Planetary Apocalypse Now!
Trump's victory in the U.S. election causes panic in the climate and environment world.
“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you, you still have chaos in yourselves.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Enjoy your last turkey in three weeks. Then put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.
Trump’s second term as President is ending life on planet earth as we know it.
Haven’t visited Glacier National Park? Do it before the third week in January. By February, the glaciers will all be gone.
Thinking of having kids? Don’t. They’ll melt (or perhaps spontaneously combust!) before they reach pre-K.
This is certain to be an endless theme for the next four years. Get used to it.
It did not take very long for the implications of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential election yesterday to cause sheer panic and true rage among climate and environmental activists. Within hours, stories to begin to spring forth from legacy media and climate and environmental news sites about all the things Trump will do to promote fossil fuels, weaken environmental regulations, threaten the Inflation (non)Reduction Act, undo Biden’s climate policies, pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, destroy the planet, etc., ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
Politico’s E&E News was up with the roosters yesterday morning, publishing three pieces in “ClimateWire”, “E&E Daily”, and “EnergyWire” before 8:00 a.m.
Sister publication “Greenwire” followed shortly after lunch.
The “scientists” say we need to be ready for a new world. (We would counter that maybe they do….)
The New York Times:
CNBC:
The Verge:
And “Earth.org”
The day would not have been complete without at least one High Priest of the “existential crisis of Climate Change” weighing in. Below is an excerpt from one with whom you may be familiar who was kind enough to provide this statement on X:
From the reactions above, one might conclude that over the past four years, the Biden/Harris administration has dramatically reduced U.S. fossil fuel production and CO2 emissions. And that another Trump presidency means that U.S. fossil fuel production and correlated CO2 emissions will now begin to rise after four years of rapidly falling.
Not exactly.
As the two charts from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) below demonstrate, U.S. production of crude oil and natural gas has never been higher. (And the figures are even larger if you include natural gas liquids and condensates.)
Crude oil and natural gas production have both gone up steadily during the entire duration of the Biden/Harris administration. Somehow, this has not been an “existential crisis” in terms of “climate change”, and we are supposedly on the right track during said administration. But surely death, destruction and suffering await us now that Trump won a second term as President.
While the sources of the hair-on-fire climate and environmental doom porn direct their opprobrium at Trump, they conveniently avoid identifying and directing it at the real problem:
Misdirected climate and environmental anger wasn’t limited to the United States in the wake of Trump’s victory. Yesterday, Just Stop Oil protesters in the UK spray painted a wall on the U.S. Embassy to express their displeasure. Their choice of paint color wasn’t accidental.
The energy, environmental and economic policy pendulum just swung in America. But that fact is going to upset some people.
Developing story. Watch what happens next.
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Q: Why doesn't China care about CO2 emissions?
A: They are already communist.
This is really stupid. Yes, the Earth is warming - slowly - and it is probably due to CO2 from burning fossil fuels.
That said, there are no economical at scale replacements for fossil fuels in the production of steel, ammonia (fertilizer), plastics, and cement (see Vaclav Smil). Try living without those.
It makes no sense to export manufacturing to China and import batteries, PV panels, and wind turbines from China when the energy used to produce those goods comes from burning coal - the dirtiest of the fossil fuels.
Furthermore, the products imported from China are shipped in massive ships burning bunker fuel - the dirtiest bottom of the barrel petroleum product, worse than diesel, which is burned in the trucks and heavy equipment needed to mine the minerals for the batteries and turbine motors.
This is madness - totally irrational and crazy!
If you want to electrify the grid you should support nuclear fission reactors. They have much much higher capacity factors and can run without stopping for years at a time. The record for continuous operation for ANY thermal power plant is held by Ontario, Canada's Darlington Unit 1 nuclear plant that operated continuously for 1,106 days > 3 years until it was shut down voluntarily. It could have run longer.
We import products and export pollution and environmental destruction ... and jobs.
Insane!