I moved to slightly outside of Beijing in 1999 and it was already a polluted dump. Much like the previous post I described. The repercussions were well apparent and it got worse during my stay there. It's gotten even worse since I've left. You're better off smoking two packs of marlboro reds a day than living in the city. You really have to experience it first hand to get a grasp on how bad it is. This is where the way the media keeps talking about how great China has been doing irks me. Take this recent article. Very positive towards their contributions and while I think you could at least make a debatable argument about their future given their investments the portrayal is nuts. The article admits they're killing over a million a year and can't stop talking about what wonderful accomplishments they're achieving. For reference that's 3x the total number dead in the entire Syrian civil war. Every year. Just from the air pollution, not including things like the people who die from things like skin diseases from coming into contact with their polluted rivers. How do you kill 20 million+ over the last 20 years from just one type of pollution and do way better than everyone else combined? Ummm, no they didn't. Sure, there's some prospective hope for the future, and it is at least more encouraging than what they've been doing, but the idea that they're poised to become some model for the world is kind of nuts to me. Also, China is set to increase emissions until 2030 and then they'll 'peak' and reduce total output. I hate Trump on climate change issues and the republicans in general, but they're not wrong that this was a ridiculous deal that put an undue burden on the US relative to others with very questionable commitments from other nations. It would be better that we signed it (imo) but the EU are acting like shit heads being so unwilling to renegotiate it whatsoever.
But that's exactly the point...they are in a sweet spot: still developing, so they can re-sell it (and steal what tech they need), their expanding middle class can finance it, and they can use it in trade with the nations that have the raw materials they need (which is why they are so keenly interested in Africa, for example). They aren't doing this to blow a Lorax, they are doing it because it is vital to the growth of their economy, a principle which the US understood decades ago, but hasn't really gotten behind yet. No one is saying China will be pollution free, what we are saying is they are leading the world in renewable energy manufacturing.
I think this quote is quite emblematic of the Republican Problem we have right now. When faced with disagreement not only from the majority of Americans, but from the entire rest of the world, the Republican response involves no introspection, no reexamination, no notion of how conservative principles could be brought to bear on a problem identified by others, just a shrug of the shoulders and a Seymour Skinner-esque "No, it is the rest of the world that is wrong." They have no identity outside of opposing some nebulously defined "left."
Never mind the fact that the head of the EPA today said that they really don't have to worry about it because they were making huge advances in technology, like horizontal drilling and fracking. I was watching the press conference live and had to do a serious double take when he said that. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but not much.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out because there's actually been a large recent shift among conservatives who are starting to accept that climate change isn't myth. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/many-more-republicans-now-believe-in-climate-change/ I think this is an issue that might really hurt the republicans at the midterms and beyond, probably more so than all the other topics that get swirled around like the Muslim ban, the wall, abortion, etc. The mainstream republican stance is becoming increasingly untenable as opposed to other issues which are still mostly divided along party lines. Just throwing that out there as kind of a silver lining. The republicans have a lot of control over fed/state government right now, but they're going to be fucked if they don't start to shift on this issue.
Tell me something: what is it that THEY know that the entire rest of world doesn't know? Do they honestly know how monumentally stupid we think they are when they spew this bullshit? Did James Inhoff bring another snowball into Congress to checkmate the science community again? These corrupt fucks will say anything to keep their pockets lined. America definetly has a sense of humour to a have stupid person as both the president AND Vice President, what a perfect storm. Every time they try to keep their head above water for as much as 30 seconds, here comes the tide.
Could someone give me a Cliff's notes version of the whole global warming thing? I really haven't looked into it because we have about 150 years of records for a planet that's millions of years old. That's a fraction of a percent. The fossil record shows that the Earth has gone through many warming/cooling cycles in the past and a natural assumption is it's going to continue to do so. It wasn't that long ago that scientists were screaming that we're all going to burn up because of hairspray making a hole in the ozone. Scientist also told us Kohoutek was going to be the most amazing thing we've ever seen. I don't have a lot of faith in scientist and their doomsday scenarios.
So you can dismiss it outright as a "doomsday scenario"? Maybe it doesn't matter to you - you'll be dead soon - but I don't really want my kid having to live in a situation where the polar ice caps have completely melted, the sea levels rise exponentially and force an already-crowded population into a fraction of the land mass - and available resources - that they currently occupy. But that's cool. You want a cliff notes version. Let me get right on that. Not like you also have access to an internet. Please, allow me to get right fucking on that.
Not even just global climate change, but how about the immediate effect of pollution that is not really monitored well and therefore mostly ignored? I am very concerned about the flippant disregard for basic things like water safety. There are a lot of chemical factories and related industry up the Mobile River. Back in the 1990s, there were 53 smokestacks near/in downtown Mobile releasing huge amounts of pollution into the air, including pollutants that are directly linked to cancer and reproductive problems. Most of the pollution follows the water tides, and if you look at a map that means it hits the Eastern Shore of the bay and settles into their groundwater (same as if you look up a map of "bad bacteria" days for the beach....Eastern Shore is always 75% worse). There is, currently, an unusual occurrence of very rare cancers in Baldwin Co. including sarcomas and leukemia's. Several young girls under the age of 4 had rare forms of cervical cancer. It's in the ground water, which is used for drinking water. And at this point, when they say "It's been cleaned up now for 2 years!" I don't fucking believe them. This shit has been going on for a long time. My dad is from a small town in Northern Mobile Co. and spent his childhood roaming the woods and swamps to hunt. He has a couple stories of looking around and seeing THOUSANDS of fish all around him, dead on the surface of the water. For reference, he turns 70 this summer and has been hunting since age 9. This is directly related to the plants that have been up those waterways for decades. In my opinion, THIS is the stuff the government needs to be involved in. Instead they give incentives for these businesses to come in. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul. I am all for industry, and progress, and advancing....but at what cost? If you ruin the world and therefore people's health, what good was it really? And let's not mention that the people getting sick rarely have any recourse. It's heartbreaking to me. I love this place I grew up but I can't imagine staying here and raising kids here, this being one of a few reasons.
So. Yes. The earth rolls through cycles. We know that. http://www.explainthatstuff.com/globalwarmingforkids.html http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-simplest-explanation-of-climate-change-youl-1566494748 http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/12/15/251437395/global-warming-explained-in-about-a-minute https://climatekids.nasa.gov/climate-change-meaning/ Aside from the idea of climate change. What fucking happened to taking care of our house? We get ONE PLANET. None of us is going to live long enough to see us find another planet to colonize. None of us will live long enough, nor will our children or grandchildren, to see space travel advance to where even if we DID find another planet we could get there. I don't let people smoke in my house. It fucking stinks. Why in Odin's beard would I think it's a better idea to pollute the goddamn air we breath? There is NO sound argument against conservation, clean water, and clean air. None. Not one. Money? Oh fuck off. We've figured out how to make money off of scraps of yarn and painted rocks. We've figured out how to make money off the most ridiculous, superficial shit one can possibly conceive. We can certainly figure out how to monetize taking care of the ONE FUCKING HOME we get. This rock we're all riding on is allowing us to live here. Mother Earth can and will take care of herself and if we don't cut our shit, she's going to eradicate us like the parasitic growths we are and start all over.
There are no scientists who cooked up this scenario so they could become billionaire, playboy scientists. In over 77,000 studies on climate change THREE came back negative, and two of those three returns were done by scientists employed by car companies. This is sort of like the autism/vaccine argument where you're just automatically an idiot for taking the other side. If anybody wants to know where we're heading, look at the hell that is the surface of the planet Venus: corrosive rains, violent storms, winds that will shred any structure. Simply put the planet is a greenhouse effect gone berzerk, something we are fully capable of creating ourselves right now. Hell, we're not just creating it..... We're in the final stages of completion. The question isn't can we save the earth, it's honestly quite fucked. The question is can we make it last even another 100 years. I don't think we can. The human race does NOT care about itself enough to save itself, that why is CHOOSES to deny this, even with the full knowledge of how horrible polluting at a catastrophic scale is.
Think about this simply: everything we do to survive, we burn something. We burn fuel to travel, we burn things to cook, we burn things to stay warm, we burn things for fun. With 7 billion of us burning shit every day, for hundreds of years, on a scale at which few other natural phenomenon have ever occurred...it makes sense, right? That heat doesn't just cease to exist, the smoke doesn't just fade out into space. There's a lot to the science, and to some extent there's room for error. But the hottest years on record have somehow all occurred in the past two decades. Given your average lifespan of 60-80 years, that should be important to you. And the why people deny this is easy: it's a seemingly huge problem that directly conflicts with massive, possibly the most massive industries on the globe. Not a lot of entities have gone up against Big Oil and won...from public transportation, to Islam, to the Gulf disaster....it all tends to work out in the favor of the entrenched industry. I don't believe we're fucked. I do believe we need actual fucking leadership capable of making tough calls and enforcing them. One of said tough calls being "Hey, this shit is real, it's a danger and we need to start acting against it. Not the current band of lip service with no financial or resources (see the Paris Agreement's lack of enforcement) or our administration's equivalent of an ostrich burying it's head, proclaiming "Burn baby burn!".
Why does every single thing ever have to have an extra head-shaking twist these days? Like, this person's name couldn't possibly be Helen Smith - of course her name is Reality Winner. http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/05/politics/federal-contractor-leak-prosecution/index.html I will not even be surprised to see someone running for office in the next cycle whose name is Nexx Prezuhdint.
Yeah, how the hell you even get a government job with a name like "Reality Winner" is fucking beyond me. That is some Rick and Morty shit.
And, it wasn't even a government job, like greeter at the Lincoln Memorial - it was someone with access to Classified documents. (And, I guess she actually worked for the private contractor, not the government, per se, after her time in the Air Force, but still.)