Climate Change? Nahhh ...

I think that's what's called a strawman.

God I hope the apocalypse is as nice as San Francisco.

 

I think San Francisco, and probably Los Angeles as well, is like an actress who was an absolute bombshell 20 or 30 years ago but then ruined themselves through drug use and excessive plastic surgery. They have a natural beauty that you can still see peeking through, but their bad choices are also obvious. Remembering what they used to be, and realizing that's how they still see themselves, it makes you sad.
But that's just the view from a flyover state.

 

I prefer it that way. Less traffic.

 

Their finality is not why we're doing this. If it were, we'd more greatly consider nuclear power.

We're doing this:

A. Because the world will end, we are told, if we don't

B. Wind/solar are the moral solutions favored by world leaders and businesses

 

San Francisco and LA have problems of a big city where the general cost to do anything is high. We could cut all taxes, get government out of the way and it wouldn’t help. Tech is pricing people out of SF. LA has a similar problem. You could suggest it’s not incarcerating for minor crimes, but then CA would be nothing but prisons for drug users and mentally challenged homeless. The biggest homeless problems are areas where we don’t have enough affordable housing and don’t have enough resources for temp measures.

San Diego and San Jose just gutted funding for long term housing to do temporary measures. People are clamoring for solutions and local governments are feeling the pressure to do something.

It’s a bigger problem than policies. Policies that have little to do with preventing solar which isn’t being prevented.

 

Both things can be - and are - true.

I agree we need to revisit nuclear power, but we also have to reinvent nuclear power. [Fukushima .GIF goes here]

I'm not sure you dubbing these things "moral solutions" make them so.

But if we want to impute morality to energy production and petropolitics, we've certainly done a lot of terrible fucking things over the years to keep the oil flowing, haven't we?

 

we’ve done a lot of terrible things in general. We’re human. That’s kind of what we do.

 

Environmentalists: World will end because of climate change

Evangelicals: World is going to end because Jesus and his second coming (Trump)

We agree on the end destination, can’t we find a middle ground?

 

Not until someone finds the Planet Earth Owner's Manual that says the average temperature of the Earth must be kept at a constant 57 degrees.

 

The problem with nuclear that needs to be solved before people are going to be comfortable with it is what to do with spent fuel rods and nuclear waste. That stuff will still be radioactive enough to kill you 10,000 years from now. There is around 88,000 metric tons (that's 193,600,000 lbs) of it in the U.S. alone, spread out over 35 states. There is no permanent storage for it. For instance, the Hanford Nuclear plant in Oregon has about 55 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid, mostly water used with plutonium. Where is is going to go, other than into the ground water eventually?

Solve that problem and you'll find that position much more tenable, because until you do it's a megadisaster waiting to happen.

Congress passed the Yucca Flats storage facility in 2002. It's gone nowhere because people who live near it want to know that it's actually safe, because if it fails there will be gawdawful consequences to them and their children. Note: Humans most affected by exposure to radioactivity are the fetus in pregnant women and children, because it does the most damage to developing, growing cells, and that's what makes up children. edit Add that the other most easily damaged cells are the red blood cells manufactured in the bone marrow, that's where it hits adults hardest, that and the current sperm cells in men at the time they are exposed.

Would you live near such a site and risk your children, Alma?

Do you even have children, I wonder, because when you talk about climate change you never seem to have any focus on the future, only the immediate difficulty and expense in starting to act in any way to prevent or mitigate it.

 

If I can get somewhere without getting on an interstate and there isn't a significant time difference, I will, to quote the band from Spartanburg ... "Take the Highway."