The Environment

[BigRedBuster]

1 hour ago, Frott Scost said:

I mean whats your definition of moderate? If I was polled id say i was moderate and Im an independent also. Lots of people say theyre moderate until they are asked issue by issue. But you consider me extreme because I want healthcare for everyone. The older people got the more they voted for Trump. Those are the so called “moderates.” The youth are progressive and voted overwhelming for Biden. 

Where have I said you’re extreme?

[Ratt Mhule]

1 minute ago, BigRedBuster said:

Where have I said you’re extreme?

You said Bernie is extreme. I happen to agree with a lot of what he says, so I would think I would be extreme in your eyes also. But if im not, then I apolgize. 

[Dr. Strangelove]

7 hours ago, BlitzFirst said:

 

 

I'd take Bernie over any politician on the planet.  He's the real deal.  I also happen to agree with a lot he says so I too would be "extreme".

Bernie is certainly a politician, and acts like most others. I am personally not a fan of Bernie's style, particularly his 2020 Primary campaign. 

 

But look, for those in this thread that think Bernie beats Trump, look no further than NE02, where Kara Eastman ran on Bernie style politics and underperformed Joe Biden heavily.

 

In fact, the Cook Political Report identified 25 swing house races and Democrats lost every. single. one. Biden also outperformed each Democratic candidate in those races. 

 

The conclusion is that, in America, the geographical reality is that we're a center-right country. People voted for GOP candidates but against Trump in districts and states that matter.

[knapplc]

 

[Archy1221]

Wallstreetbets has the funniest tweet back to SEC today.  Wish I knew how to post a NSFW tweet with some crude language and hide it while still posting so those who wanted could read.  

[Archy1221]

Whooops wrong thread.  Sorry. 

[Archy1221]

While the court declared the government guilty of inaction, it rejected a claim for damages by the four NGOs that brought the suit, ordering the government to pay just one symbolic euro to them instead. 
 

what’s the point of having standards then 

[RedDenver]

  

5 minutes ago, Archy1221 said:

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/

The dire famine forecast is by a Stanford biologist who predicts it because of population increases and lack of population control not climate change. It's even conveniently highlighted.

 

The everyone will disappear in a blue cloud of steam is by the same biologist as the previous one (Paul Ehrlich), and is about population control, lack of food resources, and pollution contamination - again not climate change.

 

The next link is at least from a scientist at NCAR, who predicts that by about 2033 we'll consume more oxygen in the US than the green plants in the US can provide. I'm not sure if that's currently true or not, but I doubt it. His prediction that we'll end up boiling dry all the rivers and lakes in the continental US is laughable though. Definitely a crackpot.

 

The next article is again by Paul Ehrlich from the first two articles.

 

Scanning the rest it looks like there's about 5 articles on global cooling and/or a coming ice age. All of them are from 1971-1978 and all wrongly state that the global average temperature was declining when in actuality it was high in the 1940's, so went down in the 1950's but was increasing from the 1950's onward. I haven't dug into the researchers that the articles are referencing, but it looks like either bad scientific reporting or bad science by the researchers.

 

There's some acid rain articles that have nothing to do with climate change.

 

There's some about increasing droughts and more hot days in the summer, which have both come true.

 

There's some articles about islands losing ground due to rising sea levels, which have also come true.

 

There's an article about the Arctic becoming free of ice, which is also coming true.

 

I might have missed a couple, but basically there's some articles by Paul Ehrlich, who isn't a climate scientist and isn't talking about climate change, the crackpot NCAR scientist, and the bad science in the 1970's predicting an ice age because they somehow weren't actually looking at the data. But the rest are predicting what's actually happening.

[FrantzHardySwag]

[RedDenver]

1 minute ago, FrantzHardySwag said:

It's really weird to claim nuclear is clean and safe but ignore the radioactive waste issue. We have no known means to contain that waste for thousands of years. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, which is about how long human civilization has existed.

[FrantzHardySwag]

4 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

It's really weird to claim nuclear is clean and safe but ignore the radioactive waste issue. We have no known means to contain that waste for thousands of years. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, which is about how long human civilization has existed.

Still way better than coal, and with renewables you need reliable energy. Renewables are the best, but it needs support from nuclear so we can get rid of coal.

 

"This number may sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite small. In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."

 

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel

[deedsker]

I think "not in my backyard" is harder to stomach than the technical issues relating to the spent fuel. We have large pieces of federal land that is kinda useless in the Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Oregon, and Idaho.

[RedDenver]

30 minutes ago, FrantzHardySwag said:

Still way better than coal, and with renewables you need reliable energy. Renewables are the best, but it needs support from nuclear so we can get rid of coal.

 

"This number may sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite small. In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."

 

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel

It's better than coal for greenhouse gases, but how many acres of farmland could be rendered unusable by that amount of contamination? And after 70 years of nuclear energy, we still have no long-term plan to deal with the radioactive waste because it's such a difficult problem. Nuclear fission is just kick the can down the road IMO, and we have better options.

[Enhance]

51 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

It's really weird to claim nuclear is clean and safe but ignore the radioactive waste issue. We have no known means to contain that waste for thousands of years. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, which is about how long human civilization has existed.

(For background, my dad worked for a nuclear power company for 35 years.)

 

Safely storing nuclear waste isn't actually that big of a deal in the long term. Most of the waste collected in recent decades was transported by rail to safe storing locations, often housed in something called a 'dry cask.' And the material itself isn't like what people may think or imagine i.e. a bucket of green hazard waste that could leak into the soil and pollute natural resources. The fuel rods are largely just left to their own devices, and it's very unlikely a dry cask would fail. And in the event that it did, the radioactive impact would be relatively minute.

 

The more 'dangerous' type of storage is what happens just after a fuel rod is spent when it is put inside a cooling tank. It's best to get them out of a cooling tank and into a dry cask within a few years of being spent because the cooling tanks pose a greater risk.

 

Nuclear energy, in and of itself, is still quite safe and powerful. The problem is that it has been regulated into the dirt in a variety of ways, which is a big reason the Fort Calhoun plant closed.

[FrantzHardySwag]

2 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

Nuclear fission is just kick the can down the road IMO, and we have better options.

We do but it won't power the whole grid and what happens when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Nuclear isn't perfect but give me renewables backed with nuclear over renewables backed by coal - any day of the week.