311–320 of 332 posts
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Ah, that makes sense, thanks. $0.07/kWh still sounds great, we're blasting past 0.30€, subsidizing wind farms is pricy.
Subsidizing heavy industry is expensive. I assume you're German. https://youtu.be/YkA65vpeA5g
That too, yeah. Though they are primarily subsidized by not paying taxes on energy, they're not paying negative prizes (yet).
I'm reminded of Feynman's famous anecdote about the Millikan oil drop experiment: Millikan underestimated the charge of the electron, and over the ensuing years, subsequent measurements slowly but surely converged on the correct value. Why? Because experimenters who got the correct value figured it must be too high, and ran the experiment again until they got a more-erroneous value, one that was nonetheless higher. E…
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I question a lot the models as well. I think pollution is a big problem in general, but CO2 is totally the wrong focus; like focusing on the sniffles and ignoring the flu. The real issue is consumerism and consumption. We cannot buy our way out of environmental disaster, but the CO2 camp is trying to offer that option: buy green, electric cars, etc. In realize, we need fewer cars, more trains, better transport option…
No, there's no debate in science this reality. You are just anti-science.
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> Total War economy/society > quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing. The impact on quality of life and society would be "astonishing," but they won't be improvements. The Soviets and Chinese tried similar "mobilization[s]" for food production. The idea was to direct society's efforts to producing enough food for everybody. Tens of millions…
Thanks for the straw man. American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people - that's not an intrinsic attribute of a country focusing on something. Think also new deal / public works projects like the Hoover Dam (many died working on the Dam but not because it was a government mobilization project). Just the government spending a bunch of money on environmentally focused projects could happen and could be good…
America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount every year, and lasting for decades [2].
It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come.
The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation.
In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to modern military spending is actually quite appropriate.
1 - https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
2 - https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-polli...
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this is textbook middlebrow contrarianism. using some quote from some recognizable name to dismiss the incredible work of dozens of top of their field professionals doing their life's work. its a perfect example of the way hacker news "types" do climate change denial. via endless "well-actuallys" until you're lost and stuck in a level of analysis-paralysis that borders on an anxiety disorder. the problem with solving…
Pointing out that climate models are predictions is not the problem. The models are in fact predictions and they accumulate errors the further out they project. That's just the reality. The problem is pretending otherwise. That muddies the waters and literally fuels and strengthens climate change deniers as it gives them a leg to stand on. Remove that leg. We need to make it harder to dismiss, which can be better acc…
It's disheartening to read some of the comments here. Scientists are basically saying "we're not sure if it's going to be a disaster or a catastrophe", and some folk's response seems to be "see! scientists don't know! why should we listen to them?"
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> Total War economy/society > quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing. The impact on quality of life and society would be "astonishing," but they won't be improvements. The Soviets and Chinese tried similar "mobilization[s]" for food production. The idea was to direct society's efforts to producing enough food for everybody. Tens of millions…
You’re referencing The Great Leap forward right? Because if so you’re completely ignoring the details in an attempt to use it to bolster your point. The reason tons of people died in The Great Leap Forward has nothing to do with food production per se. Rather, the Chinese government declared several animals to be pests and commanded everyone to eradicate them to protect the harvest. Among those animals were sparrows.…
The Four Pests Campaign is a great example of humans suffering the unintended consequences of their own stupidity and hubris. However the Great Famine had many proximal causes, and there is no evidence that simply sparing the sparrows could have prevented it.
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No, there's no debate in science this reality. You are just anti-science.
ah yes, that anti-science. I have four publications in Geography journals and hold a BS and MS in CompSci. Your "Science" is a religious ideology of its own.
Just a question, does the temperature of the core of the earth have any influence?