Guest ridiculing by David Middleton
I couldn’t make this sort of schist up if I was trying…
CLIMATE
It’s 2050 And This Is How We Stopped Climate Change
March 11, 20195:03 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Dan Charles
When NPR interviewed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in February about her Green New Deal, she said that her goal was bigger than just passing some new laws. “What I hope we’re able to do is rediscover the power of public imagination,” she said.
Well, we’re unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible future in which we’re bringing global warming to a halt. It’s a world in which greenhouse emissions have ended.
So — what does this world look like?
Mass Electrification (Batteries Hold The Power)
(Editor’s note: Each story has two sections, the first reflecting the present and the second imagining the world of 2050.)
2019: I went looking for people who’ve mapped out this world without greenhouse emissions. I found them in Silicon Valley.
Sila Kiliccote is an engineer. The back deck of her house, high up in the hills, overlooks Cupertino. Apple’s circular headquarters is hidden in the morning mist. It’s a long way from Istanbul, in Turkey, where she grew up; a great place to conjure up future worlds.
“Maybe you’d like some coffee?” Kiliccote says.
Her coffee machine is powered by solar panels on the roof. So is her laptop and her Wi-Fi.
“Everything runs on electricity in this house,” she says.
[…]
I’m fairly certain that the coffee machine, laptops and Wi-Fi in my house also run on electricity. I’m paying 10-11¢/kWh for my electricity. I wonder what they’re paying in Silicon Valley?
“What I hope we’re able to do is rediscover the power of public imagination.”
–Alexandria Occasional-Cortex
I may be reading this incorrectly… I am not 100% fluent in moron-ese… But it appears that human imagination will defeat climate change. If human imagination can defeat climate change… Well then, the sky’s the limit! Let’s polish off plate tectonics and entropy while we’re at it.
Here are some other “highlights”…
“By 2025, battery technology got cheaper,” she says. Electric cars were no longer more expensive. “At that point there was a massive shift to electric vehicles, because they were quieter, and cleaner, and [required] less maintenance. No oil change! Yippee! You know?”
Heating and cooling in homes and office buildings have gone electric, too. Gas-burning furnaces have been replaced with electric-power like heat pumps.
“Electric-power like heat pumps”… Yes he, like, actually wrote that, you know… (Possibly the most difficult sentence I have ever written).
We needed more electricity to power all this right when we were shutting down power plants that burned coal and gas. It took a massive increase in power from solar and wind farms. They now cover millions of acres in the U.S., 10 times more land than they did in 2020. Huge electrical transmission lines share electricity between North and South America.
Ten times more land, my @$$! Just to replace 274 GW of coal-fired generation, it would require a solar farm the size of Washington State or wind farm the size of Georgia. And that’s just to replace our current coal-fired generation capacity.
‘The Footprint of Energy: Land Use of U.S. Electricity Production’
Presumably, these green dimwits will also want to replace natural gas and nuclear generation… Plus, since “electric-power like heat pumps” will be replacing natural gas for heating and cooking… and the fact that a 100% electric passenger vehicle fleet would double our electricity consumption…
Maybe the Borg hostile terraforming image wasn’t so far off the mark.
At least they seem to realize that we’ll still need cement and steel…
Some big cement and steel plants still are burning coal or natural gas, but they also have to install massive plants to capture carbon dioxide from their smokestacks and put it back underground.
“We just had to kind of bite the bullet and say, ‘OK, if you’re making cement or steel, you are capturing and sequestering that CO2,'” Benson says. “And in some cases we actually had to say, ‘We’re not going to make those things here anymore'” because it wasn’t economically feasible to capture the CO2 emissions from that factory.
So… Where does she think the steel and cement plants will relocate to? The Moon? Mars? The Asteroid Belt? Note to Ms. Benson: CO2 emitted anywhere on Earth is the same as CO2 emitted here.
Big, long-distance freight trucks were a problem, too. “They’re really heavy, and batteries are really heavy, and if you have to put a whole bunch of batteries on a truck it’s really inefficient,” Benson says.
In some areas, like this one, our picture of the future gets a little fuzzy. Different guides to this 2050 world show me slightly different things.
Some of my guides see “electric highways” with wires overhead, and trucks tapping into the electric power in those wires the same way trains do. Others see trucks running on hydrogen fuel; we make that hydrogen using solar or hydro power.
Like electric-power like heat pumps wasn’t “fuzzy” enough? Why not just power the trucks with pixie dust or unicorn flatulence?
It appears that aircraft still are burning jet fuel. When you buy a plane ticket, you’re also paying to cancel out that flight’s carbon emissions, capturing an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air. This makes air travel expensive. Fortunately, we now have much faster trains. Teleconferencing helps, too.
Fast trains can’t cross oceans, not even really fast trains. And you can’t teleconference the steel and cement you’re making elsewhere over here to build solar and wind farms. I don’t think the entire mound of babble ever mentioned shipping… as in the big ships that haul big cargo across oceans and up large rivers.
The insanely insane thing, is that all of the nonsense they imagined wasn’t even the tricky bit.
Sally Benson is absolutely convinced about one thing. The hardest part of this journey wasn’t finding technical solutions. They all existed, even back in 2019. The hardest part was navigating the social disruption.
“The transformations were so profound that it really needed to be a collective effort,” she says.
Entire industries died — like oil exploration and gas furnace manufacturing. Others rose to take their place, as the country rebuilt its electrical systems. People didn’t know what would happen and they were scared. The changes only moved ahead when people were convinced that they weren’t getting ignored and left behind. It was the political struggle of a generation.
Now, in 2050, there’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
Over my 38 year career in oil exploration, I don’t think I’ve ever seen “oil exploration and gas furnace manufacturing” used in the same sentence. I figure I have at least 12-15 more years of oil exploring before I even think of retiring. That takes us out to 2031-2034. Any bets as to whether or not we’re still exploring for oil then? Any doubts that gas furnace manufacturers will still be manufacturing gas furnaces in 2050?
More “highlights”…
The Urbanization Of Everything (A Desire Named Streetcars)[…]
How did we do it? By gradually reshaping our cities so that they look more like this neighborhood, with lots of people living close together, within walking distance of many of the things they need.Keesmaat can already see this city in her mind, and describe it. “The vast majority of streets have been pedestrianized; that’s how people get around, by walking down the street,” she says.
“What has happened to the sprawling suburbs?” I ask. “Are people living there? How are they getting around?”
“Some of the large homes haven’t changed at all,” Keesmaat says. They’ve just been turned into multifamily units.” Other free-standing houses that once lined suburban cul-de-sacs have disappeared; each one has been replaced with a building that contains five or six homes. With the local population booming, those neighborhoods also attracted shops and offices. Suburban sprawl morphed into urban density.
Cars have mostly disappeared. “There are cars, but people don’t own cars,” Keesmaat says. “Because a car is something that you use occasionally when you need it.” Streetcars and buses go practically everywhere in the city now, and you rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes to catch one. Fast buses and trains connect towns. For other destinations, there’s car-sharing.
“2050? It’s a wonderful life!” says Daniel Hoornweg, another one of my guides to this zero-carbon world. He’s a professor of energy systems at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Years ago, he wrote a big report on cities and climate change for the World Bank.
Forced urbanization… Agenda 21… Maybe the black helicopter nonsense wasn’t quite as tin foil hat crazy as I thought it was. Let’s not leave out agriculture… Where’s the beef?
2050: The same way we stopped mining coal to generate electricity, we’ve stopped mining the soil to grow food.“It’s different now, in 2050,” Arango says with a smile.
In a world without climate change, this is what cattle grazing looks like, all over the tropics. Farmers aren’t letting cows wander across the landscape in search of something to eat. They’re treating their pasture like a valuable crop, which it really is.“This was critical, to change the mindset of cattle growers,” Arango says.
As a result, production is way up and “there is no need to cut the Amazon to do livestock production,” Arango says.Another critical change: Americans are eating a lot less beef now — per person, half what they ate in 2020. “That’s a really, really big deal,” Searchinger says.
Traveling the country, you now see alternatives to beef and dairy products everywhere. There are blended mushroom-beef burgers in fast food chains and non-dairy cheese on pizzas. They even taste pretty good, thanks to the creative genius of America’s finest food scientists.
If we won’t be “mining the soil to grow food,” where will it be coming from? Supermarkets?
If “blended mushroom-beef burgers” and “non-dairy cheese on pizzas” in 2050 “taste pretty good,” it won’t be due to anything that “America’s finest food scientists” did. It will be due to the fact that good chefs and fry cooks, particularly Cajun chefs and fry cooks, can make anything taste really good… not just pretty good.
As one of the most insanely idiotic articles I have ever read, this clearly earns five Billy Madison’s
“We’re unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible future in which we’re bringing global warming to a halt. It’s a world in which greenhouse emissions have ended.” – AOC, 2019
Reminds me of someone, now who was it? Oh yes, I remember:
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal;” – Obama nomination victory speech, 2008
I have Millennial kids and I’m pretty sure AOCs Imagination quote originated with Sponge Bob Squarepants
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/imagination-spongebob
“I have a dream”?
The Socialist Insanity of a Green Utopia
https://youtu.be/b-s6Nr1-R-w
Socialism’s Slippery Slope
https://youtu.be/fJDD7WXByGY
min 31
Peter Schiff
I thought that quote was from the 1998 movie, ‘Deep Impact’ – Morgan Freeman. Am I right?
GReenhouse emissions have ended? Did all these people start wearing rebreather equipment, so that their personnel CO2 emissions would end, too?
An oldie:
“If you’ve ever considered wearing a gas mask to sequester your own CO2 emissions,
you might be a Green-neck.”
More likely because they shot all the spare people to stop their CO2 emissions. You know, people that do unimportant things, like engineers and real scientists.
I dream of nuclear war, ending all life on Earth. Only when everyone and everything is dead, can we have true peace and justice.
“Some of the large homes haven’t changed at all,” Keesmaat says. They’ve just been turned into multifamily units”
Sounds like the Russian and Chinese take overs. Normal houses were divided up to allow for a family for each room. (Except for the elite of course!)
Some quality of life 🙁
Roger, exactly. That sentence reminded me of a scene in Dr. Zhivago.
Regards,
Bob
Dr. Zhivago came to my mind also.
Coworkers around me were wondering why I was on the floor lmao for at least 20 minutes or so… until I showed them this fantasy from the leftist greens…
“Ten times more land, my @$$! Just to replace 274 GW of coal-fired generation, it would require a solar farm the size of Washington State or wind farm the size of Georgia. And that’s just to replace our current coal-fired generation capacity.”
Since wind turbines only produce 0 to 25% of their rated power on average, you would need at a least ten times more wind turbines or 10 Georgia’s of area.
And huge transmission lines between continents is just stupid. Why?
As wind and solar are simply not high density energy, they cannot suffice for real industrial purposes. It’s simply not reality to think so.
I up-scaled based on the average capacity factors of wind turbines and solar PV.
Reality is not and never has been in their tiny little minds!
This is the result of participation trophies.
A nightmare. NPR interviewed someone about a nightmare and tried to sell it as utopia.
It’s much simpler than that. Your nightmare is Watermelons’ utopia.
1984 and Soylent Green were supposed to be nightmares, not planning sessions.
~¿~
they were predictive programming planning session you know
Biggest laugh I’ve had in ages
Not even the IPCC is stupid enough to think that man made CO2 is the sole cause of climate change. So to stop climate change completely we will have to counter the natural changes.
So how about: “We stopped the potentially catastrophic cooling due to the solar minimum by raising CO2 to 2000 PPM.” That is a good deal more plausible than the above fantasy.
“So to stop climate change completely we will have to counter the natural changes.”
Stopping climate change is 1) Impossible, and 2) Extremely undesirable. A totally static climate means the moon no longer orbits the Earth (either it’s locked in place, or it’s gone), that the Earth no longer rotates, and that the Earth no longer revolves around the Sun. There is no “or” in there, at least ALL of those things would have to happen to “stop climate change”. It’s such a childish concept.
Stop. Stop. Stop. You’re going to give AOC a worse headache than her handovers did. Do you want the poor woman’s head to explode????
Well, if she’s not emitting CO2 anymore, all that gas has to somewhere.
(“Nature abhors a vacuum.”)
If nature abhors a vacuum, why are there so many greens?
We must stop the climate from changing. It is our destiny. I have seen a vision from Mother Nature commanding me to do so. First step is for you to give all your money to me…
“mushroom-beef burgers”?
Mushrooms grow on manure — no livestock, no manure.
I’m glad I’ll be gone in 2050 and won’t have to see how these morons destroy lives.
Mushrooms are a fungus and don’t need any climate manure to grow.
And the climate skeptic vision of America in 2050 is…?
What new infrastructure or improvements to the built environment will there be to improve peoples lives?
Build more coal plants might not do it???
Not one mention about what the CLIMATE will be like in 2050. How will we know that climate change has been defeated. Perhaps Griff, our resident climate expert could weigh in on this subject.
Build one or two coal fired plants in PNG and use transmission cables (Or whatever), or thousands of windmills and solar plants? For a start, PNG is earthquake prone, settled right on the Pacific Rim of Fire. It’s also heavily forested, so those will have to go for the expanse required for wind and solar.
Not “thinking again” Griff are you?
Thinking is not on Griff’s agenda, only writing.
I don’t think he even writes much. He has been issued a set of standard responses, “bullet points” if you will, and he only copies/pastes them, then alters a word or two to make it sound like he’s actually responding to the present post.
That’s the difference between leftists and sane people.
We don’t go around planning other people’s lives for them.
Why do you think anyone needs a “vision of America in 2050”? Go ahead, look at past visions, how many of them came anywhere close to reality? None.
Building more coal plants means cheap energy and more plant food in the air. All good.
Central planning is a disastrous way to attempt to cope with an essentially chaotic world.
Evolution copes with chaos by creating innumerable mutations, most of which die. A few are appropriate for the changing environment as it presents itself at the time. Those organisms get to breed and pass on their characteristics.
How does capitalism cope with chaos? Same way.
How does central planning cope with the chaos of changing conditions? It ossifies and dies.
“How does central planning cope with the chaos of changing conditions?”
For the most part it executes those who point out that the plan is failing.
Wait. Don’t tell me. I know this one. In fact, I have seen this one. Central Planning changes the data to fit their theory. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Of course there was no hiatus of Global Warming™ from 1998-2018. There has never been a hiatus. Always and as predicted, the temperature has performed exactly in conformance with the theory…
commieBob good analogy.
A n illustration of central planning: In 1959(?) when only a few people heard about transistors, the Institute of Solid State Physics submitted a proposal to the Planning Commission for a massive investment in a technology of future, a transistor manufacturing. Six months later, the Commission reported that there was no demand whatsoever for transistors, proposal rejected.
We let industry take its natural course. In short, a bit cleaner, a bit better quality. A lot of additional jobs and hopefully brand new technologies. I expect fusion to still be ten years in the future and the majority of power to be provided by a mix of gas and novel nuclear technologies (yet to be specified as none of the current ideas have proven themselves commercially).
It’s not a sexy, sleek idea, but it’s a lot more practical and doesn’t rely on ignoring physics or science-fiction technology.
Climate skeptics lack the “idiot gene” that makes people think they can predict 30 years out. Without that gene, the question is just mindless drivel when someone hears it. Griff, you need to go back to the “idiot gene” sights where you all can imagine your hearts away. (I have a copy of John Lennon’s “Imagine” if that would help any……)
Sheri
Who is Gene?
And why is he an idiot?
No one knows why Gene is an idiot. It’s one of the great mysteries of the ages.
Grifter:
The past climate change, since 1950,
is roughly +0.1 degrees C. average warming
per decade, although there was
almost no warming since
the 2003 peak temperature, through 2018.
If that post-1950 trend continues,
the average temperature would be
approximately +0.3 degrees warmer
in 2050.
No one would even notice that
minor warming, unless lots of
bellowing, hysterical leftists, like you,
were claiming the end of the world
was coming !
Of course +0.3 degrees C.
in 30 years is not even close
to being an “existential threat”.
In addition, global warming
measured since 1975
was mainly in the northern half
of the Northern Hemisphere,
at night, during the six
coldest months of the year.
If that trend continues, Alaska
will have above average
global warming, and the few
people who live in that state,
will love it !
On the other hand, it could be cooler
in 31 years — our current interglacial
is most likely nearing an end, so
a very long term cooling trend
is another possibility.
Most important, however, is not to
make wild guesses
about the future climate.
The best we can do today
is to assume
the current trend
— mild, harmless warming,
will continue.
I know this is WAY OVER your head, Mr. Grifter,
but there is no logical reason to be hysterical
about climate change –we’ve already had
hundreds of years of warming since
the Maunder Minimum cold period
in the late 1600s — probably at least
+2 degrees C. warming since then
… and the warming has
been good news all the way !
The only global warming that is 100% bad news,
is the imaginary FUTURE warming in the
cloudy minds of hysterical leftists, who have
been predicting a global warming disaster
since the late 1950s !
Have a nice day, Mr. Grifter !
But please stay away
from my climate science blog,
or else you will risk
the possibility of posting
something sensible here,
and that would be disappointing,
not to mention everyone here
would suspect you hired
a ghost writer !
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
“And the climate skeptic vision of America in 2050 is…?”
I would call myself a “climate realist” rather than a “climate skeptic”…although I don’t mind being called a “climate skeptic” (a little skepticism never hurt anyone). America in 2050 looks like:
https://markbahner.typepad.com/random_thoughts/2019/03/eia-aeo-2019-projections-versus-mab-yours-truly.html
Natural gas usage is essentially unchanged from 2017 (after peaking in the 2030-2040 period).
Coal use is down 85%.
Nuclear is down 65%.
Petroleum is down 36% (due to electrification of automobile and bus transport).
Renewable energy such as photovoltaics and wind has increased by more than a factor of 10.
P.S. Oh…and the global lower tropospheric temperature for the 5-year period ending in 2050 will be 0.3-0.6 degrees Celsius warmer than for the 5-year period ending in 2015.
I find your projections utterly fantastic, but we already have a track record on EIA’s projections, and they haven’t done so hot, either, so maybe you have as good a chance of being right as they do. But I’m going offer some thoughts on your thoughts anyway. Donald J. Trump may be merely the first to declare the emperor has no clothes I can’t believe I’m offering praise to DJT, twice in the same day!). Remember the story, it only took one voice to admit out loud that the emperor had no clothes, and soon everyone was saying it. Well, that may well be what is happening here. The tailors and the emperor’s advisors who are personally invested in the emperor not looking like the fool that he is are just now raising their voices trying to drown out the beginnings of the crowd murmuring, “The Emperor has no clothes!” but the crowd is more numerous than they are, and soon they will be drowned out.
Once that happens, the support for renewables will dry up, almost over night, and not just in the U.S., but world-wide! Probably first to go will be the feed-in tariffs voluntarily offered by the utility, soon distributed-generation will have a hard time getting on the grid unless it can demonstrate dispatchability and put itself under the control of the utility, turned on and turned off by the grid-operating utility. Next the fiat subsidies and feed-in regulations will go away (the DJT administration has already nixed a bunch of those), they were implemented by the stroke of a pen, they can be killed just as easy. The last to go will be the legislated feed-in tariffs, “renewable portfolio standards” and subsidies. So any renewable project less than 30% design phase will not happen, and many further along than that will never make it to completion, or will experience a remarkably shortened life. That means the amount of renewables, as a fixed quantity, not “market-share”, has just about peaked. It will continue to climb for the next five years maybe, then it will flat-line, and 10 to as little as 5 years after that, it will begin to drop off.
Coal is still the cheapest form of energy, even in building the plants if you can roll back that last layer of regulations, the ones that try to get mercury emissions to zero, even though the natural environment already boasts a level of mercury nearly as high as the previous minimums (I’m paraphrasing here, I would be interested to see actual numbers), and other ridiculously unobtainable claptrap. I mean there was no basis in health, safety or reality for any of the “War on Coal” regulations other than to kill coal, just undo the “Clean Coal” regulations. So by 2030 already, coal as a percentage of total production will be on the rise again.
Because about then the price of natural gas will start to creep back up. I’m not declaring “Peak Gas”, not even from the tight-fracs (once upon a time there were work-over rigs that did things to a declining well to bump its production back up again, is that still a thing?), but I do think demand will start to catch up with supply in about 10 years. Natural gas will continue to increase as a percentage of total production, maybe even astronomically, for at least another 10 years, but then it will flat-line and stay at a more or less constant percentage for quite some time, maybe even all the way to 2070. It might even exceed 50% of production before nuclear can get back on its feet.
The real surge, at least in the U. S., will be in nuclear. If the President elected in 2020 is a deregulation kind of guy/gal, the nuclear power plant permitting “industry” will take a huge hit. Who can tell me, if a utility decided today that they needed another power plant, how long before it could produce electricity if they choose nuclear? The AEC will be ordered to create a one-stop approval process, with a response due in 90 days whether it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and once it is approved it’s approved. They won’t have to get an approval to start planning, then another approval of the selected site, then an approval of the design, then constant over-inspection of construction, then have to request another permit to fuel it, then another one to actually operate it. Giving a clear response up front will encourage innovation so the industry can finally get beyond Generation 2 in the designs. With that kind of process, they can probably even reach modular, maybe even portable!
So that’s my prediction! I shan’t build a web-site to post it, but it’s out here on WUWT for anyone to call up again any time they like! Even if WUWT is shut down for whatever reason(s), this will be preserved in somebody’s archive somewhere!
Molton Salt Thorium nuclear reactors are fail safe and scale-able to the size of town. Thus very few power transmission lines. Electricity could be generated without fossil fuels. Natural gas and coal can be used to produce gasoline inexpensively using electricity. With inexpensive electricity, salt water can be purified for use in agriculture.
Thorium is plentiful on the earth and uses waste Uranium to start the reaction which burns up virtually all the radioactive waste, thus solving the Uranium storage problem.
They are fail-safe with no moving parts, no necessity for cooling pumps, etc.
By declaring MST, I think you’re limiting innovation too much. But let’s DO say nuclear is expected to be part of the mix going forward, lift the regulations anywhere from a bit to a lot, simplify the permitting process, and let’s see what happens!
“Molten Salt Thorium nuclear reactors are fail safe and scale-able to the size of town”
Absolutely true. The technology was demonstrated by the US Government at Oak Ridge TN in the 1960s where a molten-salt reactor ran successfully for more than 4 years before being shut down by the Carter administration. The MSRE was fueled with uranium, but the same power-source can be fueled with cheap/safe/abundant Thorium that is bred (with neutrons) to produce U233 as the on-going fuel. High operating temperatures and low containment pressures make the cycle inherently safe and simple to shut off in the event of problems.
The Chinese, Indians, and Japanese are moving forward with Molten Salt Thorium reactors (also called “Lifters” for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) based on information declassified from US Defense research. How ironic is that?
My vision for “Life on Earth in 2050” is widespread, abundant, cheap, and reliable electricity generated from LFTR scalable thorium-fueled fission reactors.
Home heating and thermal-industrial processes are run on cheap, abundant natural gas and/or coal. Scrubbers remove most everything but H2O and CO2 from the exhaust. Nobody tries to bury CO2 – that’s just stupid/futile
Transportation continues to run 95% on liquid hydrocarbons (high energy-density) extracted from geologic reservoirs. Nobody grows food crops just to turn them into ethanol – that’s just immoral.
Solar panels and wind turbines are only installed where other, more reliable sources of electricity are too expensive (due to remote locations). Of course, some LFTR configurations can be small and cheap enough to power villages, so maybe solar/wind are largely gone, except stock ponds. Wind power still useful for sailboats and kites.
Happy plants thrive in 500 ppm CO2 air.
No one cares about global warming because the climate is colder than today, waiting for recovery from Solar Grand Minimum
Read that at first as Morton Salt.
When it rains, it pours. ^¿^
Wondering where we are going to put all the Canadians as the glaciers return
griff,
Why does anybody need a “vision of America in 2050” or any other random future date? It became what it is today not because of anybody’s “vision”, but because of the cumulative efforts of millions of free people pursuing their own interests over the last 200+ years. Our society is a an emergent property, not something that was created based on a plan or “vision”. As long as we remain a free republic, with government constrained by the US Constitution, this will not change. I suspect things will generally improve, but as always there will be bumps along the way. Nobody knows what the future has in store, and it’s a fools game to even try to predict it. All we can do is muddle along in our sub-optimal way and individually do the best we can with what we have.
Vision of America (re power):
After a restoration of sanity and good engineering:
1) Standardize the design for nuclear power plants and replace all coal burning plants with nuclear generators. (Save the coal for steel making).
2) Begin the construction of solar power satellites to eventually replace the nuclear reactors.
3) By this time most personal vehicles will probably be hybrid, with an ICE for long distances.
4) We’ve gotten rid of the bird-killers by this time, and solar is only used for remote outposts.
griff
Fracked gas will though. And coal.
I’m looking forward to spending my remaining days on the 27th floor of a government-owned building taking care of my grandchildren while my children commute by bicycle or public transportation so they can work from 7 am to 11 pm and earn $250 per month. /s Not far fetched from what’s actually going on in parts of the world. Next time you buy a “Made in _____” item, you may be paying someone $250/mo to work 16-hr days. Hope they can afford yellow rice.
The climate skeptic vision of America in 2050s is apocalyptic hellscape.
Or atleast that’s what climate alarmists keep telling me.
Miss Occasional-Cortex missed her calling. Should have been a Si-Fi writer for Hollywood.
The trouble is that her electorate believe every word she says.
YUP, and her promises of “everything FREE”, and you don’t have to work for it, will cause 15 to 30 million never-before-registered-voters ……. to “register” so they can vote for her.
AOC makes promises that are so inspiring the dead rise from the grave just to vote for her!!!
I wonder if all the drinks were FREE where she worked as a bartender? By the way a great job for someone with a cum laude from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences majoring in international relations and economics. We know what bars her fellow students work?
My favorite AOC moment:
https://www.facebook.com/theunityspot/videos/1860424880728156/
Not going to follow fb links.
Hey OC, Marx, Stalin and Mao and a dozen others like you, all had a vision.
The result – over 140 million dead via democide, or “death by government”.
The God’s drive mad those who would rule the world, it worse when they start out insane.
So AOC is pretty much declaring right now that no matter what happens by 2050 (which will be pretty much more of the same, regardless what we do), Gang Green (TM) is going to take credit for SAVING THE WORLD!!!!!!(TM). I thought we were all supposed to be dead in 11 years and 8 and a half months?
I love how she just assumes that the technology that they need, will be invented, and it will be cheaper than what we have now.
The world in 2050 according to AOC. (All good stuff.)
The world will end in 12 years. (Hmmm … 2019 + 12 = …)
Think she reached her “tripping” point 12 years ago?
Is ignorant the right word for describing those who are highly educated yet are still true believers in the fairy dust and unicorn farts? I think we need a more powerful word. Any ideas?
Swivel-eyed, spittle-flecked lunatics..?
Tofu Brains.
For those highly educated like that, there is a nice article by Nassim Taleb, ‘The Intellectual Yet Idiot’. Worth reading, a google should reveal it.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577
This?
How about batsh!t crazy busy body fu***ng @$$holes?
Why am I sure THEY will not be living five families to a house and eating wormburgers on a lightly toasted roachwing encrusted maggotbread bun?
I am glad they are tipping their hand at long last.
Big question in my mind is will they slink off quietly when they are told to p!$$ off, or will they need to be locked up?
The article doesn’t mention who gets to decide what family gets to share my house with me, or what happens to my wife and me when they tear down our house to build a six-plex. Oh, we’re OK, we don’t live on a cul-de-sac.
I guess I’m just highlighting one of those difficult social transformations.
Once you become sufficiently socially enlightened, you will realize that it never was your house, since you didn’t build it.
Therefore you have no say in who society (government in reality) decides should live with you.
I noticed they never mentioned cleaning up the streets of California’s cities
Where do you think they’ll be growing the mushrooms for the mushroom burgers?
BTW: you are replying to an old wireline guy 1962-2003. Deadhorse to Patagonia, Brunei to Aberdeen.
In 1964 Fairchild electronics used a new electric component package known as a Dual Inline Package Chip. They first went downhole in 1965.
That’s quite a history!
Memories. I think I still have a couple of dip clips. 8 and 16 pin. And a chip puller. But I also have an old nibbler tool for making my own chassis.
But the joy of trying to get a 40 pin DIP to go into it’s socket without any of the legs bending.
I’ve read of 64 pin DIPs, but thankfully I never had to deal with one of them.
more to Mark W
i did electronic assembly in the early 90s and the multiple legged chips were ok to insert as long as you were careful and gentle, soldering was stressy as you have to be very careful to stagger joints so as not to heat chips much. and you NEVER wanted to get em in wrong way round as desoldering was….OMG time.
I was pretty good at my job, loved it! but the new micro boards are impossible to work on without too much equipment
I stil repair older pcs and appliances for the hell of it;-)
solder wick uber alles.
They’re only writing about 2050, Dipchip. California streets won’t be cleaned up until at least 2280 ;o)
.
.
.
Excellent point. Let’s fix some real, immediate problems before we attempt to control the World’s climate.
It’s just business as usual for those living the fantasies in their heads to ignore the difficult-but-possible-to-solve problems and jump right to the impossible-to-solve problems. They should start small by trying something simple, like balancing their checkbook, and work their way up from there.
We have always had idiots claiming all sorts of nonsense:
– Car companies and oil companies are hiding a carburetor that can get 200 MPG
– Perpetual motion machines demonstrated on the NBC Today show
What makes me nauseous is NPR is partially funded by taxpayers! NPR is amplifying this nonsense.
Plug all that into the climate models and what do we get? *drum roll*
0.01 degree centigrade of reduction in projected temperature by 2100! (At a guess)
What, now you don’t believe the models?
You don’t say! Fuzzy mindedness makes for fuzzy predictions. I’ve got news for these (sub)geniuses, we’ve had dairy-free cheese on pizza for decades, and most people reject it in favor of REAL cheese. They yaddah-yaddah the part where governments have to coerce the population into accepting less beef in their burgers, or turning over millions of acres of farmland into wind farms. If you squint real hard looking at this future, you can almost make the fascists disappear.
I will play griff’s little game. In 2050, 80% of electrical needs will be met by nuclear power. This frees up land used for useless wind and solar farms for pasturage, to meet the world’s growing need for 100% beef hamburgers.
I seem to recall certain hamburger chains were accused of putting filler in their product. That didn’t go over too well either.
In 2050, the Audubon Society disbands because of the wind turbines killing off all the birds. Disease and pestilence abounds due to the bats being eradicated by the same wind turbines. Weather radar is now completely useless. Livestock is only available to those that can afford the $25,000 per lb. price unless you have access to black market rat carcasses. Vegetation in the great outdoors has gone dormant due to the lack of CO2 and greenhouse managers become the new saviors of humanity.
Yes, Sarcasm.
Black market rat? No, that will be readily available as a source of protein, to replace the birds and bats we ate after the wind turbines killed them. Don’t ask about what the Fallout franchise calls “rare meat”.
Rare meat? = cannibalism? 😉
Hey, if it’s good enough for John Spartan…
The action in that movie was forgettable if not downright silly.
But the depiction of a fluff-in-the-head dystopia is scarily prophetic. I don’t think the screenwriters meant it, but that’s how it turned out.
It is POSSIBLE to reach global CO2 emissions levels that would satisfy the AGW prognosticators…and “SAVE THE WORLD BY 2050”.
But a workable plan would have to include total nuclear annihilation of 2/3 of the first world nations plus India and China. NOTHING ELSE WILL WORK.
But I don’t think we should do that. It’s bad for international trade.
If the US “goes” Carbon Zero…the global temperature rise would be reduced by only about 0.2 of a degree C by 2050 according to their own (wrong) numbers. In actuality the reduction would be unmeasurable.
AGW is not about climate…it’s a tool in a giant power grab…by evil people.
You exaggerate, sir. It wouldn’t have to be nuclear.
If you consider Bjorn Lomberg’s numerate writing on the subject, if every nation in the world lived up to its “Paris commitments,” the amount of temperature change would be (1) too small to accurately measure, (2) last for a period measured in WEEKS, and (3) not occur until 100 years in the future.
In actuality, since Bjorn ACCEPTS the AGW nonsense 100% and STILL arrives at that conclusion, the REAL effect (on TEMPERATURE) would be what we call “NIL.”
Unfortunately, if the “green” POLICIES are enacted, there WILL be a catastrophe which will be all too real, in economic and humanitarian terms.
The truly scary thing is that NPR takes this seriously.
The scary thing is that there are people who take NPR seriously.
That last bit sounds like a massive confiscation of property to me. Over my dead body.
Looking forward to that fast train to Hawaii.
The rails would rust with all that saltwater, Tim. They are not thinking things through.
No, you aren’t getting the whole “plan.”
The “fast train” just drops you at LA or San Francisco, and then they put you on the SAIL BOAT for the trip to Hawaii. THEN you can get on another “fast train” to get to your final destination on the “islands,” assuming you didn’t die of old age during the ocean voyage.
No, you are forgetting about the underwater train tubes.
*pshhh* That’s why you tunnel it. *geez* *eyeroll* duh!
(I don’t have to tell you /sarc do I?)
Cold fronts in the south can generate tornadoes.
We are currently getting several tornado warnings in Kentucky right now. I heard reports these storms are moving 50 to 60 mph and one report of 70 mph.
People in the east should keep their eyes open as this storm front moves to the east. There’s a lot of power in this storm.
Have you ever noticed that solutions to climate change are always harmful to people and usually harmful to the environment.
All the jobs at jiffy lube, coal mining and generation, oil workers, etc..
Many of the jobs in agriculture, food processing, transportation, etc.
And what will we do about the CO2 released when we open a bottle of beer.
Instead of vegetables and fruit my back yard will sprout solar panels producing dark spots only spiders, centipedes and other uglys will love.
But the green economy will produce new jobs they say. Of course, but that means you will have to move to where the jobs are. That means new housing, new infrastructure and massive relocations. How does that improve the environment or the human condition.
Oh wait, isn’t that what climate change is supposed to cause. Maybe.
Of course there will be winners. probably the ones pushing this agenda.
Solutions will cause massive hardship and upheaval.
Isn’t that what climate change is supposed to cause? Maybe.
The results are the same but one scenario is certain and the other is, well at best, a maybe and probably far in the future.
I don’t care about the 97%. I will bet against the odds. The returns could be fantastic.
After all, we have already made it through the first quarter year and the odds improve daily.
Also, it keeps my money in my pocket and my friends and neighbors will not have to move away to find work. Can you find a better bet? The worst outcome is no more expensive than the solution.
Also what the hell is wrong with warmer winters? Will anyone really notice a degree or two warmer on the few hottest days of the year?
I’d miss those nifty “bomb cyclones” like just hit and left roads closed and drifts everywhere! Come on, some of us like these cold weather events! Which is why I’m okay with all those different climates all over the world. “One World Climate” would just be wrong.
I laughed so hard, tears were running down face; the best laugh I’ve had in weeks.
My poor wife kept asking me in Japanese, “Are you OK?”
My goodness… Leftists have completely lost all capacity for logic, reason, and rational thought.
You can’t fix stupid.
Great comment!
I love the idea that imagination alone can fix things, Occasional Cortex really is the gift that keeps giving.
Actually if I imagine it I can have a faster than light personal spaceship to take anywhere I like in the universe and find out lots of interesting things, the slight problem of actually building such a thing clearly is no issue. Even so, I harbour a slight suspicion I stand a somewhat higher chance than any of OC’s green fantasies.
Just refurbish an old British Police Box.
Mr. Middleton,
Thank you for this rejoinder and roast of NPR.
I got in the habit of listening to NPR many decades ago and I never stopped. As you can imagine, the constant (near daily) barrage of climate advocacy pieces emanating from them comes close to driving me batty. Almost needless to say, I stopped monetary contributions to NPR and my local NPR station years ago.
NPR’s hypocrisy (and flat-out chutzpah) is boundless. In the same breath as claiming to be “non-partisan, objective journalism” they continuously broadcast what any sentient and rational person knows is nothing but climate propaganda. Why they continue to do so in the face of overwhelming evidence that climate science is, at best, pseudoscience and, at worst, outright fraud is beyond my comprehension.
It is a national disgrace and I again thank you for bringing this latest example to the fore.
Way back before Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the Sirius Patriot network of 24/7 Right Wing Radio… I also listened to NPR. It was more balanced back then, as was CNN.
During the run up to Desert Storm, the afternoon NPR talk show featured a steady stream of idiots claiming that the M1 Abrams tank, F-15 Eagles and Strike Eagles and all of our other high tech weapons wouldn’t function in the desert and that Saddam Hussein’s battle-hardened army would kick our @$$. Then one guy, named Tom Clancy, was interviewed. Clancy said our weapons systems would work extremely well, with deadly effect and that we would destroy the Iraqi armed forces in a matter of hours.
The author missed what I think is the best quote from the NPR fantasy…
“”And this is even if they are electric vehicles?” I ask.
“Even more if they’re electric vehicles!” Hoornweg says. Personal electric cars for everyone couldn’t solve the problem, he explains. First of all, electricity is precious. We can’t waste it powering everybody’s electric car.”
So, the government will tell you you can’t have personal vehicles, depriving you of liberty, or at least making prohibitively expensive. Massive disruption to industries to solve a vastly exaggerated problem to attain political and economic power over the people.
Note .. “electricity will be precious. We can’t waste it powering everybody’s electric car” Sorry Elon, even a Tesla future will be restricted ! Of course electricity will be precious…if you restrict it to unreliable intermittent sources !
People need cheap reliable electricity to run a modern society and industrial civilization. Look at Venezuela ! In the dark for a week.
electricity is precious. We can’t waste it powering everybody’s electric car.
Yeah, the quote there is what’s precious. Preciously stupid.
I had to leave a lot of material out… Otherwise, I would still be writing this post… 😉
Lenin famously asserted that liberty was so precious it had to be rationed.
You fail to understand the perniciousness of some in power. The will NOT ban private ownership of cars. They will simply make cars and fuel unaffordable, gradually over time, for 99% of the people. The last 1% will be themselves, who will have government provided (i.e., taxpayer paid) vehicles at their disposal, to perform ‘official’ government duties.
You don’t need the heavy hand of government to prohibit something when you can simply tax it to death.
trying to imagine usa gridlock now replaced with everyone on pushbikes like china used to be
Oh, jeesh, the battery stuff again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can run your little phones & computer notebooks for a short time before needing recharging & a bigger one can turn your car starter motor for a few moments….
NPR is so simple-minded. For a simple-minded audience I guess.
“By 2025, battery technology got cheaper,…”
but by then they were no longer needed because Mr. Fusion had also gotten cheaper…
AOC is a “performance artist”, invented in the image of some real performance art, maybe like “Lady Gaga does politics”, only without Lady Gaga’s talent.
It’s time to start ignoring this moron. Enough of her.
That would be like ignoring a slow motion train wreck.
Large homes still exist, they’ve just been turned into multi-family units.
Once again the leftist assumes that once everyone is properly educated, they will want only what the socialist wants them to want.
In their world, people voluntarily give up big homes, big cars, and just willingly walk wherever they need to go. Why? Because the socialist believes that’s how everyone should live.
Of course those who don’t agree have to be re-educated until they do.
Yeah. Lara’s Theme was playing in my head when I read that.
jtorn
Ditto! I’m sure that Dr. Zhivago would not approve of the future vision!
“…changes only moved ahead when people were convinced that they weren’t getting ignored and left behind. It was the political struggle of a generation.” Wow Trump has even intruded in on this fairy tale. With millions spent on Madison Avenue message spin doctors the Climate Totes are losing the battle. Their product isn’t good enough. And now they are going to sell us on mushroom tofu burgers for our rousing tailgate parties and backyard cookouts.
BTW, it wasnt lost on me the conversion of big single family houses to multifamily units. This is precisely what the Bolsheviks dreamed up a hundred years ago. In fact this is unmistakeably a brave old world vision.
“Not even wrong” would be an apt appraisal, would it not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
It’s so dumb… I don’t think it rises to “not even wrong.”
“Not even wrong” is one, maybe two Billy Madison’s. This doozie was at least five Billy Madison’s… 😉
I’m not sure how you managed to wade through that. I’m dummer for even reading your carefully filtered version.
The question is, how does David manage to avoid getting dumber from reading this stuff?
“How did we do it? By gradually reshaping our cities so that they look more like this neighborhood, with lots of people living close together, within walking distance of many of the things they need.?
Forced urbanization represents a reversal of policy. I’m old enough to remember municipalities enforcing maximum density rules. Oh wait, they still do.
Is NPR in ABCCBSNBCMSNBCCNNNPRPBSNYTWaPoLAT? Yes, yes it is.
I think of the difference between a fantasy painting of a bridge and an architectural drawing, where the architectural drawing is the real world and the fantasy bridge described here is the painting. You may have a pretty picture, but if you check with an architect he’ll advise you to hold off ordering materials.
It does not look or sound to me like a pretty picture.
It sounds like a deliberate dystopian nightmare.
Jammed into tiny spaces, eating soylent green if we can get it, ride a bike for 45 minutes to turn on a light,
no traveling, no economy, and everything people have now is confiscated, because aint no one giving up their STUFF willingly.
These people are insane.
This future is a horrific nightmare.
like heat pumps
Not much heat to pump when it’s -20. Geothermal heat pumps are great but take decades to pay for the investment.
Hat tip: Willie Wonka
Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imagination
We’ll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we’ll see
Will defy
Explanation
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world?
There’s nothing to it
There is no
Life I know
To compare with pure imagination
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly wish to be
If you want to see magic lands
Close your eyes and you will see one
Want to be a dreamer, be one
Anytime you please and please save me one
Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imagination
There is no
Place to go
To compare with your imagination
So go there
To be free
If you truly wish to be
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly wish to be
Comrade Kaprugina, err AOC: “There was living space for thirteen families! In this one house!”
Thirteen “families” using a single bathroom. Yeah, except AOC.
Fortunately, a vision of the future was already laid out for us back in the 60’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyinD6ZDqeg
Hard to say what the chief energy source(s) might be, but likely nuclear of some sort. Hopefully by then, all remaining long-since abandoned, rusting and crumbling folly-driven eyesores involving wind and solar would have been cleared from the landscape. CO2 as a friend to mankind and to all life will have long since been accepted as fact, and the period of time of roughly 3 decades, from the 90’s to early 20s would be viewed as a dark age, when mankind went crazy, setting himself back, instead of moving forward. And another thing, the earth will probably have cooled significantly by then, possibly to LIA conditions. But due to technological advancements, and through the use of fossil fuels, mankind will have gained both in wealth and knowledge, meaning adaptation to a cooler world would not be all that difficult.
Here is my mental picture of what they have in mind:
https://youtu.be/geol8k3rsLM
I only have 1 rhetorical question:
WHAT TO DO ABOUT ASIA?
Sorry, but it really is “the problem”, if you are an anti-CO₂-ist. China, India, Japan, Korea, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. More CO₂ emissions predicted as their economies and prosperities continue to nearly exponentially scale upward. It’ll not be mushroom burgers that’ll “fix” their appetite for coal and oil, folks. It won’t be unicorn horn batteries and massive thorium molten salt nuclear plants to charge ’em.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT ASIA?
Its just about the only question that matters. (I could add AFRICA to that, but not realistically. Africa will remain stubbornly poor, and ironically relatively low CO₂ producing.)
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
Well, Africa will become rich quickly if they finally get rid of those dictators and socialism.
But yes, if AOC and her band really cared about “saving the Earth” she should advocate for declaring nuclear war against half the world. Much more effective than empty virtue signaling. If you truly believed that the world only has 12 years left, then that should be your moral duty.
But just be careful, China and India might start fighting back.
They never talk about what they would do when the batteries expire ? !! Batteries go flat and are usually thrown away. These humungously huge car batteries would need to be buried in the earth by the MILLION or sent to the third world to kill a few more Indians etc. to get the precious metals out. These people are completely clueless !! Imagine the “crashes” from flying cars as the batteries fail! Oh God it will be dangerous for those poor souls left walking on the earth as these things plummet to the ground !! Somebody drown Musk!
“What I hope we’re able to do is rediscover the power of public imagination.”
–Alexandria Occasional-Cortex
AOC psychobabble.
I see ole Beto (Richard Francis O’Rourke) is getting in the presidential race. AOC will have her male counterpart in Beto. They are both completely delusional.
And… If you ever listened to “Puto” (my wife, who’s Mexican, calls him that) speak, you’d know he sounds like even more of a moron than Ayock (how AOC would sound if it was a word).
Beto is guero (if you come from “The Valley” you know those words rhyme)! I grew up in a small town (which is now an indistinguishable suburb) just south of Houston. There were enough Latinos that I knew that word, but I have been wracking my brain for months trying to think of it. When I first heard the nickname that Richard Francis O’Rourke had chosen for himself, I was sure I was misremembering, because nobody wanted to be called that! At least not where I came from. I’m pretty sure I know what “puto” means. If I’m right, I can’t translate it to English on here.
I grew up in East San Jose, and I could imagine someone with Chicano friends getting nicknamed “Berto”, from Roberto. Getting to “Beto” seems a stretch too far.
Well, you could build a solar farm the size of Washington State, but if you put it IN Washington State, you won’t get much power from it.
Notice that the only practical places to build these unicorn dreams are in the South (east and west), for solar, and, primarily, the midwest for wind. I can’t speak for the fine people in the red-states of the midwest, but I can pretty much guarantee you that if Southern lands are taken to generate power for Northern states, they’re going to freeze their backsides off in the winter!
“Some of the large homes haven’t changed at all,” Keesmaat says. They’ve just been turned into multifamily units.”
Anyone ever seen Doctor Zhivago?
My wife and I have a large home on a large lot about 8 miles east of downtown Dallas. We have no children, 10 dogs and more firearms than we can both shoot at the same time. I can guarantee that any attempts to turn our large home into a multifamily unit will result in a lot of changes to our large home and to those attempting to perform the conversion.
“We have no children, 10 dogs and more firearms than we can both shoot at the same time.” Two cats here. For the record, all of my firearms and ammo got sweep overboard in the Great Michigan hurricane of aught eight.
🙂 tonight i have 5 large dogs
tonight or in the next 2 days I will have..maybe 13 dogs;-)
on 10acres
my small home will just hold me n the mutts
oddly, no one seems to want to stay more than a few nights here;-) lol
ps to the other Paul-ever seen the youtube bowyer clips on amazing bows made with polypipe?
That anybody would think of this shows the true goal of the green left mediated via climate change-totalitarianism. How they want us to live is reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s “We the Living”. Insecure people just need to exert control over others to try and gain an ego.
“No oil change! Yippee! You know?”
What is it with these electric car people and no oil changes? Are they really so stupid/busy/incapable/forgetful/ignorant/etc that they can’t manage to get the oil changed in car? How do they remember to eat? If that restaurant app dies, they starve? This is one of the most ridiculous comments I hear.
You will need to replace the batteries in the electric car long before the IC engine wears out.
And the battery costs more.
Hmmm … what lubricates the bearings and other moving parts on an electric car? Vegetable oil?
“…In some areas, like this one, our picture of the future gets a little fuzzy….”
Truer words, never spoken.
“Sila Kiliccote is an engineer. The back deck of her house, high up in the hills, overlooks Cupertino. Apple’s circular headquarters is hidden in the morning mist.
Her coffee machine is powered by solar panels on the roof. So is her laptop and her Wi-Fi.”
So if there is morning mist, how is she getting solar power for here coffee machine?
What happens in the winter when she needs to get up before the sun does?
“So if there is morning mist, how is she getting solar power for here coffee machine?”
This question shows a lack of knowledge; easily fixed.
Santa Clara Valley
It’s 2050 and science moved on and the general public saw the waste of advocacy crusades while also learning about climate cycles of various length.
What’s real in all this is that to the extent they get power, they want to make changes: cut back on the burning of fossil fuels, at whatever cost to the poor and others; refuse to build nuclear; build more crowded, transit-friendly communities because less impact something something. I’m beginning to think the golden age of transit has actually come and gone; witness the high-speed rail in California. People like their cars; they might car pool if that works; they are looking forward to self-driving (private) cars that can platoon, run closer together without crashes, etc.
AOC is apparently a college grad who knows virtually nothing about how energy and industry work today, so any comments she makes about transitioning to something else are uninformed. What interests me is how this is all inspired by the boomers, and now people read even fewer books than the boomers did; some things are taken on faith. They don’t want to go back to nature in any meaningful sense. They think old-fashioned technology has wrecked things, and they are determined to apply (selectively chosen) new technology, even if it wrecks things in a different way. We are supposed to change ourselves, really change human nature or demonstrate there is no such thing, so as to adapt ourselves to “our” technology. Physics and engineering have made great progress; why not even more progress, and now some progress in the science of human beings? There is something seductive here that is very powerful. This is where I think political philosophy (ahem, in which I was trained) is of some help in clarifying the issues.
I think AOC’s GND is a litmus test for mild retardation. I’m floored at the amount of people that buy into this ex-bartender’s impossible dreams.
I think AOC can claim credit for her GND about like she claimed credit for the term papers she turned in during her college years… have someone insert the USB, find and open the document, insert her name in the appropriate places on the cover sheet and the header/footers, then save and send (my step-daughter just completed a masters a couple years ago, that’s how she “turned in” all homework, except she did her own work before the save and send part). The true author might have conversed with her all of 10 minutes to get a sense of how she speaks, and away they went. About the only difference is, AOC paid for this one with some of that $1,000,000 in missing campaign contributions, instead of with her daddy’s money.
Remember the old slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”? I can assure you nothing went to waste in this transaction. And since truth is a 100% defense against libel accusations, I’m not the least bit worried.
But she’s absolutely correct in all this. I have good news for the survival of mankind!
I have recently perfected the kind of high speed rail that we will be using in 2050 to cross oceans. The inaugural crossing will be announced soon and AOC and others at the forefront of the battle against climate change will be honored guests on this ceremonial and history making trip/flight which has been calculated to culminate at an unrevealed spot on the island of Oahu.
The engineering in use is, of course, still secret but I can reveal that it involves the train being able to break what we now call the “speed of inertial levitation” and is almost 100% safe now that we have factored in the remote possibility of water landing/floatation.
Leaders of the climate protection movement, contact us soon for your free passage.
What do you mean, why does this ticket say, “One Way”?
The alternative to cows roaming the landscape in search of food is usually known as intensive farming, even factory farming: it is usually considered a bad thing in terms of animal welfare and of the environment. I fancy the author knows nothing about this.
And as for “Farmers aren’t letting cows wander across the landscape in search of something to eat. They’re treating their pasture like a valuable crop, which it really is”, they pretty do that now! Alfalfa anyone?
The changes the greens are talking about will need to be forced on the population. In order to do that, a dictatorship will be required, with the greens in charge. Their crazy ideas and projections are only a smoke screen for the gullible, technically uneducated and uniformed.
One thing is certain. Central control will fail, at the cost of billions of lives, because it always ends that way. The real goal is power and control of whatever is left at the end.
Most of these plans will founder on the problem of not enough money. If one simply assigns all, and I mean all, savings in the economies of North America to building out this renewable utopia, it will take a good 80 years I figure. If one simply tries to force people to live sparingly to free-up savings, then the economy will shrink, and with it the supply of savings.
I’m also with Menicholas about this vision being a nightmare. People often say that “socialism sounds great until…” Socialism, even the idea sort, doesn’t sound good. What sort of satisfaction is there to a life without challenge, planned from beginning to end, and being run by other people?
Socialists/Communists always show THEIR way of life as utopia, then reality happens……..
Even my liberal millennial daughter laughed at the silliness of these ideas–especially the part about sharing homes and cars. I don’t think this vision of the future is going to appeal to most.
This is why the left lusts after gun control/confiscation so badly. A population without a way to fight back will be slaves.
We all have to realize that all politicians are fat pigs at the self made trough endlessly feeding at the expense of the general population.
There should be a working French guillotine in every Senate, Parliament, city hall, etc., any place politicians,especially self appointed (anointed?) ones (UN, EU) do their business, just to remind the politicians who really is in charge, and it’s not the politicians. They are supposed to work FOR us.
“rediscover the power of public imagination.”
You can’t rediscover something that hasn’t existed before. The closest thing to this is called Group Think and it’s not very imaginative.
The individuals that had imagination that changed things for the better were: Newton; Faraday, Watt; Tesla; etc. etc. It’s not that many people.
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge.
Most people that I know have very little to no imagination, regardless of their knowledge.
The urbans who have dropped ~30k+ into solar and batteries are the worst of all. Sila Kiliccote may be a wealthy and clever engineer, but she probably does not drink and wash with her own captured rainwater. She probably uses water pumped from distant watersheds, then treated, then pumped uphill to her house… and flushes down into the Cupertino Sanitary District where the wastewater is treated again.
The “See? It works for me!” people are NOT prepared to illuminate one or a few streetlights that would be their community share. Their tiny utopia does not include any power, heating or cooling for schools and other buildings, especially hospitals, that typically demand far greater energy than their property could provide.
Their willful disregard of the total aggregate energy necessary to sustain modern civilization is completely opaque to them. As long as AOC and journalists looking for sound bites cherry-pick these engineering-challenged engineers, the lie will grow bigger.
“By gradually reshaping our cities so that they look more like this neighborhood, with lots of people living close together, within walking distance of many of the things they need.”
Something that the Utopia designers are either unaware of, or don’t want to talk about, is that there is a direct correlation between urban density and the crime rate. Probably, largely a result of anonymity and gang activity. The annual FBI Uniform Crime Report documents how crime (and especially homicide, which is one of the best reported crimes) is primarily an urban problem with just a few of the largest cities contributing to the majority of the murders. What comes to mind is the stereotype of inner-city people who can’t afford air conditioning sitting on the front steps of their apartment in the Summer evening, drinking beer, and getting into arguments with their neighbors.
When I do my weekly grocery shopping, I buy more than I could easily put into a backpack and haul home. Carrying several bags into the house from the car isn’t an issue. However, what this ‘vision’ means is that people will have to make multiple walking trips to the neighborhood grocery store, perhaps every other day, of every day if it is a large family. That may not be possible for the elderly! Everyone will probably need their own shopping carts or a service to collect them outside their dwellings. Prices will probably go up for food because of the loss of economy of scale and competition with all the neighborhood Mom & Pops. Some grocery stores are now providing online shopping, but they would have to expand that to delivering as well. Ace Hardware may survive, but Lowe’s and Home Depot will probably go out of business when people can’t haul home 4’x8′ sheets of plywood and all the paint buckets for home remodeling. Yes, it will be a different world. But not as enjoyable as these dreamers envision!
What strikes me is the shear hubris of these social planners. They think that they know what others will want. They also think that they are smart enough to design a system that will be better than what has evolved. But, as I remark above, they have overlooked a lot of things. “The Devil is in the details!”
I know that it’s a conspiracy theory to believe that “climate crusaders are really just communists in disguise” but dang-it if they both don’t really love government planned economies.
History is repeating itself from the late 60’s-early 70’s.
Who here is old enough to remember “The Age of Aquarius” song, and New Age hippy-ism?
(Okay, no fair Willis, I know you were there.)
The Hair musical made the song popular. Which is what I remeber as an adolescent from that time.
I’m referring explicitly to what the WikiPedia entry refers to about that pop-culture period.
“The expression Age of Aquarius in popular culture usually refers to the heyday of the hippie and New Age movements in the 1960s and 1970s. “
We are entering this new era of New Age-ism, dependent on the un-informed stupidity of a few ignorant 20-soemthings.
From a cultural stand-point, what this AOC Idiocy Phenomenon is about is a cultural movement of New Age-ism, version 2019. Now 50 years forward from the last era of this gibberish, hippy movement.
In the late 60’s-early 870’s the anti-War (Vietnam War) became the New Age-ism’s focal point. That was the un-educated (or poorly college educated) 20-somethings. Meanwhile the educated 25-65 year olds were busy putting men on the Moon with Apollo.
Today, the “anti-War” movement has adopted Climate Change as their anti-war. Just as stupid a movement, becasue it uses emotion and “feelings” to drive real-world policies that have real world consequences, especially for the poorest or most vulnerable.
Yes, we got out of Vietnam quickly as soon as we had our POWs back, but then what happened to the South Vietnamese we left behind? Or the Cambodians? just a few years later. Those decisions had catastrophic outcomes for those vulnerable populations.
Joel O’Bryan
I couldn’t find an icon for a raised hand! However, count me in.
We’re entering the Age of A-carious?
> trucks running on hydrogen fuel
This cannot possibly refer to anything real. Even other energiewende crackpots admit there isn’t any storage solution good enough for actual transport use (http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/consumer/hydrogen/basics/storage.htm).
And it’s utterly improbable there will be such a solution any time soon, seeing how this didn’t go anywhere (despite much effort) back in Cold War era, when “nuclear energy” was spelled clean and loud, while the commissars were commonly kept on leashes and mostly not allowed to interfere with R&D doing its job. So the prospects are bad even compared to fusion (which is only 10 years away for last 50 years or so).
So it seems that after projectively expelling arguments against an earlier New Ice Age scare (digested and made into stupid), Team Watermelon now regurgitates the looniest things they could copy-paste from old Popular Mechanics and suchlike.
And as for “Farmers aren’t letting cows wander across the landscape in search of something to eat. They’re treating their pasture like a valuable crop, which it really is”, they pretty do that now! Alfalfa anyone?
Sorry, don’t know how that got there.
The only way to run a long-haul truck off of hydrogen is to carry it in liquid form, and I personally do not want to be anywhere near a truck fueled by liquid hydrogen.
“Sila Kiliccote is an engineer. The back deck of her house, high up in the hills, overlooks Cupertino. Apple’s circular headquarters is hidden in the morning mist.
Sorry, Sila. If we are going to make your dream world a reality, you are going to have to give up this house way up in the hills, and your beautiful deck looking over the valley. You and your family are being relocated to a living room in an old suburban home in San Jose. The rest of the house will be occupied by four other families, with 10 illegal immigrants living in the garage. Ahhh Utopia!
Here is NOAA’s weather prediction for winter 2018-19. It was published October 2018. Not exactly a long term prediction like looking out 30 years. It could not have been more wrong. Their modeling accuracy is worse than expected.
https://youtu.be/pqhlgovftLY
People living close together, in harmony, in government designed and managed apartments was the investment made by the old USSR and can now be seen on Google Earth as run down and mostly vacant surrounded by places where town used to be. These socialists who think they know what is best for our lives should never be allowed to have power. One word describes them, disaster.
Every time I contemplate climate change, computer models, and consensus, I’m reminded of this science fiction short story by Ben Bova from 1971, that concludes with this observation .
“Son if a bitch,” he said with unaccustomed vehemence. The computer was right after all.”
https://archive.org/stream/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v041n02_1971-08_PDF/Fantasy__Science_Fiction_v041n02_1971-08_PDF#page/n3/mode/2up
Hey everyone quit criticising: this is easy in a 2050 world with a global population of 5million! Er…
Does anyone else think that the real motivation of the climate-change lobby is a complete government takeover of the energy industry. By definition this is a move toward socialism, which is the clear goal of the Green New Deal. And to, of course, reduce the human vermin by a factor of or more10 or more to reach this nirvana.
“No oil change! Yippee! You know?”
just replace old worn-out smart phone batteries or simply buy a completely new e-car battery! You know?
“Electric-power like heat pumps!”
the heat pump in the backyard has the advantage that the spring in the backyard comes 2 months later.
And winter comes 2 months earlier. In the backyard.
The state of emergency is unrolling to adultery bevore our very eyes.
I really don’t know what else you would expect from National Proletariat Radio David!
“Now, in 2050, there’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment.”
Meanwhile on the weather channel which no longer has any viewers, there hasn’t been a hurricane since 2044 nor a tornado since 2042. There are no floods anymore nor any droughts nor wildfires. The temperature is always perfect and rain is plentiful but not overwhelming. The seas are clam, the polar bears are everywhere, the glaciers are back, civil wars have stopped, the poor are rich and the rich are less rich, the seas are full of fish and coral, Greenpeace is now the world government and WUWT has been apologizing for 15 years about how wrong they were.
I’m surprised the transportation “problem” wassn’t solved by teleportation and the food problem with matter synthesizers. As long as we’re imagining impossible or ridiculous we might as well go full Star Trek.