Carbon emission reduction: News and technology

[JimC]

This thread has become more of a Brian vs mac thing. Boring.

[Brian Peacock]

I like to have my views challenged - because I have to defend them to teachers, heads, students and their parents. So I'm just trying to encourage mac to challenge these perspectives with something other than declarative assertions.

[Brian Peacock]

Economic assumptions prioritise the profits of emitters over the viability of the biosphere for long term ecological health. This is never more obvious than the fossil lobby being able to give $1bn to the Trump campaign, and by that secure the c.$700bn pa the fossil sector receives in govt subsidies tax breaks, and deferred costs.

Democrats and climate groups ‘too polite’ in fight against ‘malevolent’ fossil fuel giants, says key senator

The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation”, the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview on Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by the burning of fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”

...

While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil”, he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts – if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.”

...

Long before Donald Trump reportedly told oil company CEOs he would repeal Joe Biden’s climate policies if they contributed $1bn to his 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans went silent on climate change in return for oil industry money, Whitehouse asserted. The key shift came after the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on campaign spending. Before that, some GOP senators had sponsored climate bills, and John McCain urged climate action during his 2008 presidential campaign.

But Citizens United, Whitehouse said, “told the fossil fuel industry: ‘The door’s wide open – spend any money you want in our elections’”. The industry, he said, promised the Republican party “unlimited amounts of money” in return for stepping away from bipartisan climate action: “And since 2010, there has not been a single serious bipartisan measure in the Senate.”

Whitehouse said that after delivering 300 climate speeches on the Senate floor, he has learned to shift from talking about the “facts of climate science and the effects on human beings to calling out the fossil fuels’ massive climate-denial operation”.

He said: “Turns out, none of [the science] really matters while the operation is controlling things in Congress. I could take facts from colleagues’ home states right to them, and it would make no difference because of this enormous, multibillion-dollar political club that can [punish] anyone who crosses them.”...

[pErvinalia]

Whitehouse for the White House!

[pErvinalia]

This thread has become more of a Brian vs mac thing. Boring.

They at least come at each other with information and facts. I get something out of it.

[macdoc]

Except Brian complains without providing realistic solutions.....yes boring.