Biden promises massive emission restrictions!
 

This is not going to bode well for aviation:

https://reason.com/2021/01/12/biden-...ate-agreement/

I like the 2035 grid generation goal, that will force everybody to either poop or get off pot. And they only way to get there in 14 years is with nuclear. So we'll see how serious they are in the next 3-4 years.

The 2050 goal was always nebulous and aspirational. That's not happening unless they can get the grid sorted out well in advance.

My state has a 100% renewable electricity by 2045 legislated goal.
Seems difficult since over 60% is petroleum and about 10% coal.
Living on an Island also makes air transportation critical and while aircraft keep getting more efficient, it is literally tons of fuel for a single airliner to reach here.

I love the idea of solar and wind power, and even driving a Tesla. But it shouldn't be forced on anyone, and the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers. It should be a result of a free market merit.

Plus there's not enough of it to practically get where they want to go. Unless they plan on restricting travel... I guess they could make all non-business travel subject to official approval, perhaps you'd go to your neighborhood party boss for a travel pass.

you realize the government has been subsidizing the oil and gas lobby for decades... the government "picking winners and losers" as you call it has always been going on, so I don't really understand this objection.

regardless, the way the "free market" prices fuel externalizes the cost of carbon pollution. Just because you can get gas for 2 bucks a gallon doesn't mean there are not other costs incurred downstream. This is why people advocate carbon pricing, because it harnesses the free market to solve the problem of carbon emissions by including externalized costs in the price of fossil fuels.

Wind power on the wings of an aircraft. 🤪

That may well be.

But the challenge is rapidly transitioning to a different system while the current one has many economic stakeholders... if you discount the stakeholders (including tens of millions of working people in the US alone) and just assume they're all going to eff off and die when their livelihoods vanish you're going to fail politically. Solutions have to account for political realities... ESPECIALLY since the problem at hand is nebulous, controversial, and very hard to define in specific terms of exactly how and when the problem will play out.

Read and enjoy, Comrades.

https://roanoke.com/business/local/s...9211cb193494d9

They shouldn't be doing that either.

Except that carbon emissions are not a real problem. It only exists as a problem in the minds of the global warming myth/hoax crowd.

I live on 45 acres in Nashville and ‘offset’ the carbon of 140 cars annually. I can’t wait to send the city a bill for this service.

It doesn’t help that there are still people out there insisting that climate change isn’t real and misrepresenting the way solar and wind power work.

“Windmills cause cancer!”
”If you put up too many windmills then the wind may stop blowing!”
”The sun went down, I guess we can’t watch TV tonight.”

These are all ridiculous statements made by people in our government.

Plenty of utter ignorance on both sides of that debate.

The real problem with climate science is that NOBODY has any experience with analysis and prediction of the potential for long-term changes caused by man on anything like a planetary scale. We're in uncharted territory, so when people make assertions about what *will* happen in X number of years, it's very easy to show that they don't have any empirical data or any model that's known to be accurate for extrapolation at that scale.

I'm not trying to assert how accurate or not the predictions are, we simply don't know. I'm pointing out why it's so hard to get all of society on board with severe, life-altering austerity in the hopes of averting something which we cannot accurately predict.

For that reason any viable solutions will need to keep human and political realities front and center... basically going to need to allow people to keep their lifestyles and economies while getting rid of excess CO2.

Otherwise a lot of people will just live their lives and take their chances. I'm mostly one of those, because I'm an engineer and the global warming advocates are so emotionally vested in fringe technology and politically infeasible austerity that they're sabotaging their own efforts. Wholesale nuclear power (using safe, standardized modern core designs) is the only conceivable way of getting there by 2050. Added benefit is that if necessary you can build extra nuke plants co-located with industrial scale carbon-capture systems to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere (all proven technology). That may be necessary to reverse the inertia of climate change; it may not be enough to stop putting CO2 in the air. But again we won't know for sure until we get there.

My point is that we have people in charge who would rather make outrageous claims like those I mentioned so that they can either pocket money from lobbyists or because they’re ignorant and too lazy to educate themselves. Either way, it does nothing to benefit society, it just creates, wait for it.... more divisiveness.

Climate change is real because the climate is dynamic; in a constant state of change. But are humans affecting it, and to what extent? Anyone who says they know for sure is lying. That's the real issue at hand.

Should we seek out greener alternatives? Absolutely. Should we strive to pollute less? Absolutely.

Should we stifle our economy or incur onerous regulations and taxes because we might maybe possibly potentially be changing the climate 1/2 of 1 degree centuries down the road? Hell no.

You have to understand, and I think you do, at it's core, radical environmentalism is being used as a vehicle to advance socialism. I'm not talking about reasonable pollution laws that prevent you from ruining your neighbor's land, air, or water.

There is a very subtle ideology at play among the radical environmentalists that humans are a scourge on Mother Earth and that we need less humans; it's practically a eugenics cult.

They want us all to travel nowhere, breed less, eat grass, and revert back to the stone age. Peel it back and that is the real agenda for a lot of that crowd.

Again, I agree. I think you’re drastically understating scientist estimates regarding the severity of the increase in global temperatures, but I don’t really feel like looking it up right now.

What is the most conservative approach? To assume that change is needed and start preparing for it. Maybe do that by investing in research on ways to be more “green”. In order to prevent damage to the economy, maybe invest money in businesses that can help us be more energy efficient and invest money in training people who work in coal and oil to work in wind and solar. Someone should actually draft a proposal for that. Maybe they could call it the Green New Deal! Have you read it?

If you're pushing the Green delusional Deal then you're not an airline pilot.:rolleyes:

I guess I have to start screenshotting my replies if they’re just going to get deleted. I’d love to know the reason that one was deleted.

I guess I’ll just say that if you haven’t bothered to read it, but you think the Green New Deal, a non binding resolution, is going to damage the airline industry, then you’re just ignorant.

Ok, we have delusional on one side, ignorant on the other.

How about some discussion of the actual points and merits, since we as an industry are probably going to be stuck with some form or aspects of GND...


Something about hannity and the brown woman?

Okay, since you're pushing it, what's in it for our industry? I may have missed in all honesty.

I’m not “pushing” the green new deal, I’ve just taken the time to read it so I don’t get defensive and fear for my job when someone mentions it.

This is the problem with our country! We, as a society, have become so ****ing lazy, that we won’t read a simple 14 page document that is double spaced, large font, and actually pretty easy to read. Instead we leave it to the talking heads on TV to tell us what is in these documents and give them the opportunity to twist it in order to push their own agenda.

The green new deal is basically just invest money to make transportation more energy efficient and invest money to train people who currently work in coal and oil to work in solar and wind. It is a non-binding resolution that merely lays out goals to work towards, [MOD EDIT]

Read it for yourself: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/h...6hres109ih.pdf

This guy definitely gets it :-)

This is one of my favorite quotes from Bill Bryson’s book, a short history of nearly everything:

“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”


The most relevant part being this:

“Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant.”

Now I don’t doubt that we humans are making a significant impact on our environment, but when you look at it like this, it kind of makes one wish we had a larger sample size to work with.

Anyway, this is an interesting thread and look forward to continued civil discourse.

I’m all for a Pigovian tax on carbon to allow free market economics price the externalities—just waiting for democratically elected politician propose one. Probably still waiting in 2050. Everybody wants to go to Heaven, nobody wants to do what’s required.

About the same amount of time that a bullet would take to hit an artery and bleed you out. Maybe we are Earth’s bullet.

The end is near.

Pretty arrogant assumption there lol.

Is it? 70,300 nuclear weapons were in the world in 1986. That’s a pretty big bullet, lucky it wasn’t fired. I’m certain with almost 8 billion of us we have the capacity to end the world as we know it. Life will go on though.

Though 10's of thousands fewer warheads today, there is still a staggering amount of them.
So with that addition I will modify your post with adding one word to "lucky it wasn't fired"............yet.

The US nuclear weapons deterred other enemy countries from dropping nuclear weapons they had on other countries, allies, and the US. MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) actually works, wether it is with someone who will punch back in a street fight or with nuclear weapons.

Transworld,

It works until it doesn't.

Partly due to how nuclear weapons have been, and likely still are, used in international politics; partly due to chaos theory;
partly due to laws of probability; and partly due to possible breakdown of industrial civilization from global warming/resource depletion/insolvent world economy I have my doubts as to MAD working forever. Considering the consequences of it's failing
I hope my doubts never prove true.
As long as the 2 largest nuclear powers mutually use MAD we can not know that it will work.
It only has so far.

There's no other alternative, can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Nobody expects MAD to work perfectly, or prevent all use of nuclear weapons. I almost expect at least one will get used this century. But lower-tier nuclear powers having a small nuclear exchange does not equate to Armageddon, and neither does nuclear terrorism. I'm pretty sure even major powers could get in a tactical nuclear exchange and still walk it back.

What MAD does accomplish is stability, and compared to the cold war and USSR, the US and especially Russia are far more methodical and much further away from the brink (same for China, which is growing its arsenal). Processes are much more measured and deliberate, there's definitely not a hair trigger mentality. None of the major powers have any kind of fanatical idealogy any longer, and their leaders want to enjoy power over a thriving economy... they don't want to preside (via zoom from a bunker) over a devastated nation.

Now what we can (and should) do to reduce risk of accident (and severity if there's ever an all-out nuclear exchange) is to cut arsenals to the absolute minimum size necessary to ensure credible deterrence and first-strike survival. Can't get the genie back in the bottle, but we don't have to let it run amuck either. Arsenal size has to be balanced with ABM defenses... you need enough ABM to catch small numbers of shots (accidental or rogue nation) but not so much that you significantly degrade the other guy's deterrence. Our ABM capabilities are encouraging both Russia and China to improve arsenals and delivery systems.

There's simply no reality where the major powers can eliminate all weapons and trust each other. Plus then you'd have to get all the OTHER nations to renounce it, with verification procedures. Frankly Russia, China, and the US are too big to have any hope of being able to adequately verify that nobodies building bombs and missiles in the vastness of Mongolia, Siberia, or the western US. The problem needs to be managed, aggressively.

Hi Rick,

While my thoughts don't amount to a hill of beans (least of all posted on an obscure pilot board), I decided to try and give a bit of a reply to your lengthy one to myself. Hopefully it communicates a bit of my thinking on the subject.


The post you replied to was refuting the idea that MAD works. We truly don't know if it will work, and would only have a definitive answer if it fails.


Though you started out by stating that there is no alternative, you then proceeded to lay out some ideas of the only viable alternative that I have come up with, or heard from others.

You correctly point out some problems with complete nuclear disarmament. There are others and I have some disagreements on some details you suggest as to how use of nuclear weapons might play out. But those are irrelevant to the main idea of MAD. It doesn't matter if any of our thought scenarios comport with what could happen.


The Alternative: the only one with a current political possibility is what you suggested. The minimum number of weapons to provide a deterrence to nuclear attack.

With the current arsenals an all out nuclear war(which MAD is hoped to prevent)would almost surely lead to the end of civilization, and if nuclear winter is triggered possibly the extinction of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Creating a system where it's activation would cause such an outcome is truly madness, and I would argue only possible in societies that have lost sight of the lines between Good and Evil.


A war with only the minimum deterrence available for use would have horrific results, but possibly Civilization would survive.

I have coined it MAR...Mutually Assured Retaliation. (kind of what I assume is the aim of North Korea and China)

It would take massive work and out of the box thinking by all involved. (maybe even coloring outside the lines!)

For now it is the only plausible route I am aware of that could slide Civilization, and even mankind itself, out from under the proverbial Sword of Damocles.

For what it's worth

I say we have done a bang up job with the climate. A mere 43 years and we have prevented the coming of the second ice age.


Leonard Nimoy warns of the coming ice age.

Yes, I remember that was a thing when I was a kid.

A cover of Newsweek in 1975 had a headline, “The Coming Ice Age”. If I recall the photo was of an iceberg.

https://i.ibb.co/vB2qLb6/0025-C5-A7-...-DCCA077-E.jpg

“97% of all scientists agree that man made climate change (used to be global warming) is real. Anyone who disagrees is a climate denier, is a crackpot, and needs to be shut up.”

If one goes back and looks at the scientific articles published, only one fourth of the papers say man made climate change is real. A vast majority say maybe or maybe not, science is not clear, we just don’t know, we cannot conclude anything, please give us more money to study it.

This is the truth. I have read their analysis and background material. The politicians and media have twisted it and reported the 97% number, refusing to let the other information to be aired.

NASA is now saying they predict global cooling, due to diminished sun activity, part of its normal cycle of activity. That is directly contrary to what is stated, above.

One in Four. Wow. I thought there was agreement.