people can see what they're selling and refuse to buy it.

The white knights that think they're saving the world by punching nazis are just making it objectively worse. Just ignore them, like we had been doing successfully for decades with no issue. America is the least racist country in the world, and we were becoming less racist every day until intersectional politics came around and started shutting down speech and creating isolative bubbles.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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So it's completely bonkers to talk about incremental advantage built up over decades. There wasn't any

Two words: Vince Foster.

In the 2016 election, Trump had the advantage of 25 years of bullshit allegations targeting Hillary Clinton.

That's so stupid I can't stop laughing.

If Bernie Sanders would have won the primary, that wouldn't have mattered. If Martin O'Fucking-Malley had won the primary, that wouldn't have mattered. But here you go, accusing the buffoonish Republican party of advantage built up over years when Democrats pick literally the worst candidate they possibly could, someone who quite literally has decades of accumulated disadvantage, because … I don't know, maybe Dems thought they couldn't lose and it was "her turn?" The hubris!

If the Dems would have nominated Bernie, we'd have a President Sanders in the White House currently. Instead you went with the least electable woman in recent history and when she predictably loses you're like "Vince Foster." Yeah, no fucking shit Vince Foster, that's why you should have picked someone else.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

I think you're reading the "arsenic" bit too literally here. The point is that their ideas are bad.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

If the last decade hasn't shaken your faith that intelligence will consistently overcome stupidity, I think you haven't been paying attention. It can and will get worse if we don't fight it head-on. The adaption is antifascism. It's recognizing that no amount of debate or new information is going to convince someone who has made millions of dollars pushing conspiracy theories to stop pushing conspiracy theories, and that the only reasonable response is to get that guy's bullshit off the marketplace of ideas. It's recognizing the threat fascists pose and taking it seriously. It's punching a nazi so hard and so often that he no longer wants to be a nazi (in public anyways). It's actually enforcing community norms, doxxing the shitheads carrying nazi flags at Charlottesville, and making it clear that you can't be a part-time nazi - if you're a nazi online, if you're a nazi at rallies, you'd better damn well be ready to be a nazi in your day job, and deal with the consequences of that.

This is COMPLETELY out of touch. None of the top 10 problems facing Americans or the world are fascism or are caused by fascism. Racism and sexism aren't top 10 problems either. Only a tiny number of people are involved in this white supremacist communities. Yet you sound like you are willing to implement dictatorship if it will ensure a world where they don't exist. The cure would be worse than the disease.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

the case for nazi-punching (and direct antifascist action in general) boils down to the fact that Nazi speech inevitably has violence as an end goal.

This is obviously false. People don't become activists for causes simply to commit violence; they believe that their cause will protect people, and that punching a few people is a small price to pay for that. In other words, the speech you are making now is no less inherently violent in its goals than the people you're targeting.

A sane and thoughtful message regarding UK elections (3 minutes)

Blaming the US exclusively for their carbon footprint is silly. Yes, they contributed the most to CO2 emissions but as Xav said (it feel weird saying that), the technological advancement wouldn't be anywhere as close to what we have right now without the industrial revolution. In a situation where fossil fuels were somehow never discovered, we might still have electricity but we wouldn't have means of mass transport. Boats would still be using wind as their main propulsion, planes wouldn't exist, trains wouldn't have been able to cover large distance (wood burning is much less efficient than coal). Cars wouldn't be a thing.

So, compared to what we have now, we'd be lagging behind by maybe a century in term of progress.

Of course, that is just speculation and isn't really worth debating. The only point I'm really trying to say is that the discovery of fossil fuel was largely beneficial. The problem is that we didn't move on the next thing after discovering the very negatives effects it has (both on humans and on nature/climate).


And here's where the real blame goes. Those oil/coal lobbies that shut down alternative sources of energy because they didn't want to lose their grip on the huge energy reserve that represent oil, coal and natural gas. Moving on from those sources of energy while they still have huge reserves means money loss, which is unfathomable for a corporation, even if it means the whole world burns for it.

Many others are also to blame when it comes to power generation. China is currently a big culprit with its 2300~ coal plants while alternative sources exist is also to blame. Any country that is building/encouraging fossil fuel power plant is to blame.


Trump is also to blame as he's literally bringing back the US multiple decades prior with his completely insane stance on climate change and how coal is clean while wind turbine somehow cause cancer.... Thankfully, some states aren't crazy enough to buy his bullshit but still, his damage will last for a few decades in certain states...