quote:

Originally posted by TomP:

quote:

Originally posted by Magine Enigam:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone...20a39e7f5114ef2&ei=9

California Sues Oil Giants, Claiming Decades of Deception
Story by David Gelles •
19h

Sigh...a grain of truth, but a dollop of nonsense. I idly wonder how much taxes are paid from oil money, and how Newsom plans to replace them.

A thorough audit would undoubtedly show that California taxpayers spend far more trying to repair the damage done than the State receives in tax revenue, but to a Republican that doesn't matter.

The only true evil is taxes, the only true good is greed.

quote:

Originally posted by Jefffive:

quote:

Originally posted by TomP:

quote:

Originally posted by Magine Enigam:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone...20a39e7f5114ef2&ei=9

California Sues Oil Giants, Claiming Decades of Deception
Story by David Gelles •
19h

Sigh...a grain of truth, but a dollop of nonsense. I idly wonder how much taxes are paid from oil money, and how Newsom plans to replace them.

A thorough audit would undoubtedly show that California taxpayers spend far more trying to repair the damage done than the State receives in tax revenue, but to a Republican that doesn't matter.

The only true evil is taxes, the only true good is greed.

Yeah, "repair the damage done"

You cannot deny the fact that the products we get from the evil oil industry are the greatest contributor to the nation's economic success.
All tax revenue is reliant, to one extent or another, on the oil industry.

Just try to run any business venture or produce and deliver a product without the oil industry.
It's impossible.

quote:

Originally posted by Jefffive:

A thorough audit would undoubtedly show that California taxpayers spend far more trying to repair the damage done than the State receives in tax revenue, but to a Republican that doesn't matter.

The only true evil is taxes, the only true good is greed.

Let's address actual FACTS first - The tax on gas (this is the only direct tax that MIGHT be going to "repair the damage done" actually goes to (drumroll)

quote:

Use fuel taxes provide revenue for planning, constructing and maintaining California's publicly funded roadways and public mass transit systems.

source? oh, that little nagging thing? https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes...ees/use-fuel-tax.htm

Next fact -- man, it's just weird - "repairing the damage", by which i assume should read, in government-tese as to something like environmental remediations
Let see - the top categories of california state budget-- oh, where am i making this up from -- just https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24EN/#/Home
Education - nope, no environmental remediations
Health and Human Services? nope, no environmental remediations
Higher Education? nope, no environmental remediations
Corrections? dang, not again, nope, no environmental remediations
"Other" lots of sins in others Let's dig into that
1.7% of all of cali's budget goes into environment -- but don't let that give you false hope - https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24EN/#/Agency/3890
"Environmental Health Hazard (the closest i could find to remediations) $35 million- less than $1 per LEGAL resident of cali -- wow, what a HUGE investment

Now, as to your audit bet - they spend 35M in remediations - while receiving, in a single line item of the budget, over 58 millions dollars, from the Fed, for ems authority https://ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2023-24EN/#/Agency/4000

to help you read this complex document (it's more than the 27 words of the 2a which seems to give you some trouble) it lays out State funds, and the next column is total with federal dollars -

Jeff, you knowledge of Texas is only surpassed by your knowledge of Cali -- both are PROUNDLY amazing

Let's see -- largest sectors of Cal economy (and thereby taxes)
Trade -- yep, oil and gas are the drivers for this industry
Tech - yeah, find a computer without plastic (you know that plastic is made from oil and gas, right?)
Farming - say, were you the one that informed us that corporate farming was a leading cause of climate change (if you weren't, you should read that post, it's hysterical)
Banking - see tech, as the whole tellers counting cash in a stone building with no AC is so 19th century
Gas cars - okay, you might be right on this one, given the amount of state tax paid on every gallon of gas and diesel -- oh, who am I kidding, the gas price is so high because there's FOUR refineries that can produce the cali required blend, 2 in cali, two in Texas -- neither one of the ones in cali can cover for the other during turnarounds -- if you don't know what a turnaround in a refinery is, you should defiantly (but you will) never post about Texas again.. like, ever
Tourism - sure- all the tourist aren't taking oil and gas powered transportation to cali - not a jet, car, or train, nope not one
Computers and AC required to perform the audit -- uhmmm, i added this one for fun, but I am LOL on it..

Dang, man, it looks like Cali's entire economy is based on oil and gas -- In fact, they are only slightly behind Alaska in O&G production

Yes sir, I bow in the dust at your PROFOUND knowledge of Cali and Texas - what you know is simply amazing and dumbfounding - you are truly a font

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...c6189a8dfe8da5&ei=74

New Orleans issues emergency declaration amid possible water crisis
2h

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...c6189a8dfe8da5&ei=69

Army Corps of Engineers to barge 36 million gallons of freshwater a day as saltwater intrusion threatens New Orleans-area drinking water
Story by By Jamiel Lynch and Rachel Ramirez, CNN • 17h

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...6189a8dfe8da5&ei=131

Saltwater pushing into Mississippi River could compromise Louisiana drinking water
Story by Tara Suter • 6h

Here's a question for you all. Do you think GMO'ed foods cause or contribute to climate change as well?

https://www.facebook.com/reel/326688686465363

This whole GW is utter bullshit…period
Anytime someone starts talking about it around me in person, I simply tell them go to hell

I know of some wonderful ocean-front property near New Orleans which I'm sure you can make a good deal with the seller.

quote:

Originally posted by Aspen Hill Adventures:
Here's a question for you all. Do you think GMO'ed foods cause or contribute to climate change as well?

https://www.facebook.com/reel/326688686465363

I don't know offhand how that would make the situation worse but they'll be largely useless after industrial agriculture collapses, what folks trying to feed their families and maybe some neighbors will need are seeds from heirloom varieties with a lot more genetic diversity than Frankenseed so they have a shot at identifying a variety that can finish a crop in whatever the new growing season is in their area.

Unfortunately, many heirloom varieties that might offer drought resistance or be better able to handle an early frost just before harvest are either gone or not widely available.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...fptaskbarhover&ei=67

Louisiana Gov to Ask for Federal Emergency Declaration After Contamination of Drinking Water
Story by Jack Davis • 44m

quote:

Unfortunately, many heirloom varieties that might offer drought resistance or be better able to handle an early frost just before harvest are either gone or not widely available.

In some cases, plants are being created that do not have viable seeds. This should be illegal.

quote:

Originally posted by Aspen Hill Adventures:

quote:

Unfortunately, many heirloom varieties that might offer drought resistance or be better able to handle an early frost just before harvest are either gone or not widely available.

In some cases, plants are being created that do not have viable seeds. This should be illegal.

They are only borderline "plants", completely useless outside VERY narrow controlled conditions, the exact opposite of what will likely soon be needed.

Once upon a time, every other farmer or rancher raised horses for transportation
Then automobiles came and now only handful of manufacturers make them
What would we do without them?
So eventually we will rely on few food and crop manufacturers to supply us with food like it or not…

Genetic modification is one of the things that offers shorter growing seasons.

Hybridization is a form of genetic modification.

I don’t disagree that we need to keep heirloom genetics around, but GMO’s are hardly a generic threat to health.

As far as sterile seeds- seedless grapes? Etc.

From my end, a bigger issue is the one sided contracts the big seed producers force on farmers.

GMO cow farts. That needs regulation.

quote:

Originally posted by crbutler:
Genetic modification is one of the things that offers shorter growing seasons.

Hybridization is a form of genetic modification.

I don’t disagree that we need to keep heirloom genetics around, but GMO’s are hardly a generic threat to health.

As far as sterile seeds- seedless grapes? Etc.

From my end, a bigger issue is the one sided contracts the big seed producers force on farmers.

Did you know if your vineyard has seeded, normal grapes, the 'seedless' varieties will produce seeds? Nature seems to find a way.

The difference between traditional hybridization and 'modern methods' is that cross breeding is vastly different than gene splicing. Our typical food plants and livestock species have all been bred to be what they are in a natural sense by selective breeding.

Gene splicing is new territory and quite interesting but the potential for dangerous outcomes is very possible with this situation. I say proceed with caution but, since it is humans in control, that likely won't happen.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/vide...cid=socialshare&t=11

Climate science becoming 'matter of belief' warns French expert

"Science is becoming a matter of belief, opinion and even ideology" says Francois Gemenne, political scientist and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "I see the Republican candidates in the United States who don't accept the scientific reality of climate change" he adds, speaking during an interview with AFP. Gemenne worries that if "science and fact become a matter of belief... we can't move forward in a democracy."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...4fb34e1041852e&ei=32

If we can't fix this "frightening" problem, then we have "no hope" of addressing the climate crisis
Story by Matthew Rozsa • 3h


(excerpts of the interview with)
One of the world's most prominent advocates for taking action to halt human-caused climate change is Dr. Michael E. Mann, climatologist and geophysicist, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania.

(Interviewer in bold. Italics for emphasis)

You mentioned in your book there is a tendency on the part of the media to promote a somewhat alarmist approach to climate change, and that this seems to be derived from, if not scientific illiteracy, at least a lack of familiarity with the complexities of climate science. What are some solutions to this so that the media can balance emphasizing the reality of human-caused climate change with explaining the nuances of science?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's something we all struggle with: Journalists struggle with it, scientists struggle with it. How do we characterize this in a way that best frames what we know from the science? It's a challenge for all of us. I wouldn't want to imply that it's the media's fault or something. We all struggle with how to take complex science and the nuances and the message.

And this is true for press offices at universities and the press releases that they write, which all sort of emphasize about the given study, how much it adds to our understanding, and how there's a tendency to imply that it completely changes our way of understanding the world. Yet scientific understanding doesn't work that way. I talk about some examples in the book that there are paradigm-breaking developments: Plate tectonics was one of them, chaos theory is another and we can go on.

But, by and large, the evolution of science occurs through incremental increases in our knowledge that don't radically change our understanding but fine-tune it, and so that's the struggle. I think that's the challenge: How do we solve that problem? I think you and I are a good example. You've got journalists and scientists who develop close working relationships.

I agree. I now think it's important to look at the other side of the coin, which is how climate change deniers weaponize the virtue of scientific uncertainty to advocate inaction. I think it's important that — I like how you detailed this in your book — to define what real skepticism is versus what I would call faux skepticism.

Skepticism is a good thing in science, but there are a lot of bad-faith efforts to distort and impair understanding — and that's not skepticism. I think, for too long, we allowed climate deniers and contrarians and critics to sort of frame themselves as skeptics in the mantle of Galileo. It's anything but skepticism.

When you're rejecting the evidence based on the flimsiest of arguments that don't hold any water at all, that's not skepticism. It's agenda-driven anti-science — and that's what we're dealing with today. And, of course, I don't see how you and I can have this conversation today without talking about what transpired last night [the first 2024 Republican presidential debate], where one of the two major parties made it crystal clear that yes, their official stance is that humans are not warming the planet. That is so frightening. It just drives home how this debate is no longer based on like good-faith differing, good-faith differences and interpretation of the evidence. It's based on rejection of the evidence. That's what we're dealing with today.

To use your Galileo analogy: I would argue that the elegance of that analogy is that Galileo created a telescope, and the church literally refused to look through his telescope. The deniers would be cast in the role of the Catholic Church at that time because they had a figurative telescope, and they were refusing to look through it.

Yes, I think that's exactly right, and there are other layers of absurdity to that framing, as well. Galileo was actually a mainstream scientist. He was the chair of his department. He contributed to the peer-reviewed literature. So, he was anything but a maverick sitting on the sidelines throwing potshots at the scientific establishment, which is the way that these wannabe Galileos would frame themselves.

What we're really talking about is partisanship, tribalism, people thinking in terms of politics as a team sport rather than finding the truth. In contrast, when I was reading "Our Fragile Moment," I was thinking of the cumulatively hundreds of years of detailed and meticulous scientific research that went into acquiring all of this information. Can you explain what the actual legitimate process of scientific research looks like?

I think that's a great way of framing it, and I think there is some irony, particularly when it comes to this book because I'm presenting billions of years. It's a Carl Sagan, "billions of years" of information, of data, of evidence. And we have people last night who are literally rejecting billions of years of evidence.

The key lessons that Earth history has to offer us from the earliest beginnings of our planet, it's jarring. We really are taking this very long-term perspective, this deep dive. And I document it meticulously with references to the scientific literature and try to break it down in ways that people can understand.

And, yet, one of our two major parties now will a priori reject whatever it is I have to say or show in this book. In chapter four, I go on this diversion, and there's some popular culture references. You and I both are movie buffs, and I think we've even talked about dystopian 1960s, '70s films and the role that they played. "Planet of the Apes" was one of those dystopian films. It's mentioned in the book, and that's what we were dealing with, where the apes were covering up the evidence as best they could that apes had descended from humans. The levels of irony to that are just remarkable. That's where we are today. That's where we are.

We've discussed "Soylent Green," and I've said that that movie was remarkably prescient, especially in determining the deterioration of culture. I feel like there's a cynicism — you use the word venal — because there's a sort of very detached, almost nihilistic perspective that I feel has entered our culture. To me, if you're arguing that "Maybe the earth is heating, but even if it is, I don't want to look at whether it's caused by people and prefer to just let it happen so that I don't have to deal with it" — that is beyond just being stubborn. Nihilism seems to be at play.

Yes, I think it is nihilism. I think it's bad faith. It's tribalistic. It's a refusal to even look at what the evidence is. We have one of our two major parties whose very platform involves the rejection of scientific evidence, whether it's the rejection of the health crisis we have faced in recent years in the form of the pandemic and the solutions to that crisis or the rejection of the even greater crisis that is looming in the background — the climate crisis.

I think you put your finger on it — and that's what's so frightening here. It's the rejection of evidence, of reality. And, once we lose that, we are truly lost. And, if we can't fix it — the fundamental problems we have right now with our democracy and the nature of our public discourse and our political discourse — we have no hope of addressing the climate crisis.

I want to go back to Carl Sagan, who you mentioned a moment ago. Can you elaborate on the connection between the efforts to discredit Sagan's discoveries about nuclear winter in the 1980s and climate change denialism today? Also, right now, thanks to the movie "Oppenheimer," nuclear war is very much part of the zeitgeist.

I allude in the book to the fact that Putin's threat to use tactical nuclear weapons in the current conflict [in Ukraine] — we've not gotten past that crisis. It suddenly becomes far more salient, I think, looking back at the nuclear winter debate and the lessons that it offers us for today. There are all sorts of remarkable parallels and connections, which I struggled to outline in a way that was coherent because there are just so many interesting threads that connect them.

One of them, of course, is just that [Sagan's warning] was about climate change. Fundamentally, nuclear winter was about a global cooling episode, and it was based on climate model simulations. And a group arose — now these groups are called dark money groups — but this was an industry-funded front group, the George Marshall Institute that came into being because the military-industrial complex saw Sagan's messaging on the threat of nuclear winter as a threat to them.

And just like the fossil fuel industry, they hired scientists to act as attack dogs on their behalf. And so you had scientists who were basically paid to try to discredit Carl Sagan, and one of the avenues they took was to try to discredit climate models. So, what's ironic is that, of course, the George Marshall Institute in later years would remake itself as a climate denial group.

But they started out as sort of a Cold War-promoting interest group that was working for the military-industrial complex. As that became less of an issue with [Soviet Union President Mikhail] Gorbachev and [American President Ronald] Reagan signing on to peace agreements, that sort of went on to the back burner. The George Marshall Institute needed another issue, and then, of course, the fossil fuel industry was more than happy to have them go down that thread of discrediting climate models because that would become ever more important in the context of the even greater debate over climate change and fossil fuel burning.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weat...42fa388f2d6aa6&ei=21

Half-Million People at Risk After Huge Amounts of Fish Die in River
Story by Anna Skinner •
1h

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...41feb2d7e76d12&ei=84

UAE's president-designate for UN COP28 offers full-throated defense of nation hosting climate talks
Story by By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press • 5h

Pushing 80 degrees in the foothills of the Alps high 9k plus above sea level

Yes, it can have a direct impact on the locals. The snow and rain on the high peak is how they outing drinking water. Hot and dry weather creates water issues.

It was also this hot the last time I went in 2017.

quote:

Originally posted by Aspen Hill Adventures:

quote:

Unfortunately, many heirloom varieties that might offer drought resistance or be better able to handle an early frost just before harvest are either gone or not widely available.

In some cases, plants are being created that do not have viable seeds. This should be illegal.

People prefer fruits and veg without seeds and pits.