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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Wait a ding-dong minute here.  Wasn’t the top priority lowering the price of gasoline and eggs?

Won’t the MAGA crowd feel ripped off when they learn that Trump and his appointees couldn’t care less about them?

Just kidding.  The answer is no.  There is exactly nothing that the incoming president could do, no crime or act of betrayal he could commit that would weaken the loyalty of the rank and file Trump supporter.

He hates ethnic/religious minorities, intellectuals, and woke liberals, and that’s all that matters.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

While what Bill Nye said here is true, here are a couple of points:

Obviously, there are parts of the globe that will be inhabitable far into the future, even as most of the globe is subject to extreme levels of heat, desertification, flooding, etc.  Here, I’m talking about land masses that are far above sea-level, and relatively cool, due to their latitudes.  For example, most of Canada will be in good shape far longer than India.

We keep talking about space migration, i.e., exporting humankind to another planet.  That means finding a new home for all our greed, stupidity, and tribalism.  Doesn’t sound appealing to me.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

I had the opportunity to meet a fellow from Norway the other day who confirmed the unbelievable scale of EV adoption in his country.

Out of curiosity, I asked where in the country he lives.  He named the town, but it was unfamiliar to me.  “Near Oslo?” I asked.  “Not really,” he replied. “About 800 miles north of Oslo; 300 miles above the Arctic Circle.  67 days of darkness every winter.”

Yes, that’s different.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The reader who sent me this answers his own question “bottled water.”

Excellent response.  Staying hydrated is a very strong idea, but ruining the planet with microplastic is horrendous.  How hard is it to re-use containers?

The other thing that inflames me about bottled water is that it enriches companies like Nestle, Pepsico (Aquafina) and Coca Cola (Dasani), some of the most destructive agents on the planet.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This meme presents an extremely pessimistic statement about America’s future.

Yes, it’s possible that Trump will succeed in the tasks he wants to take on, e.g., weaponizing the justice system against his enemies, removing rule of law as it applies to him, further wrecking public education, removing environmental protections, using military aggression against our allies, and so forth.  But he’ll need to fight hard to achieve these victories; he’ll face some fierce opposition.

Sure will be interesting.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

If you’re a conspiracy theorist who believes that only 3% of scientists are honest, you most certainly have never known anyone who plays a role in this discipline.

Now, you don’t have to be a QAnon/MAGA  Trump supporter to harbor this type of BS in your mind.  A few years ago, I attended a lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara where the speaker asserted that science, especially climate science, is now a matter of politics, rather than science per se, and that the subject of climate change is being forced upon us by people with PhDs whose work is all about government funding that has no basis in reality.

That’s quite an accusation, given, as it was, without any evidence.  The president of the university got a letter from me the next day. Some random guy is impugning the integrity of tens of thousands of our world’s most intelligent people?

If you happen to be an honest person who for some reason wants to maintain this asinine idea, do yourself a favor.  Make a few phone calls, or send a few emails to the people who have dedicated their entire adult lives to understanding the phenomenon of global warming.

That’s what I did, about 15 years ago, in the course of writing my four books.  Speaking with real scientists does wonders in cleansing oneself of ignorance.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

As presented at left, Americans love to complain about taxation.  Yet most people in the rest of the developed world don’t mind paying taxes, in some cases at higher rates than ours here in the U.S., because they derive significant benefits in terms of free education and healthcare, higher minimum wages, longer paid vacations, maternity/paternity leaves, etc.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I just met a senior executive at HopSkipDrive, an organization with an Uber-like business model, but one that focuses on providing a safe, reliable alternative school transportation solution.  My new friend says that the typical schoolchild might be in foster care, or have some disability that would make him ineligible for the “yellow bus.”

He told me that he feels that he’s making a difference by getting kids to school who otherwise would be missing that opportunity.  I agreed and added encouragement in that he’s helping to buck the trend in the United States whereby the American educational system becomes less valuable with each passing year.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The meme here may sound damning to some Americans, but keep in mind that the majority of U.S. voters either think that Trump was treated unfairly by the woke elite or never even heard about the indictments.

I have a friend who lives on a steady diet of Fox News, and when I asked her about Jack Smith, she said she didn’t know who he is.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

A reader asks:  I really wish I could come up with a better adverb than “really” to emphasize or to express enthusiasm, which I really use way too often. But I really can’t think of one that does it better.

I taught my kids to try to find a word that doesn’t need “really” or “very” to communicate exactly what is intended. It’s not “really big”; it’s “gargantuan.”

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