I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
Humans aren't special. We're not immune to what's happened to so many different species that went before us. The question isn't if humanity will eventually die out, but when and how.
No that isn't true. Humans are one of the most adaptable species on the planet and the only one that may one day be able to escape it.
I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
Humans aren't special. We're not immune to what's happened to so many different species that went before us. The question isn't if humanity will eventually die out, but when and how.
No that isn't true. Humans are one of the most adaptable species on the planet and the only one that may one day be able to escape it.
We are basically unchanged in the last 1,000 generations or so. We are not adapting, we are using science and technology as a crutch.
I am almost glad we haven't escaped the Earth yet. Until we can NOT FUCK UP ONE PLANET, we shouldn't get out to screw over others.
I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
Humans aren't special. We're not immune to what's happened to so many different species that went before us. The question isn't if humanity will eventually die out, but when and how.
No that isn't true. Humans are one of the most adaptable species on the planet and the only one that may one day be able to escape it.
We are basically unchanged in the last 1,000 generations or so. We are not adapting, we are using science and technology as a crutch.
I am almost glad we haven't escaped the Earth yet. Until we can NOT FUCK UP ONE PLANET, we shouldn't get out to screw over others.
Because other planets are somehow better off with no life at all? I'm not buying it.
Edit: They can share their pristine nothingness with nobody...
We can't leave our planet in significant numbers anyway, let alone survive anywhere else. Bacteria as well as many small mammals and insects are also more adaptable.
There is NO chance humans are going to another planet in time to avoid the collapse of this one. There is only one planet in this solar system that is even remotely feasible to colonize, which is Mars, and that would require building artificial biomes that aren't even close to being in the works. Anything else would require not only leaving the solar system, but likely the entire galaxy. No, when the battle with mother nature comes, it will be the last stand, and we are going to lose. Badly.
If you want to just focus on America, because we produce way, WAY more than our fair share of the emissions, the denialism falls into 3 camps. #1 is that people don't believe or understand something they can't "see", yet also refuse to believe those that do understand it and can see it. #2 is that they don't care because they know they'll be dead when it hits. And #3 think God will sort it all out.
There is NO chance humans are going to another planet in time to avoid the collapse of this one. There is only one planet in this solar system that is even remotely feasible to colonize, which is Mars, and that would require building artificial biomes that aren't even close to being in the works. Anything else would require not only leaving the solar system, but likely the entire galaxy. No, when the battle with mother nature comes, it will be the last stand, and we are going to lose. Badly.
If you want to just focus on America, because we produce way, WAY more than our fair share of the emissions, the denialism falls into 3 camps. #1 is that people don't believe or understand something they can't "see", yet also refuse to believe those that do understand it and can see it. #2 is that they don't care because they know they'll be dead when it hits. And #3 think God will sort it all out.
Or #4, the genie's out of the bottle. There's no putting it back. Only tyranny can save us politically. People are not going to go along quietly with giving up cheap energy. You're really setting yourself up for depression if you're waiting for humanity to 'see the light'. Have faith, there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes scientifically. We'll fix this yet...
I don't deny climate change because the climate is *supposed* to change. I keep waiting for all the doom-and-gloom scenarios which have been predicted for the last 30 years to happen and nothing keeps happening; the waiting is starting to get a little boring.
I agree with @jjstraka34 that we will never leave the planet. We should have had a permanent, international scientific base on the Moon by the late 1980s (or at least the late 1990s) but here it is 50 years after setting foot on the Moon and...nothing. I think India's mission just entered lunar orbit this week, so that is a step in the right direction--maybe they will put a base on the Moon. I won't even care if they plant their flag on the surface because they will have earned the right to do so.
I don't deny climate change because the climate is *supposed* to change. I keep waiting for all the doom-and-gloom scenarios which have been predicted for the last 30 years to happen and nothing keeps happening; the waiting is starting to get a little boring.
I half agree. We are only starting to come out of the previous ice age and the Earth's temperature is normalizing to whta it was before. The problem is that its happening so quickly, relative to changes in the past. We will be fine, if we have the infrastructure in place to handle the changes. Which we don't, and that's a problem.
I don't deny climate change because the climate is *supposed* to change. I keep waiting for all the doom-and-gloom scenarios which have been predicted for the last 30 years to happen and nothing keeps happening; the waiting is starting to get a little boring.
I half agree. We are only starting to come out of the previous ice age and the Earth's temperature is normalizing to whta it was before. The problem is that its happening so quickly, relative to changes in the past. We will be fine, if we have the infrastructure in place to handle the changes. Which we don't, and that's a problem.
That can change fast though once people are motivated. Look at what was accomplished by the US during WW2 in just a few years, or what the USSR accomplished in a very short time cleaning up after Chernobyl. It would be nice if the proverbial shit didnt have to hit the fan first before action, but it's amazing what a large group of human beings can accomplish in a short period of time when they ARE motivated...
We've already seen a remarkable number of unusually severe natural disasters in recent decades. We've already had one brutal hurricane battering Texas, and we don't need many more. Personally, the more worrying problem is chaotic rainfall and unstable temperatures--we can't grow nearly as much food in an unstable environment.
I would be more okay with inaction on climate change if drought-resistant, heat-resistant, and frost-resistant genetically engineered crops were already available worldwide and we knew it would be easy to create new ones. I wouldn't worry about damaged infrastructure if our infrastructure was designed to survive the increasingly severe hurricanes we've already started seeing. I wouldn't worry so much about rising sea levels if so much of our population didn't live on the coastlines. I wouldn't care about sudden shifts in marine environments if we didn't get so much of our food from intensive fishing.
Likewise, I would place more importance on fossil fuels if we didn't already have access to multiple different low-cost energy sources that don't produce nearly as much pollution.
And while I don't think human extinction is realistic, "we can probably figure it out" is not sufficient reassurance for me. I think we should be reliant on fossil fuels when we know for a fact that we can handle whatever climate change throws at us, whether it's hurricanes or droughts or heat waves or floods or frosts or rising sea levels or any of the countless things that can easily destabilize the earth we use to grow our only food.
We've already seen all of those things happening in real time. It's not hypothetical--the only hypothetical thing is how much worse it could get.
In the 2000s, we had a devastating drought here in Texas. My family has a farm out in the hill country, and we saw entire forests of oak trees suddenly dying because the lack of water weakened them so much that they couldn't fight off the oak wilt fungus that those trees used to be able to survive.
IS common from authoritarian governments, doesn't matter if right or left wing to try to hide environmental disasters. But the countries with mostly environmental problems are exactly the most socialists like China.
In the 2000s, we had a devastating drought here in Texas. My family has a farm out in the hill country, and we saw entire forests of oak trees suddenly dying because the lack of water weakened them so much that they couldn't fight off the oak wilt fungus that those trees used to be able to survive.
I can independently verify this since I saw the same things happening. Still...I just don't think that climate change is a dramatic problem worth fighting--people will adjust. As far as the hurricane problem we have here...well, Houston city leadership has been kicking the can down the road for most of my lifetime and now their residents are paying the price for their lack of forethought in modernizing and expanding the levee and storm drain systems.
I think people should understand that the rate of the warming climate is causing one of the largest mass extinctions in history.
It's exceptionally short sighted if beating climate change just means "Humans survive". There's an entire world of biodiversity and life that will cease to exist because of a combination of anti-science and a lack of willingness to do what it takes to try to preserve it.
Mass extinctions are going to occur no matter what we do. I am not suggesting that we burn it all down, of course, but I do think that people worry about it more than the situation necessitates.
IS common from authoritarian governments, doesn't matter if right or left wing to try to hide environmental disasters. But the countries with mostly environmental problems are exactly the most socialists like China.
China is the least socialist major country I know of. The United States has a far stronger social safety net and much stronger regulations on corporations than the PRC. The closest thing to socialism in China is the existence of state-sanctioned monopolies, and they function just like the private companies they compete with. Free enterprise in China is basically unrestricted and the government does very little to address inequality or help out the poor.
The reason China is so incredibly polluted is because their version of the EPA has essentially no power to enforce regulations. Companies emit so much pollution in China precisely because the government lets them.
It's a bit of an unspoken joke. When Deng Xiaoping started introducing market-based reforms in then-communist China and people pointed out that he was advocating capitalism, he said his policies were "socialism with Chinese characteristics"--and since Deng Xiaoping by then had successfully wrested control of the Party from Hua Guofeng, a diehard Maoist and Mao Zedong's intended successor, nobody could really tell Deng he was betraying the goals of the Party. At that point, he was the boss. The now-famous phrase is just a polite word for capitalism, and "X with Chinese characteristics" is a way of dismissing any apparent injustices in the system.
Socialist countries like those of the European Union are among the cleanest in the world in terms of pollution.
The level of pollution in a country is less a factor of how authoritarian a government is and more a factor of (1) how much the government favors private enterprise over the public good, and (2) how advanced the country is technologically.
IS common from authoritarian governments, doesn't matter if right or left wing to try to hide environmental disasters. But the countries with mostly environmental problems are exactly the most socialists like China.
China is the least socialist major country I know of. The United States has a far stronger social safety net and much stronger regulations on corporations than the PRC. The closest thing to socialism in China is the existence of state-sanctioned monopolies, and they function just like the private companies they compete with. Free enterprise in China is basically unrestricted and the government does very little to address inequality or help out the poor.
The reason China is so incredibly polluted is because their version of the EPA has essentially no power to enforce regulations. Companies emit so much pollution in China precisely because the government lets them.
It's a bit of an unspoken joke. When Deng Xiaoping started introducing market-based reforms in then-communist China and people pointed out that he was advocating capitalism, he said his policies were "socialism with Chinese characteristics"--and since Deng Xiaoping by then had successfully wrested control of the Party from Hua Guofeng, a diehard Maoist and Mao Zedong's intended successor, nobody could really tell Deng he was betraying the goals of the Party. At that point, he was the boss. The now-famous phrase is just a polite word for capitalism, and "X with Chinese characteristics" is a way of dismissing any apparent injustices in the system.
Socialist countries like those of the European Union are among the cleanest in the world in terms of pollution.
The level of pollution in a country is less a factor of how authoritarian a government is and more a factor of (1) how much the government favors private enterprise over the public good, and (2) how advanced the country is technologically.
China is governed by one party(communist) and as i've said, if the stat owns the means of production with direct control or with regulations, is socialism. Every country on earth has some degree of socialism and China is very socialist. Help the poor is not socialism, otherwise an Church who owns an orphanage is socialist
No freedom of press, no freedom of defense, no freedom of expression, not freedom of self determination, no due process, the social credit system. the unique capitalist thing on China is Hong Kong and the communist party is trying to destroy hong kong.
Anyway, why not compare the Former Soviet Union (USSR) Countries who are relative easy to do business like Estonia with the countries who are very communist like?
In the 2000s, we had a devastating drought here in Texas. My family has a farm out in the hill country, and we saw entire forests of oak trees suddenly dying because the lack of water weakened them so much that they couldn't fight off the oak wilt fungus that those trees used to be able to survive.
I can independently verify this since I saw the same things happening. Still...I just don't think that climate change is a dramatic problem worth fighting--people will adjust. As far as the hurricane problem we have here...well, Houston city leadership has been kicking the can down the road for most of my lifetime and now their residents are paying the price for their lack of forethought in modernizing and expanding the levee and storm drain systems.
I will third the Texas drought, as my hometown is also in the Texas hill country. My mother is convinced that had the drought gone on another 3 months or so, we would have been unable to pump water from the river for our farm. We lost about half our trees. For that matter, that drought caused the lowest level on record for Lake Brownwood since almost the start of the lake. https://waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/individual/brownwood (go to the historical tab. No, I have no idea why there's missing data).
Also, maybe we should make it illegal to "kick the can down the road". It is one thing to project that "this will be paid for it, given projected economic conditinos". It is entirely another to say "We will do this, and we will still be losing money under the most ideal circumstances out of a fever dream".
Raise the taxes to pay for what we already have. Modernize as we need to. MUST do. One thing that struck me from Michael Bennet's speech on the Senate floor during the last shutdown was that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in 25 years. What about our last major dam (Google says 40 years)?
I will give nuclear energy a pass because I think it's still in development and the future of it is probably not massive several multi-gigawatt reactors that we have built, but smaller hundred-megawatt reactors distributed as needed using designs still on the drawing board or in experimental test reactors.
China is the least socialist major country I know of. The United States has a far stronger social safety net and much stronger regulations on corporations than the PRC. The closest thing to socialism in China is the existence of state-sanctioned monopolies, and they function just like the private companies they compete with.
State sanctioned monopolies are a far closer definition of socialism than a welfare state or social safety net. Typically socialism has been defined as a state controlled economy. You can deliver welfare just through taxation without controlling the economy, but you can't have state sanctioned monopolies without the state controlling the economy.
I don't know how socialism has become synonymous with welfare over the past few years, but I chalk it up to the manipulation of language so often used by politicians. Republicans want welfare to mean socialism, in a bad way. Democrats want it to mean socialism, in a good way. Neither interpretation is accurate.
Even Milton Friedman supported some welfare programs. For Milton Friedman was much more efficient to give an "education voucher" into poor families than to have public schools. David Friedman(his son) in other hands is anarcho capitalist.
China is the least socialist major country I know of. The United States has a far stronger social safety net and much stronger regulations on corporations than the PRC. The closest thing to socialism in China is the existence of state-sanctioned monopolies, and they function just like the private companies they compete with.
State sanctioned monopolies are a far closer definition of socialism than a welfare state or social safety net. Typically socialism has been defined as a state controlled economy. You can deliver welfare just through taxation without controlling the economy, but you can't have state sanctioned monopolies without the state controlling the economy.
I don't know how socialism has become synonymous with welfare over the past few years, but I chalk it up to the manipulation of language so often used by politicians. Republicans want welfare to mean socialism, in a bad way. Democrats want it to mean socialism, in a good way. Neither interpretation is accurate.
That's why guys like Bernie or AOC should call themselves social Democrats instead of Democratic socialism I guess. But totally, the right complains that the left says everything is racism then they turn around and do the thing they're complaining about and say that whenever the government does stuff it's socialism.
In origin socialism meant the community as a whole directly owning and/or controlling the means of production, distribution and exchange.
I agree that the term has been stretched in meaning though and it is now widely accepted as applying to countries where the state owns or controls production etc. However, the rationale for this applies only in democratic states - the theory being that the people control the government and therefore indirectly control the means of production.
Using the term in a pejorative sense to mean any form of government control in any country is a far more fundamental move away from the original meaning. Personally it seems silly to me to talk about somewhere like China as being socialist. The people there have very little control, either directly or indirectly, over the means of production. I would have thought a more appropriate description would be something like authoritarian or despotic.
Going back to the origin of words again, communism had a very similar meaning to socialism. Both referred to ownership by the community, but communism went further in suggesting that the community dictate how resources should be allocated. There's never been anything like a true communist state though and the term has essentially lost entirely its original meaning and is now generally applied to authoritarian states like the USSR or China.
I'm much more comfortable with the use of the term communist for these countries, rather than socialist. That's because there is no alternative use of communist - it has lost its original meaning entirely. That's not the case with socialist though - the original meaning of the word is still very much alive in much of the world, e.g. throughout most of Europe. I suspect that even in America there are still substantial numbers of people who do not agree with the pejorative use of socialist - perhaps some of those people living there could comment on whether that is the case.
Raise the taxes to pay for what we already have. Modernize as we need to. MUST do. One thing that struck me from Michael Bennet's speech on the Senate floor during the last shutdown was that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in 25 years. What about our last major dam (Google says 40 years)?
I will give nuclear energy a pass because I think it's still in development and the future of it is probably not massive several multi-gigawatt reactors that we have built, but smaller hundred-megawatt reactors distributed as needed using designs still on the drawing board or in experimental test reactors.
There are so many environmental regulations in place that the cost of building new airports--or oil refineries--is so high that no one is willing to invest the money.
I wouldn't even go with nuclear in Texas, even though the safety record of nuclear facilities is stellar--without looking can you name any nuclear incident other than Three Mile Island or Chernobyl? If you can, then you are a rare exception. In Texas, I would go with expanded wind farms and solar panels. I will have to track down this research again--I posted it years ago on another forum--but at that time covering only 1.4% of the Earth's surface with solar panels was sufficient to power the entire planet's grid without needing to rely on any other source, including hydroelectric or geothermal.
I don't deny climate change because the climate is *supposed* to change. I keep waiting for all the doom-and-gloom scenarios which have been predicted for the last 30 years to happen and nothing keeps happening; the waiting is starting to get a little boring.
What's been happening for the past several years doesn't remotely qualify as "nothing."
Here's something - climate change is causing spread of invasive species.
Mass extinctions are going to occur no matter what we do. I am not suggesting that we burn it all down, of course, but I do think that people worry about it more than the situation necessitates.
In the macro scale, yes. Mass extinctions happen. However, the Holocene extinction event is largely caused by human activity. Which is to say, it is occurring because of what we do, not no matter what we do.
I agree, but the media wasn't waiting to pounce all over Newton's discoveries and tout them as gospel to sell papers. Nor was Newton predicting some Apocolypse. It's the very Apocolyptic nature of this that is making me more sceptical, not less. It's really not much different from religion from my point of view.
Humans aren't special. We're not immune to what's happened to so many different species that went before us. The question isn't if humanity will eventually die out, but when and how.
No that isn't true. Humans are one of the most adaptable species on the planet and the only one that may one day be able to escape it.
Adapting so well we're in the process of rendering much of the Earth uninhabitable.
As far as whether we'll ever be able to colonize elsewhere, I think that often people underestimate what's required to insure human (and other animal) survival on other planets. Mars itself is, as pointed out, the best candidate in the Solar System. It also has profound challenges to make it even slightly habitable in a small area.
As far as exoplanets go, we'll need a lot more information about any of them before we can even begin to locate a candidate for extrasolar colonies. In addition to that, the challenges of sending humans on an interstellar journey are fairly extreme.
China is governed by one party(communist) and as i've said, if the stat owns the means of production with direct control or with regulations, is socialism. Every country on earth has some degree of socialism and China is very socialist. Help the poor is not socialism, otherwise an Church who owns an orphanage is socialist
No, workers owning the means of production is socialism. The state owning the means of production is not. Please actually read some Marx sometime.
And no, there aren't any socialist policies in the US or in Europe. Social safety nets are not socialism. The rightward progress of the Overton Window isn't actually changing the definition of socialism, but it does lead to a lot of people who should know better calling non-socialist things socialism. Please look into social democrats and democratic socialists.
State sanctioned monopolies are a far closer definition of socialism than a welfare state or social safety net. Typically socialism has been defined as a state controlled economy. You can deliver welfare just through taxation without controlling the economy, but you can't have state sanctioned monopolies without the state controlling the economy.
I don't know how socialism has become synonymous with welfare over the past few years, but I chalk it up to the manipulation of language so often used by politicians. Republicans want welfare to mean socialism, in a bad way. Democrats want it to mean socialism, in a good way. Neither interpretation is accurate.
You're mostly correct. Socialism is again defined as worker control of the means of production and the intention is for the state to wither away. State-sanctioned monopolies aren't socialism.
There is NO chance humans are going to another planet in time to avoid the collapse of this one. There is only one planet in this solar system that is even remotely feasible to colonize, which is Mars, and that would require building artificial biomes that aren't even close to being in the works. Anything else would require not only leaving the solar system, but likely the entire galaxy. No, when the battle with mother nature comes, it will be the last stand, and we are going to lose. Badly.
If you want to just focus on America, because we produce way, WAY more than our fair share of the emissions, the denialism falls into 3 camps. #1 is that people don't believe or understand something they can't "see", yet also refuse to believe those that do understand it and can see it. #2 is that they don't care because they know they'll be dead when it hits. And #3 think God will sort it all out.
Even Mars as a colony wouldn't work. For two reasons.
First off the gravity problem. No one yet truly knows how the human body would hold up under long term exposure to Mars' gravity, but our own current experiments with spaceflight already show that the human body deteriorates quite rapidly in the free fall environment we subject astronauts to. It's inferred that the same problem would exist on Mars. There's not even a conceivable technology that could overcome this.
Second problem is electricity/power. Solar power isn't going to be highly effective on Mars. And how are you going to generate the energy you need to power things like internal biomes? You'd have to shuttle power in some fashion between Earth and Mars. You're not going to construct a solar panel array of the size necessary to have enough independent power generation there.
It's sort of funny, but you're more likely to build a floating colony in the atmosphere of Venus than you are to build a colony Mars, given our understanding of science and technology today.
I wouldn't even go with nuclear in Texas, even though the safety record of nuclear facilities is stellar--without looking can you name any nuclear incident other than Three Mile Island or Chernobyl? If you can, then you are a rare exception. In Texas, I would go with expanded wind farms and solar panels. I will have to track down this research again--I posted it years ago on another forum--but at that time covering only 1.4% of the Earth's surface with solar panels was sufficient to power the entire planet's grid without needing to rely on any other source, including hydroelectric or geothermal.
Nuclear is safe but Fukushima Daiishi is a thing, although that power plant was an older design.
First off the gravity problem. No one yet truly knows how the human body would hold up under long term exposure to Mars' gravity, but our own current experiments with spaceflight already show that the human body deteriorates quite rapidly in the free fall environment we subject astronauts to. It's inferred that the same problem would exist on Mars. There's not even a conceivable technology that could overcome this.
Never mind the effects of zero gravity on the journey to Mars. That's addressed in the video I linked a few posts back.
I don't deny climate change because the climate is *supposed* to change. I keep waiting for all the doom-and-gloom scenarios which have been predicted for the last 30 years to happen and nothing keeps happening; the waiting is starting to get a little boring.
I half agree. We are only starting to come out of the previous ice age and the Earth's temperature is normalizing to whta it was before. The problem is that its happening so quickly, relative to changes in the past. We will be fine, if we have the infrastructure in place to handle the changes. Which we don't, and that's a problem.
That can change fast though once people are motivated. Look at what was accomplished by the US during WW2 in just a few years, or what the USSR accomplished in a very short time cleaning up after Chernobyl. It would be nice if the proverbial shit didnt have to hit the fan first before action, but it's amazing what a large group of human beings can accomplish in a short period of time when they ARE motivated...
It's not really comparable in my opinion. The key ingredient to remember about climate change is that emissions lock in a certain amount of warming over time. And this effect can last centuries. And it will doom certain parts of the world to be unlivable (at least at current populations).
If you're up for a world where the US is welcoming a bunch of refugees from Central America and the Caribbean with the same aplomb as we had taking on the Axis powers, great. But something tells me, folks who express skepticism of climate change, are also going to be among the least welcoming in this case.
I don't deny climate change because the climate is *supposed* to change. I keep waiting for all the doom-and-gloom scenarios which have been predicted for the last 30 years to happen and nothing keeps happening; the waiting is starting to get a little boring.
I half agree. We are only starting to come out of the previous ice age and the Earth's temperature is normalizing to whta it was before. The problem is that its happening so quickly, relative to changes in the past. We will be fine, if we have the infrastructure in place to handle the changes. Which we don't, and that's a problem.
That can change fast though once people are motivated. Look at what was accomplished by the US during WW2 in just a few years, or what the USSR accomplished in a very short time cleaning up after Chernobyl. It would be nice if the proverbial shit didnt have to hit the fan first before action, but it's amazing what a large group of human beings can accomplish in a short period of time when they ARE motivated...
It's not really comparable in my opinion. The key ingredient to remember about climate change is that emissions lock in a certain amount of warming over time. And this effect can last centuries. And it will doom certain parts of the world to be unlivable (at least at current populations).
If you're up for a world where the US is welcoming a bunch of refugees from Central America and the Caribbean with the same aplomb as we had taking on the Axis powers, great. But something tells me, folks who express skepticism of climate change, are also going to be among the least welcoming in this case.
Antarctica has a population close to 0 right now. Ditto Greenland. I think Nunavut might have to worry about refugees more than the US.
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No that isn't true. Humans are one of the most adaptable species on the planet and the only one that may one day be able to escape it.
We are basically unchanged in the last 1,000 generations or so. We are not adapting, we are using science and technology as a crutch.
I am almost glad we haven't escaped the Earth yet. Until we can NOT FUCK UP ONE PLANET, we shouldn't get out to screw over others.
Because other planets are somehow better off with no life at all? I'm not buying it.
Edit: They can share their pristine nothingness with nobody...
If you want to just focus on America, because we produce way, WAY more than our fair share of the emissions, the denialism falls into 3 camps. #1 is that people don't believe or understand something they can't "see", yet also refuse to believe those that do understand it and can see it. #2 is that they don't care because they know they'll be dead when it hits. And #3 think God will sort it all out.
Or #4, the genie's out of the bottle. There's no putting it back. Only tyranny can save us politically. People are not going to go along quietly with giving up cheap energy. You're really setting yourself up for depression if you're waiting for humanity to 'see the light'. Have faith, there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes scientifically. We'll fix this yet...
I agree with @jjstraka34 that we will never leave the planet. We should have had a permanent, international scientific base on the Moon by the late 1980s (or at least the late 1990s) but here it is 50 years after setting foot on the Moon and...nothing. I think India's mission just entered lunar orbit this week, so that is a step in the right direction--maybe they will put a base on the Moon. I won't even care if they plant their flag on the surface because they will have earned the right to do so.
edit : About Bolsonaro image on exterior, is mostly due the anti bolsonaro media. Trump has an different image on local radio and on exterior too.
I half agree. We are only starting to come out of the previous ice age and the Earth's temperature is normalizing to whta it was before. The problem is that its happening so quickly, relative to changes in the past. We will be fine, if we have the infrastructure in place to handle the changes. Which we don't, and that's a problem.
That can change fast though once people are motivated. Look at what was accomplished by the US during WW2 in just a few years, or what the USSR accomplished in a very short time cleaning up after Chernobyl. It would be nice if the proverbial shit didnt have to hit the fan first before action, but it's amazing what a large group of human beings can accomplish in a short period of time when they ARE motivated...
I would be more okay with inaction on climate change if drought-resistant, heat-resistant, and frost-resistant genetically engineered crops were already available worldwide and we knew it would be easy to create new ones. I wouldn't worry about damaged infrastructure if our infrastructure was designed to survive the increasingly severe hurricanes we've already started seeing. I wouldn't worry so much about rising sea levels if so much of our population didn't live on the coastlines. I wouldn't care about sudden shifts in marine environments if we didn't get so much of our food from intensive fishing.
Likewise, I would place more importance on fossil fuels if we didn't already have access to multiple different low-cost energy sources that don't produce nearly as much pollution.
And while I don't think human extinction is realistic, "we can probably figure it out" is not sufficient reassurance for me. I think we should be reliant on fossil fuels when we know for a fact that we can handle whatever climate change throws at us, whether it's hurricanes or droughts or heat waves or floods or frosts or rising sea levels or any of the countless things that can easily destabilize the earth we use to grow our only food.
We've already seen all of those things happening in real time. It's not hypothetical--the only hypothetical thing is how much worse it could get.
In the 2000s, we had a devastating drought here in Texas. My family has a farm out in the hill country, and we saw entire forests of oak trees suddenly dying because the lack of water weakened them so much that they couldn't fight off the oak wilt fungus that those trees used to be able to survive.
I saw cacti die of thirst.
I can independently verify this since I saw the same things happening. Still...I just don't think that climate change is a dramatic problem worth fighting--people will adjust. As far as the hurricane problem we have here...well, Houston city leadership has been kicking the can down the road for most of my lifetime and now their residents are paying the price for their lack of forethought in modernizing and expanding the levee and storm drain systems.
It's exceptionally short sighted if beating climate change just means "Humans survive". There's an entire world of biodiversity and life that will cease to exist because of a combination of anti-science and a lack of willingness to do what it takes to try to preserve it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
If finding life on another planet is of scientific importance, maintaining life on our own should be as well.
The reason China is so incredibly polluted is because their version of the EPA has essentially no power to enforce regulations. Companies emit so much pollution in China precisely because the government lets them.
It's a bit of an unspoken joke. When Deng Xiaoping started introducing market-based reforms in then-communist China and people pointed out that he was advocating capitalism, he said his policies were "socialism with Chinese characteristics"--and since Deng Xiaoping by then had successfully wrested control of the Party from Hua Guofeng, a diehard Maoist and Mao Zedong's intended successor, nobody could really tell Deng he was betraying the goals of the Party. At that point, he was the boss. The now-famous phrase is just a polite word for capitalism, and "X with Chinese characteristics" is a way of dismissing any apparent injustices in the system.
Socialist countries like those of the European Union are among the cleanest in the world in terms of pollution.
The level of pollution in a country is less a factor of how authoritarian a government is and more a factor of (1) how much the government favors private enterprise over the public good, and (2) how advanced the country is technologically.
China is governed by one party(communist) and as i've said, if the stat owns the means of production with direct control or with regulations, is socialism. Every country on earth has some degree of socialism and China is very socialist. Help the poor is not socialism, otherwise an Church who owns an orphanage is socialist
No freedom of press, no freedom of defense, no freedom of expression, not freedom of self determination, no due process, the social credit system. the unique capitalist thing on China is Hong Kong and the communist party is trying to destroy hong kong.
Anyway, why not compare the Former Soviet Union (USSR) Countries who are relative easy to do business like Estonia with the countries who are very communist like?
I will third the Texas drought, as my hometown is also in the Texas hill country. My mother is convinced that had the drought gone on another 3 months or so, we would have been unable to pump water from the river for our farm. We lost about half our trees. For that matter, that drought caused the lowest level on record for Lake Brownwood since almost the start of the lake. https://waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/individual/brownwood (go to the historical tab. No, I have no idea why there's missing data).
Also, maybe we should make it illegal to "kick the can down the road". It is one thing to project that "this will be paid for it, given projected economic conditinos". It is entirely another to say "We will do this, and we will still be losing money under the most ideal circumstances out of a fever dream".
Raise the taxes to pay for what we already have. Modernize as we need to. MUST do. One thing that struck me from Michael Bennet's speech on the Senate floor during the last shutdown was that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in 25 years. What about our last major dam (Google says 40 years)?
I will give nuclear energy a pass because I think it's still in development and the future of it is probably not massive several multi-gigawatt reactors that we have built, but smaller hundred-megawatt reactors distributed as needed using designs still on the drawing board or in experimental test reactors.
State sanctioned monopolies are a far closer definition of socialism than a welfare state or social safety net. Typically socialism has been defined as a state controlled economy. You can deliver welfare just through taxation without controlling the economy, but you can't have state sanctioned monopolies without the state controlling the economy.
I don't know how socialism has become synonymous with welfare over the past few years, but I chalk it up to the manipulation of language so often used by politicians. Republicans want welfare to mean socialism, in a bad way. Democrats want it to mean socialism, in a good way. Neither interpretation is accurate.
That's why guys like Bernie or AOC should call themselves social Democrats instead of Democratic socialism I guess. But totally, the right complains that the left says everything is racism then they turn around and do the thing they're complaining about and say that whenever the government does stuff it's socialism.
I agree that the term has been stretched in meaning though and it is now widely accepted as applying to countries where the state owns or controls production etc. However, the rationale for this applies only in democratic states - the theory being that the people control the government and therefore indirectly control the means of production.
Using the term in a pejorative sense to mean any form of government control in any country is a far more fundamental move away from the original meaning. Personally it seems silly to me to talk about somewhere like China as being socialist. The people there have very little control, either directly or indirectly, over the means of production. I would have thought a more appropriate description would be something like authoritarian or despotic.
Going back to the origin of words again, communism had a very similar meaning to socialism. Both referred to ownership by the community, but communism went further in suggesting that the community dictate how resources should be allocated. There's never been anything like a true communist state though and the term has essentially lost entirely its original meaning and is now generally applied to authoritarian states like the USSR or China.
I'm much more comfortable with the use of the term communist for these countries, rather than socialist. That's because there is no alternative use of communist - it has lost its original meaning entirely. That's not the case with socialist though - the original meaning of the word is still very much alive in much of the world, e.g. throughout most of Europe. I suspect that even in America there are still substantial numbers of people who do not agree with the pejorative use of socialist - perhaps some of those people living there could comment on whether that is the case.
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/08/21/politics/electoral-college-ruling-colorado/index.html?r=https://www.google.ca/
There are so many environmental regulations in place that the cost of building new airports--or oil refineries--is so high that no one is willing to invest the money.
I wouldn't even go with nuclear in Texas, even though the safety record of nuclear facilities is stellar--without looking can you name any nuclear incident other than Three Mile Island or Chernobyl? If you can, then you are a rare exception. In Texas, I would go with expanded wind farms and solar panels. I will have to track down this research again--I posted it years ago on another forum--but at that time covering only 1.4% of the Earth's surface with solar panels was sufficient to power the entire planet's grid without needing to rely on any other source, including hydroelectric or geothermal.
What's been happening for the past several years doesn't remotely qualify as "nothing."
Here's something - climate change is causing spread of invasive species.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/cjidmm/2018/5719081/
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04072019/tick-disease-danger-species-longhorned-lonestar-climate-change
In the macro scale, yes. Mass extinctions happen. However, the Holocene extinction event is largely caused by human activity. Which is to say, it is occurring because of what we do, not no matter what we do.
https://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/sites/sw/files/Warning_article_with_supp_11-13-17.pdf
https://www.uv.mx/personal/tcarmona/files/2010/08/Science-2014-Dirzo-401-6-2.pdf
Adapting so well we're in the process of rendering much of the Earth uninhabitable.
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/12/22/humidity-may-prove-breaking-point-for-some-areas-as-temperatures-rise-says-study/
As far as whether we'll ever be able to colonize elsewhere, I think that often people underestimate what's required to insure human (and other animal) survival on other planets. Mars itself is, as pointed out, the best candidate in the Solar System. It also has profound challenges to make it even slightly habitable in a small area.
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8358/mars-terraforming-not-possible-using-present-day-technology/
As far as exoplanets go, we'll need a lot more information about any of them before we can even begin to locate a candidate for extrasolar colonies. In addition to that, the challenges of sending humans on an interstellar journey are fairly extreme.
https://futurism.com/why-we-shouldnt-colonize-exoplanets
We're not special.
No, workers owning the means of production is socialism. The state owning the means of production is not. Please actually read some Marx sometime.
And no, there aren't any socialist policies in the US or in Europe. Social safety nets are not socialism. The rightward progress of the Overton Window isn't actually changing the definition of socialism, but it does lead to a lot of people who should know better calling non-socialist things socialism. Please look into social democrats and democratic socialists.
You're mostly correct. Socialism is again defined as worker control of the means of production and the intention is for the state to wither away. State-sanctioned monopolies aren't socialism.
@Grond0 Thank you.
Abolish the electoral college.
Even Mars as a colony wouldn't work. For two reasons.
First off the gravity problem. No one yet truly knows how the human body would hold up under long term exposure to Mars' gravity, but our own current experiments with spaceflight already show that the human body deteriorates quite rapidly in the free fall environment we subject astronauts to. It's inferred that the same problem would exist on Mars. There's not even a conceivable technology that could overcome this.
Second problem is electricity/power. Solar power isn't going to be highly effective on Mars. And how are you going to generate the energy you need to power things like internal biomes? You'd have to shuttle power in some fashion between Earth and Mars. You're not going to construct a solar panel array of the size necessary to have enough independent power generation there.
It's sort of funny, but you're more likely to build a floating colony in the atmosphere of Venus than you are to build a colony Mars, given our understanding of science and technology today.
Nuclear is safe but Fukushima Daiishi is a thing, although that power plant was an older design.
Wikipedia lists dozens of incidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents#Nuclear_power_plant_accidents
Radioactive waste in the Columbia River still, at least in 2017, from Hanford's radioactive waste site.
https://www.courthousenews.com/radioactive-waste-still-flooding-columbia-river-epa-says/
Oops, wait, was that intentional?
https://allthatsinteresting.com/human-radiation-experiments-united-states-government
Never mind the effects of zero gravity on the journey to Mars. That's addressed in the video I linked a few posts back.
It's not really comparable in my opinion. The key ingredient to remember about climate change is that emissions lock in a certain amount of warming over time. And this effect can last centuries. And it will doom certain parts of the world to be unlivable (at least at current populations).
If you're up for a world where the US is welcoming a bunch of refugees from Central America and the Caribbean with the same aplomb as we had taking on the Axis powers, great. But something tells me, folks who express skepticism of climate change, are also going to be among the least welcoming in this case.
Antarctica has a population close to 0 right now. Ditto Greenland. I think Nunavut might have to worry about refugees more than the US.