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| I wear glasses now which proves I'm smart, debonair, and..what's that third thing? |
Energy Secretary Rick Perry is cooking up a case to stifle further federal support of renewable wind and solar energy. He’s ordered a dubiously sourced staff study that is aimed to paint renewables as an unreliable source for the nation’s electric grid.
The study, due June 23, seeks to determine whether federal tax and subsidy policies favoring renewable energy have burdened “baseload” coal-fired generation, putting power grid reliability at risk. It is being spearheaded by Energy Department political appointee Travis Fisher, who’s associated with a Washington policy group that opposes almost any government aid for renewable energy.
Fisher wrote a 2015 report for the Institute for Energy Research that called clean energy policies “the single greatest emerging threat” to the nation’s electric power grid, and a greater threat to electric reliability than cyber attacks, terrorism or extreme weather.
The Institute for Energy Research and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance, has been the “influential force in shaping Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle Obama administration climate initiatives,’’ according to Bloomberg News.
Damn is that depressing to learn.
Oh and it gets even worse.
Courtesy of the New York Times:
The Energy Department is closing an office that works with other countries to develop clean energy technology, another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat on climate-related activities after its withdrawal from the Paris agreement this month.
The 11 staff members of the Office of International Climate and Technology were told this month that their positions were being eliminated, according to current and former agency employees. The office was formed in 2010 to help the United States provide technical advice to other nations seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The small office also played a lead role preparing for the annual Clean Energy Ministerial, a forum in which the United States, China, India and other countries shared insights on how best to promote energy efficiency, electric vehicles and other solutions to climate change.
After all of the hard work that President Obama put into making this country energy independent and moving us away from planet killing fossil fuels, here comes this Texas shit kicker to undo the whole thing.
And while we are all distracted by the Russian investigation Trump and his progress hating cohorts are slowly dismantling all of the advances we have made in the last eight years.
And it is not just in renewable energy. They are also undermining our civil rights, our education system, and even our access to affordable health care.
We need to keep all of this fresh in our minds as we approach 2018. Because that will be our first opportunity to start to put things right again.
Or should I say "Left again?"
Do republicans just not care about the future at all? If not them what about the world their offspring live in?
ReplyDeleteFor the past ten years I've listened to Dominionist ideology. Their idea is Jesus is coming back within their lifetime so climate is not important. There is no logic that will penetrate the dominion Twue Believer.
Delete@2.26 -- They care more about sticking it to "Libtards" who laugh at them.
DeleteIf you look at a list of progressive advancements Obama achieved (despite them, which also pisses them off) -- it is simply their "Undo" list and they are determined to undo every single one, with or without Trump.
It killed 739 people in Chicago 1995. In Europe in 2003, it claimed another 70,000 lives. Just seven years later, it would take down 55,000 more in Russia. Extreme heat can and does kill. And while those heatwaves garnered global attention, according to a study released today in the journal Nature, they’re more common than we think. The study’s authors note that worldwide, some 30 percent of people are exposed to life-threatening extreme heat for at least 20 days of each year. If we do nothing to reduce climate changing emissions that are helping to push the mercury higher, they write, 74 percent of people will experience routine extreme heat events by 2100. And as is already the case today, at least some of those people will die.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/three-quarters-of-the-planet-could-face-deadly-heatwaves-by-2100/
The 1% couldn't care less -- it just means fewer people sucking on the oligarchy's tit. They know only the very rich & healthy will survive -- that the earth cannot sustain even the population it has now, much less in 50 years -- and are preparing to party hearty...
DeleteKamala Harris, Jeff Sessions, and the Weaponized Persecution Complex
ReplyDelete"It is a strategy that allows men like Sessions, O’Reilly, and Trump to hide in plain sight."
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/kamala-harris-jeff-sessions-powerful-man-persecution-thigh-high-politics
The health-care law that will affect millions of Americans is being actively concealed from them
ReplyDeletehttps://qz.com/1006885/ahca-the-senate-health-care-bill-that-will-affect-millions-of-americans-is-being-actively-concealed-from-them/
The botanists’ last stand: The daring work of saving the last samples of dying species
ReplyDeleteLet’s say for 20 years you’ve been observing a tree on a fern-covered crag thousands of feet above sea level on an island in the Pacific. Then one day you hike up to check on the plant and find it dying. You know it’s the last one of its species, and that you’re the only witness to the end of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, the snuffing out of a line of completely unique genetic material. You might have to sit down and write a poem. Or at least bring a bit of the dead plant to a bar and raise a beer to its life. (Perlman has done both.) You might even need an antidepressant.
“I’ve already witnessed about 20 species go extinct in the wild,” Perlman says. “It can be like you’re dealing with your friends or your family, and then they die.”
https://qz.com/1007400/the-botanists-last-stand-the-daring-work-of-saving-the-last-samples-of-dying-species/
Eurocrat heatwave guidelines: sit in the dark, avoid alcohol, and head home early
ReplyDeletehttps://qz.com/1009446/brexit-heatwave-eurocrats-sit-in-the-dark-avoid-alcohol-and-leave-work-early/
It's not just Republicans. In certain minds, Sky Guy will provide. Christianity is like gambling.. Nature holds the winning cards, not some mythical nobody.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of Christians who also take the reality of climate change seriously. Personally, I think that the human race has failed miserably in caring properly for this small and beautiful planet. It was science that allowed us to see Earth first from outer space and it was science that has detected how seriously we have maimed our planet despite God's mandate that we humans protect and take care of it.
DeleteMany of those in the US who call themselves Christian but refuse to acknowledge the duty of human beings to care for the planet and who deny the role of humans in bringing about Earth's current predicament, however, count themselves as conservatives, Republicans and Trump voters.
Beaglemom
Mother Earth has about had it with too-successful humanoid mammals. We will be shed through a mother-of-all plagues or blow ourselves up ... She will survive and flourish without us just fine, and the way made clear for the next incarnation of species.
DeletePea-brained dinasaurs lasted millions (!) of years just fine -- we can't even last 80,000. We are too smart for our own, and all the current species' good.
Renewable, clean energy in place of dirty, finite resources? What could we possibly be thinking?!?
ReplyDeleteNo, better to destroy the planet because Jesus comes back that much faster! :-/
The Purpose For This Index
ReplyDeleteThe Rapture Index has two functions: one is to factor together a number of related end time components into a cohesive indicator, and the other is to standardize those components to eliminate the wide variance that currently exists with prophecy reporting.
The Rapture Index is by no means meant to predict the rapture, however, the index is designed to measure the type of activity that could act as a precursor to the rapture.
You could say the Rapture index is a Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity, but I think it would be better if you viewed it as prophetic speedometer. The higher the number, the faster we're moving towards the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.
http://www.raptureready.com/rapture-ready-index/
ot? "Policy is Values."
ReplyDelete"Whatever the most powerful, and emptiest, man in the world wants you to think — or whatever he wants you to think he thinks — is a blip of information that might be useful for the endless effort to understand the perversity that prevails."
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/watch-what-trump-tweets-but-more-importantly-what-he-does/
Watch what Trump tweets — but more importantly what he does
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/watch-what-trump-tweets-but-more-importantly-what-he-does/
Another useful idiot of the Russians.
ReplyDeleteot?" Pangaea began to break apart around 175 million years ago. "showed pulses of elevated mercury concentrations that coincided with the end-Triassic extinction event."“We know we have a rise in mercury, which we can link to volcanism, and it’s happening at the same time as a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, so we can then say that this rise in carbon dioxide is almost certainly linked back to volcanism. This has been suggested before, but we now have a more global record of it.”Pulses of volcanism would have created a disturbance to the atmospheric system that would have impacted ecological recovery, producing the mass extinction event."“It allows us to understand more where the emissions came from that caused the mass extinction, how they came into the atmosphere. It also helps us understand how emissions perturb the atmosphere and lead to a mass extinction, and the recovery thereafter—particularly in the context of what we’re doing to the atmosphere today.”
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/huge-volcanic-eruptions-triggered-dawn-of-the-dinosaurs/