Sonori

I mean, regulating air pollution and managing air quality in cities was literally the reason Republican president Richard Nixon created the environmental protection agency in the first place, and it has managed vehicle emissions standards for decades, so this very much feels like the agency doing exactly what it was created to do and has long done.

Well There’s Your Problem episode on how so much rubbish and corpses get up there in the first place.

Don’t forget Putin bravely defending himself against western imperialism by invading neighboring nations, and how he must secretly be a communist no matter how much of the country he has privatized and sold off to his cronies.

Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.

As we all know, the Catholic Church is a famously anti-God institution, what with all their talk about combating climate change and not destroying the planet God left for us./s

To be fair and provide a decent answer your rhetorical question, a lot of people in general and his constituents in particular believe that a lot of his actions, especially his vetoing of a whole host of progressive laws passed by the California legislature, has been driven by an desire to succeed Biden by wishing to appear moderate following the decades long Democratic political strategy of being just to the left of the Republicans as to appear to moderates.

This has gennerally frustrated a lot of his constituents, who feel that by vetoing anything that might not appeal to theoretical swing state voters the governor is putting his own political ambitions ahead of his duty to the state and the work of the rest of the party to draft and pass these laws in the first place.

All of this context means he is seen as already focusing primarily on trying to win over swing states by his own constituents, and as such it’s worth noting to a national audience that this guy really, really wants to be president of the US and him making comments that might alienate moderates is a noteworthy event as well as providing any reason at all for them to care what he says.

Unrequested brilliant take over.

Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.

More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.

Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.

Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.

To be fair, carbon markets and carbon taxes are two very different things. One gives you an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for your emissions by giving a pittance to a paper reduction, and the other gets promptly repealed once in danger of being finalized because oil and gas companies raise prices and then claim it’s due to said taxes despite said taxes never actually taking effect, see Australia.

I agree that the oil company support for carbon taxes are because they think they’ll either never get implemented and are easy to remove once put in place due to public outcry, but I suspect a carbon market is something that they want implemented because it allows for business as useful.

Arsenic, mercury, gallium, tellurium, and cadmium are all heavy metal waste products produced in quantity for semiconductor manufacturing, are commonly landfilled, pose extreme risk to human health if they ever managed to leach out of the landfill and into a aquifer, and being heavy metals have no non-nuclear method of decay. Given the primary risk of high grade nuclear is also that it is made up of toxic hevey metals that might be dangerous if lost to the local aquifer, it seems fair to compare the two.

Semiconductor manufacturing also makes heavy use of PFAS materials, which while less directly dangerous to human health still do end up measurably entering and contamating the environment through plant wastewater streams. Once in the environment, these also tend to last for between six hundred to a thousand years before being broken down or sequestered.

I don’t think my society will last a hundreds of thousands of years, but i’m pretty sure a society of people in the area will, and if not, then it isn’t a problem because evidently there is evidently no one around to harm. Structures like landfill barriers are not likely to last that long on their own, and as such it falls on people to renew and maintain them for as long as there are people around anyway. Hence why it is imperative that the local government knows about and monitors the site.

All of this is true regardless of which specific heavy metal or acid is stored at the site, though given the small quantity of nuclear waste makes up of similarly harmful industrial wastes it is going to be easier to manage on that face alone.

Obviously humanity hasn’t made anything that lasted tens of thousands of years, we weren’t building anything significant tens of thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of local governments and buildings that have lasted thousands of years, and which are probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

Except that is hardly unique to nuclear waste. A wide variety of industrial processes produce high grade chemical waste, especially electronics like computers, solar panels, and inverters. This is just as deadly as any nuclear waste, and if stumbled upon will kill just as quickly in a hundred years, a thousand years, million years, or a billion years.

There is however a well established solution to this problem, and that is making sure the government knows what and where it is as well as that someone it monitoring and securing the site. The actual chemical makeup of the stuff that kills you doesn’t actually matter all that much compared to makeing sure it stays where it’s supposed to be.

Why are you expecting that hydrogen to be made into electricity? While there are silly ideas like using it in small scale applications like cars or buses, most hydrogen is used to produce things like fertilizer or steel, and while there are newly developed processes that are less reliant on hydrogen, we are unlikely to be able to scale them up drom lab sized for decades.

Being able to replace this hydrogen with stuff made from solar power rather than methane steam reformation would present a major reduction in emissions, and at the rate we are building out renewables it is far more likely that we will have the necessary renewables long before we have scaled up the alternative processes.

So what your saying is that you have gone through years of therapists telling you not to transition every two weeks, and accidentally been given a medication that delayed the decision until you were more mature and which you could stop taking at any time with no serious side effects. Turely that was a fate so horrible that it’s worth taking the decision away from the thirty thousand English for which it was demonstrably the right decision.

The scientists of the 1880s, through every decade up to the modern day were all so terrified of being called transphobes that they secretly conspired to fake the entire field’s research? Right, that makes sense.

You definitely promise that they’d be canceled too, and not given constant interviews by the Daily Mail, Fox News(the largest and most watched television news station in America), and the BBC(looking to show both sides of banning only certain people from getting otherwise uncontroversial and freely prescribed medication). None of thouse outlets would ever be interested in interviewing them say things their editors are pushing for.

They would also certainly not then get millions in dollars to continue their research by groups like the Heritage Foundation, the group which in 2016 focused group tested ways to create new culture war issues and identified the decades old practice of prescribing puberty blockers to children who have fought through years of therapy as one of the effective things for conservative outlets and politicians to push.

Yes, questioning children should be given love, therapy, and the choice to delay the permanent changes brought on by puberty until they are an adult and can make an informed decision, and not forced to because a politician copied an American far right party’s method to distract voters form the impacts of their economic policies by screwing over the thirty thousand English who are physically incapable of otherwise loving their own bodies.

Trans people know they should be the other gender and that puberty causes massive permanent changes to their body they are horrified by. They often do not know that everyone else around them’s deepest fantasy isn’t to wake up one day as the other sex.

They do not know that there is a easy and harmless way to delay these permanent changes effecting their bodies until they are an adult and can make a informed decision, that if started early enough these medications create a path to eliminate the need for nearly all of the intensive surgeries that are otherwise in their future, can be stoped at any time if they don’t want to continue with it, or that these medications are deemed harmless enough to be freely handed out to their fellow cis children for a wide body of disorders, but which the NHS suddenly requires years of regular therapy trying to talk them out of it to “prove” they are deserving of if there is even a hint of them being trans.

Yes, this means that the NHS has for decades required that the child and their parents must know they are trans and how they feel about the exact effect of puberty years before the child even starts puberty in order to gain the majority of the benefits from these medications which doctors can freely prescribe for non trans children without any of these barriers.

When you talk about the recent UK “research” you are talking about the Cass report yes? The report that outright stated it ignored over a century of scientific research because thouse papers went double blind, meaning they secretly gave an equal number of cis children puberty blockers without their knowledge or gave trans children sugar pills without them realizing they are still going through puberty, which was subsequently ridiculed as a purely politically driven by hundreds of UK pediatricians and experts in the field, who’s authors were actively helping draft policy with American far right politicians that defines a child gaining any acess to puberty blockers or even social transition as child abuse and requiring years of prison time for the parents, and who despite all this own author’s stated that even with their standards that while the NHS gives little support for non-binary children the high barriers it maintains against trans children pausing puberty, socially transitioning, and other forms of gender confirming care are actively harming them.

But hey, if so many people are apparently treating acess to these medications as no big deal dispite all the evidence to the contrary, why do nearly half of trans people in the UK end of having to get these medications from grey market dealers in southern europe instead of their local chemist?

The rate of renewable construction however is still skyrocketing, which is why in a few years it is expected to not only be replacing new generation but quickly replacing existing generation as well. Hence why gobal carbon emissions are expected to peak sometime this or next year.

More to the point, even if all industry stoped and we ignored that the same industry is responsible for making all the replacements for fossil equipment, we would still be seeing vast increases in electricity consumption, as sectors that are currently run almost entirely fossil fuels like heating and transportation moved from fossil fuels to electricity.

While electric technologies like heat pumps and motors are thankfully twice to several times more energy efficient than furnaces, boilers, and engines, they still use vast quantities of electricity, and given that these sectors tend to be on par with if not significantly larger than the current electrical generation capacity, and as such replacing them with things that don’t inharently emit carbon will necessitate a vast increase in generation capacity.

If anything I’d think the idea that we can just improve the efficiency of things that emit carbon is what has long been proven unviable, as a more efficient furnace or gas car still inherently emits carbon while even a inefficient heat pump or metro does not.

I used to think that a decade or so ago, but between things like the Texas districts profiting most from wind being the most against it to basically everything this congress has done, it is become increasingly clear that Trump successfully made ‘owning the libs’ the party’s primary platform.

They are already cheaper long term, near parity short term, and charging corridors have gone from just along freeways to most highways, but most Republicans will still call them useless vanity items because why would you give up the ‘freedom’ of gas.

You are taking about a party where a significant portion have been sold massive impractical pickup trucks that never get off the pavement because of marketing that a big expensive truck is ‘manly’ and ‘free’. In that paradime, where a car is a form of personal expression based on marketing, things like practically or cost are not going to be significant factors in decision making.

After all, if the practicality or cost were driving factors, every Republican would drive a Japanese sedan or van and bike everywhere they could.

Even if every quibble was solved, we’d still see pushback because ‘I just don’t like it’, or ‘rolling coal owns the libs’.