Forum Replies Created
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Well, wasn’t the whole point of your post that if Billy T was protesting the oil pipeline in ND, he should switch to a mode of transportation that didn’t use oil?
As in, if he is against oil, he shouldn’t be able to use oil in any form forever?
Or, as I stated in my first post, are you just trying to rile him up?
Just because the economic monster needs to be fed more and more petrochemicals, doesn’t mean we have to sit back and be OK with the environmental havoc it wreaks.
My post was due to BT wanting this nation to switch to all electric cars. The Nissan Leaf given its huge depreciation at the end of its first year makes it at present a far more affordable option. I see Nissan Leafs every day. This thread has nothing to do with oil or clean water IMHO.
Problem is, bnw, I never said we should do that. Not sure where you got that from. Again, I want Solar cars, not plugins.
That said, if your post was innocent and just an attempt to inform, apologies.
Bnw,
I’ll break with my promise just this time and respond to your unprovoked personal slam:
Spoken like a true leftist. They want freedom of speech but not for anyone else. Stalin and Mao and Hitler would be so proud.
His actions. As I said, his actions. THOSE should have put him in jail. He can say whatever the hell he wants, outside of inciting violence, which he so often does. I’m all for “freedom of speech,” as are all the leftists here. But he should have been jailed for his business dealings long ago. Read the Newsweek article for a good start, and the one on his charity scams too.
Also, Hitler’s on your side of the political aisle, not ours. He was a righty. Leftists, in fact, made up the vast, vast majority of the forces fighting him. All the resistance movements, in fact, were DOMINATED by leftists. Socialists, communists, libertarian socialists, left-anarchists, especially.
Now, back to ignoring you.
What i see is….a lot of Trump voters wont admit that the Trump camp has a big racist-faction. They dont want to see it, or simply wont admit to it.
But I also think its hard for the clinton voters to see that theres big factions in the Trump camp that are NOT part of the big racist faction. There’s plenty of voters who just think of him as an ‘outsider’ and a ross perot type, etc.
I agree with a lot of your assessment, but I think you’re leaving out another perspective: Leftists, who detest both parties, won’t vote for either candidate, but see Trump as a racist demagogue, and a large portion of his voters following him because of that.
By no means all of them. But a significant portion. We know it’s significant, because study after study, asking them to describe their own views, shows us this. Hell, 20% of his supporters in South Carolina said Lincoln never should have freed the slaves, and a much higher percentage said the South should have won — which is defacto support for slavery. More than 65% of his supporters, regardless of state, think Obama isn’t eligible to be the president, being born elsewhere. Trump himself led the racist birther (papers please!) charge for six years until just yesterday, when he scammed the media into helping him do an infomercial for his campaign and his new hotel, because he said he’d say something big about birtherism.
So, again, no one is saying it’s all of his supporters. But it is a significant chunk. More importantly, to me, Trump himself built his campaign on the twin pillars of birtherism and hatred and fear of brown people supposedly coming to take our jobs from us. If he had not done so, he never would have won the Republican nomination. What else is he offering, but a shot in the arm for white nationalists?
Germany is having remarkable success moving away from fossil fuels as well.
Germany Just Got Almost All of Its Power From Renewable Energy
Wind, solar, biomass and hydro met demand on Sunday afternoon
Angela Merkel’s Energiewende is squeezing coal and gas marginsClean power supplied almost all of Germany’s power demand for the first time on Sunday, marking a milestone for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Energiewende” policy to boost renewables while phasing out nuclear and fossil fuels.
Solar and wind power peaked at 2 p.m. local time on Sunday, allowing renewables to supply 45.5 gigawatts as demand was 45.8 gigawatts, according to provisional data by Agora Energiewende, a research institute in Berlin. Power prices turned negative during several 15-minute periods yesterday, dropping as low as minus 50 euros ($57) a megawatt-hour, according to data from Epex Spot.
Here’s the graph from the article:
The USA is criminally negligent when it comes to renewable energy, and criminally negligent when it comes to all things “green.”
If tiny Costa Rico can do it, we can. And it’s not alone in this. Many nations now can meet the majority of their energy needs via “green” technologies, without resorting to fossil fuels.
Costa Rica has gone 76 straight days using 100% renewable electricity Updated by Brad Plumer on September 8, 2016, 11:20 a.m. ET @bradplumer brad@vox.com
Excerpt:
Costa Rica is pulling off a feat most countries just daydream about: For two straight months, the Central American country hasn’t burned any fossil fuels to generate electricity. That’s right: 100 percent renewable power.
This isn’t a blip, either. For 300 total days last year and 150 days so far this year, Costa Rica’s electricity has come entirely from renewable sources, mostly hydropower and geothermal. Heavy rains have helped four big hydroelectric dams run above their usual capacity, letting the country turn off its diesel generators.
Uruguay is another great example for us to emulate:
Uruguay makes dramatic shift to nearly 95% electricity from clean energy
As the world gathers in Paris for the daunting task of switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy, one small country on the other side of the Atlantic is making that transition look childishly simple and affordable.
In less than 10 years, Uruguay has slashed its carbon footprint without government subsidies or higher consumer costs, according to the country’s head of climate change policy, Ramón Méndez.
In fact, he says that now that renewables provide 94.5% of the country’s electricity, prices are lower than in the past relative to inflation. There are also fewer power cuts because a diverse energy mix means greater resilience to droughts.
The follow up is this:
IF there were several options available for energy, then those protesters would be able to be “saintly” from the getgo. Not only are they protesting the immediate impact of pollution on their waterways and sacred lands, in effect they’re protesting the lack of those options.
Fossil fuel dominates the landscape. There are very few available alternatives, if we seek eco-friendly options — at the moment. Environmentalists are calling for, first, a radical increase in those choices, and second, phasing out all fossil fuel production. As quickly as is humanly possible. But while fossil fuels dominate, it’s next to impossible to avoid them if we want to gather in one place for protests, or seminars, or hearings, etc. etc.
It’s a process. Holding environmentalists to a standard of non-use is ludicrous, for so many reasons, one of them being there are next to no available alternatives. The more those alternatives come online — a goal of environmentalists — the more protesters will commit to non-use. We all win when that happens, and anyone who stands in the way of this in effect seeks the destruction of the planet.
The rationales and motives vary for pushing the absurd idea that people can’t ever use a resource they protest against. They range from an innocent misunderstanding of how protest works, how the world works, how complex our modern world is, how dependent we’ve become on various technologies — to a cynical attempt to crush all protest. The bottom line for me is this:
I don’t give a shit what they say. It has less than zero impact on what the protests mean, what the protesters stand for, and what they’re trying to accomplish. The best thing we can do as human beings who care about the planet is to absoLUTELY ignore the voices accusing those protesters of hypocrisy. They’re not worth a second of our time. They’re either too ignorant to understand what they’re demanding of people, or they know full well that if their words were heeded, all protests of this kind would be nearly impossible — or, at best, severely weakened. The people pushing this meme, through their useful idiots, fall into the latter category.
Another quick comment.
Trump came out with a new policy to radically increase military spending, and to ramp up the size and strength of the military — well beyond what the Pentagon itself is calling for. So much for the concept that he’ll be less hawkish than Clinton.
And, of course, he wants to do this while slashing revenues to the Treasury, with his massive tax cuts for the rich. Reagan Redux.
We have two horrible choices, in my view (if we go by who is going to win). But Trump really is much worse.
I’m still voting for Stein.
