I’ve always thought 350.org founder Bill McKibben was a bit off, but with this op-ed in the Guardian, he’s really made the case for it.
The Trump administration knows the planet is going to boil. It doesn’t care
Bill McKibben
n the cloud of toxic dust thrown up by the Kavanaugh hearings last week, two new Trump initiatives slipped by with less notice than they deserve. Both are ugly, stupid – and they are linked, though in ways not immediately apparent.
In the first, the administration provided the rationale for scrapping President Obama’s automobile mileage standards: because Trump’s crew now officially expects the planet to warm by 4C . In the environmental impact statementthey say it wouldn’t make much difference to the destruction of the planet if we all keep driving SUVs.
The news in that statement is that administration officials serenely contemplate that 4C rise (twice the last-ditch target set at the Paris climate talks). Were the world to actually warm that much, it would be a literal hell, unable to maintain civilizations as we have known them. But that’s now our policy, and it apparently rules out any of the actions that might, in fact, limit that warming. You might as well argue that because you’re going to die eventually, there’s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.
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This will, of course, get steadily worse in the years ahead – every climate forecast shows deserts spreading and water evaporating across the region. And of course more migration will follow, in every corner of the world. The World Bank predicts we may see 140 million climate migrants before long, and given the chaos that even a million people fleeing the (partially drought-fueled) crisis in Syria created, we better come to grips. Some of that migration will be internal – perhaps six million people will abandon their coastal property in Florida alone, according to recent reports. And much of it will be international, as people flee because their lives depend on it.
Telling people to stay home is not an option – when there’s no water, or when the floods come each year, or when the sea rises into your kitchen, people have to leave. Period.
And telling people to stay home is not a moral option, either. Because the climate chaos setting off waves of refugees is born above all from the unconstrained migration of carbon dioxide molecules from America over the last century. No wall can prevent the exhaust from our armada of oversized cars from raising the temperature in Mexico; if Guatemala could ship its changed climate back north it doubtless would, but it can’t. We have to realize that global warming stems from the fact that we are a world without atmospheric borders, where the people who have done the least to cause the problem feel its horrors first and hardest. That’s why, over the last half-decade, the environmental and migrant-rights movement have grown ever closer.
The Trump years are a fantasy land where we pretend we can go on living precisely as in the past, unwilling even to substitute electric SUVs for our gas guzzlers, and able to somehow insist that the rest of the world stay locked in place as well. It’s impractical, it’s unfair, and when it ends up with camps for kids in the desert it’s downright evil.
Full story here
“Telling people to stay home is not an option…”
So we have to open our borders and allow climate refugees into our country because climate change won’t cause the same problems here as it will everywhere else on the planet. Is that what he’s saying? Why would there be less warming, fewer storms, and fewer climate catastrophes here than elsewhere? And wouldn’t Canada and Scandinavia be better places to escape warming? But why do we need to start allowing climate refugees in right away before the 4 degree increase has even happened? Is Bill afraid it isn’t going to happen so he needs to implement his political agenda now, before he’s discovered to be a charlatan?
Hustlers, all them.
Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson hustle the race card to make their living.
Gubment and academic climate scientists hustle the climate change card to make their living.
And so to does Bill McKibben hustle his ridiculous sensational claims on climate to make a living.
But it happens on the “right” too.
Hustlers like Alex Jones of InfoWars hustle their fake conspiracy claims to make a living.
All the above depend on a large ignorant, brainwashed population, so even a small fraction is enough people who will believe them to offer them money for their lies — to hear stories they want to believe..
Doesn’t Boiling Bill get it ? He and the other eco wacho’s have been replaced by a new batch of trailer trash
claiming hurt feelings from 35 years ago when they started to play with boys .
Even Al Gore realizes he just can’t compete with MSM suffering from Donald Trump derangement syndrome . As CNN viewership tanks even Ted Turner has called them out .
Rant on mad men Trump is playing you for the dumb asses you are .
Bill McKibben would lead a good comedy team in a rubber room, bouncing their heads off the walls.
And meanwhile UAH satellite data continues a downward trend. At this rate it will be below baseline next year during this long minimum, however AGW people will have us burning in hell and plants suffering from thicker leaves.
“You might as well argue that because you’re going to die eventually, there’s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.”
Now who has time to smoke a cigarette every waking 5 minutes, or every 7 minutes if you could do so in your sleep also in order to be able to smoke a carton/day?
In New York a carton of cigarettes runs just over $1000. That would be over $3000/month. How many people can afford half that?
In fact, there is enough nicotine in a carton of most cigarettes to kill 6 adults if consumed over 24 hours. There are plenty of reasons not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day, and McKibbon is an idiot.
Just over $100 for a carton of cigarettes in NY.
This dude is unhinged.
McKibben is an out-and-out crackpot.
He is a modern day Rasputin to the well-intentioned but horribly misguided and guilt-ridden Rockefellers.
McKibben accuses President Trump of having illusions.
From a man clearly suffering from delusions.
lol.
Bill McKibben using the word “evil”. Either he doesn’t know the meaning of the word or hopes you don’t. Lies and misleading propaganda flung out by this man for decades to enrich himself. That’s meaning of the word.
350.org founder Bill McKibben: The only thing I can say is his pay check depends on such type of hype. I would like to know which stocks are in his retirement fund. I bet he owns a large number of shares in Tesla and solar panels companies.
“Telling people to stay home is not an option – when there’s no water, or when the floods come each year,”
That’s why we get out and build dams Bill and we’ve found it’s best to take advantage of the internal combustion engine rather than picks and shovels but if you really must, feel free to gather like minded folk together and get stuck in. They tell me if you do it with forks and spoons it creates more useful jobs for the like minded folk.
There probably will be 140 million refugees at some point if there isn’t already, (economic-political refugees) but it won’t be because of an abundance of CO2 molecules and CAGW. Geez, I am a climate refugee every winter along with millions and millions of others from all around the northern hemisphere fleeing the annual ice age (winter). But boiling oceans? Of course it is nonsense, and let him rant and rave because even the sheeple in his own flock know he is off his rocker and well into the deep end. The more insane the ranting becomes the more we know we are winning this nonsense war on CO2. Almost everyone I know, even the converted, all this nonsense goes in one ear and out the other. Not many actually believe the end of the world doomsday warming bit.
It is exactly because of the utilization of carbon products, mostly fossil fuels, that we even have a modern world order with all its technological advancements. And we will always be a carbon dominated species and economy, albeit we won’t have the luxury of cheap fossil fuels forever. But those are just details that will be figured out when the price point dictates so. We are so, so lucky that we are debating a warming world and whether that will be good for us into the long term future and if any of the predictions made in the 20th century would have been correct about the state of the planet by 2018, then we would have seen some of the effects by now. But on every metric compared to the world of a few generations ago, the world is a better place, politics notwithstanding. That isn’t to say everything is just rosy, and there are no issues or challenges, just that the biosphere is doing very well and is healthy overall.
If it were a drastically cooling world 4.5 degrees colder, like the beginning of an ice age, then much of what Bill was crowing about would be true, except for the boiling part. They have the shoe on the wrong foot. It is always a cooling world that is so instantaneously damaging to society and the world. That is what leads to immediate political instability and societal collapse. Not warming. And that has happened numerous times throughout the recent 5,000 year old history of humanity on the good Earth.
The news in that statement is that administration officials serenely contemplate that 4C rise (twice the last-ditch target set at the Paris climate talks). Were the world to actually warm that much, it would be a literal hell, unable to maintain civilizations as we have known them.
and yet civilizations cope just fine with the “literal hell” that happens each year as the temps rise many multiple of 4C in the transition from Winter to Summer.
E=MC^2
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[“Please answer in the form of a question.” /Jeopardy TV game show host .mod]
The science behind the mathematical equation E=MC^2 is discomfiting.
Please debunk.