A while back Scotland decided to aim for 100% renewable energy by the year 2020 – a goal that has been doubted despite being almost halfway there at the end of 2015. Now, they’ve taken another massive step forward – Scotland has shut down its last coal plant!
It’s easy, when entering the world of atheism, too get a biased view of religion. A lot of what’s talked about are the clearest examples of how bad religion can be. My own experiences with religion were largely positive. I was raised in a Quaker household in New England, and my religious community was, for a long time, my primary social community. It was a group of kind, welcoming people who were great at making everybody feel valued. I think a lot of effort went into creating that space for the kids growing up there, and I’m glad I had it.
And I should be clear – while I was pretty devout, in my way, and pretty clear that Quakerism was a Christian religion, albeit an unusual one, many of my friends, and many adults in the society were not Christian, and viewed Quakerism as more of a lifestyle thing. That really bugged me sometimes. All in all, the people were kind and respectful, and while I had to part ways with that community, I hold no resentment towards Quakers, and it’s been made clear to me many times that if I chose to rejoin the community, or even just to visit, I would be made welcome. The worst that I would suffer would be awkwardness from long absence and different understandings of the world.
Not everybody is so lucky, and not everybody has parents who are as open-minded, understanding, and willing to work for a good relationship with their kids as mine are. Case in point, fellow FTB denizen Joe Sands, over at Incongruous Circumspection:
Now, I will introduce you to one of my most popular series on my old blog, off in that dusty corner of the internet.
I grew up in an abusive environment, learning to cope quite well until I was 19 years old. At that point in my life, the heat got too hot and I was ready to be free. I left and went to live with my dad to get on my feet and expose myself to the real world in full color, rather than a world through sheltered and well defined, paranoiac lenses. My freedom came with many bumps in the road as I discovered that I was truly lazy when I wasn’t being yelled at to accomplish a task. I needed to mature…grow up. Life moved very fast and I needed to jump in and roll with it.
I’ll let you read the rest at his latest installment of Letters from my Mama, and just add that talking to other people from religious families sometimes makes me quite grateful for my own family, and my own experiences with religion.
Thanks to SteveoR for showing this to me!
The video shows a graph of the rise of atmospheric CO2 levels over the second half of the 20th century, into the 21st. Then it starts to “zoom out”, showing falling levels, back into the last ice age, rising before it, falling again for another ice age, and so on back to eight hundred thousand years BCE. As longer periods of time become visible on the graph, the timeline compresses, showing the last 50 years or so for the very short time that they represent. Well before the end of the video, it is clear that CO2 levels are far, far higher now than they have been at any point in the last 800,000 years, and beyond.
In my last non-music post I talked about the world of possibilities opened up by renewable energy, and the fact that we could fairly easily generate more power than we currently need, and use that for other projects to make the world a better place. This is a theme I’ll be returning to fairly often in the foreseeable future, and in this post, I want to set aside possibilities, and look at what’s actually happening in some places around the world today, because some places are already taking the serious steps toward that better world.
I know this has been out for a while, but I just discovered it, and wanted to share in case other people hadn’t seen it!
Usually when people talk about converting to renewable energy, the conversation covers what it would actually take to replace fossil fuels. It’s a good conversation to have, and a lot of good work has gone into working out how much surface area would need to be devoted to wind and solar, what other sources of power could be used, how much it would cost in the short term, and how much it would save in the long term. The end result of all this is that converting the United States – one of the highest per-capita energy consumers in the world – to renewable energy is entirely doable. The only thing lacking is political will.
That said, why stop at what’s needed?
Samantha Page over at Thinkprogress has a piece on Merric Garland’s record on the environment and on listening to scientists. There’s nothing dramatically good or bad about him there, but one thing that is a nice change of pace:
In a 2012 case Garland again sided with an agency, that time the DEA. Although medical marijuana advocates decried the final decision, during the argument, Garland said something that might cheer environmentalists.
“Don’t we have to defer to their judgment?” Garland asked about the agency. “We’re not scientists. They are.”
After years of ridiculing the conservative talking point that it’s reasonable to reject the scientific consensus around climate change because “I am not a scientist,” it’s refreshing to hear someone say, I am not a scientist, and therefore we have to listen to scientists.
Yep. When I have time, I’ll see if I can dig up more on him, and if anybody has something relevant, feel free to share it in the comments. Some folks think this guy was nominated because the Republicans’ inevitable obstruction will look worse when they block a center-right nominee, but there has also been plenty of talk indicating that the Republicans might cave on that, in which case this is who we’re likely to get. Time will tell.
Unsurprisingly, the sundry would-be Republican candidates for president have been less than inspiring this election season. One might think that with two candidates from Florida – a state that’s already starting to struggle with sea level rise – we might see at least hint of sanity from the national figures of Grand Old Party. One would be very wrong to think that, and if one really did, I would hazard a guess that one has not been paying attention.
Um, yeah. Climate denial is no surprise here. Peter Sinclair has more on the situation in Florida from rawstory and from his own video over at climatecrocks.com, but I wanted to talk about something slightly different.
Take a look at this video of Marco Rubio fielding a question sent in by the mayor of Miami (a Republican). Listen to the talking points:
Right-click and inspect element for transcript, or click here for full debate transcript
Some time ago, someone pulled together five stages of climate denial, which are unpacked well in this Guardian article by Dana Nuccitelli:
Stage 1: Deny the Problem Exists […]
Stage 2: Deny We’re the Cause […]
Stage 3: Deny It’s a Problem […]
Stage 4: Deny We can Solve It […]
Stage 5: It’s too Late […]
It’s pretty normal to get some combination of stages one through four in any given remark by a climate denier, and as Nuccitelli’s article shows, we’ve gotten pretty good at rebutting those arguments. Rubio mostly focused on Stages 2 and 4 in the video, with a nod to Stage 1. What I want to focus on in this post is “Stage 5”, because it’s an argument that makes a direct attempt to create despair. Let’s look at her discussion of Stage 5:
I have to fix this!
This blog was born of frustration in 2010.
At the time, I had been following climate science and climate change politics for a few years, and it was astonishing to me that so many people in the public debate seemed to think that a little sea level rise was the worst-case scenario. Sure, Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” had discussed what would happen if all of Greenland melted, but that has never been a genuine expectation for the 21st century, and the conversation six years ago was all about stopping or even reversing global warming by 2050. In other words, no danger of Greenland melting that much. Hell, at that point people were being called alarmist for talking about two feet of sea level rise. In some circles they still are.
So I wanted to provide some perspective. I wanted to show how alarming the future could be, if things really got bad.
The most obvious worst-case scenario is represented by the planet Venus, but I wasn’t sure if it was even possible to boost the greenhouse effect enough to broil Earth like that. The scenario I started with was one that has been proposed as a possible cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction, also known as The Great Dying. You can go look at my first blog post to learn more, but here’s a brief summary: [Read more…]