Thomas Friedman is one of the many reasons I do not and will not subscribe to the NY Times — they have way too many assholes granted a sinecure to babble their stupid opinions on one of the more prestigious newspapers in the world, and I guess all we can do is make a little effort to reduce their reputation, one reader at a time. So you’ll have to read his latest stupid column via a link to a site that skims off articles from the NYT.
Anyway, he starts off with classic centrist garbage — you know, both sides are wrong and extremist, therefore we ought to pick something in the middle.
On the one hand, liberal greens will tell you that the world is ending — but that we must not use nuclear power, an abundant source of clean energy, to stave it off. On the other hand, conservative greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that we can’t burden people with a carbon tax or a gasoline tax to slow global warming.
On a third hand, suburban greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that they don’t want any windmills, solar farms or high-speed rail lines in their backyards.
On a fourth hand, most of today’s leaders will tell you that the world is ending, so at Glasgow they’ve all decided to go out on a limb and commit their successors’ successor to deliver emissions-free electricity by 2030, 2040 or 2050 — any date that doesn’t require them to ask their citizens to do anything painful today.
He’s right that the Glasgow meetings were relatively ineffective because they were all about compromise, but isn’t that what Friedman wants? Split the difference, find a middle ground, characterize all environmentalists as wackos? He got what he wanted, so he can’t complain that his very own brand is a failure. His own solution is to further empower technocrats and corporations to engineer us out of the hole the technocrats and corporations have dug us into.
His answer is this turd to make it all worse.
In short: we need a few more Greta Thunbergs and a lot more Elon Musks. That is, more risk-taking innovators converting basic science into tools yet to be imagined to protect the planet for a generation yet to be born.
The only reason we need more Greta Thunbergs is because the Elon Musks have been running amuck. He’s not a “risk-taking innovator” — he’s a billionaire who is busy looting the planet and our economy to fuel his ego. He doesn’t do science! He spends money on whatever gives him a good return on his investment; his fantasy of launching people (not himself, obviously, other people) to Mars is flaming anti-environmentalism.
I am not surprised, though, that Thomas Fucking Friedman worships Musk as his Space Jesus.
What we need is an annual tax on wealth in order to raise needed funds to massively invest in combatting climate change. So sure involve Musk by having him fork over a few billion a year.
Libertarianism is antithetical to survival in space. The ‘Fuck you I’ll do what I want’ isn’t going to cut it if that attitude is going to fuck up the air everyone breaths.
Thomas Friedman has a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Tax him, too.
Harvard historian Jill Lepore has a podcast out about Musk and his contemporaries, The Evening Rocket. She argues that Musk’s vision is heavily influenced by the sci fi he read as a kid.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000xdxc
Is an oxymoron that doesn’t even exist.
The conservative solution to climate change is to deny that it exists and also that while the earth is getting warmer, this is due to natural processes. Claim 2 contradicts claim 1 but they don’t care.
The whole point is to do nothing because doing something takes effort and costs money.
freidman – what a piece of shit he is.
We are all smarter than him because his unending support for WMD’s got us here today and we knew it was a lie. A despicable human for sure.
The late science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer (who among other thrings wrote the World of tiers- and Riverworld series) stated early in the 1970s that looking after the nature of the Earth must have priority over space research.
He was also groundbreaking by introducing “adult” themes into Science fiction, such as The Lovers, where the girlfriend is a human-mimic organism.
Im a bit confused here. If, as you say, the NYT has “way too many assholes granted a sinecure to babble their stupid opinions on one of the more prestigious newspapers in the world” what makes the NYT so prestigious?
@8
The reporting not the opining. And it’s relative; it’s more prestigious than the New York Post for instance. There’s a lot of crap out there.
<blockquoteOn the one hand, liberal greens will tell you that the world is ending — but that we must not use nuclear power, an abundant source of clean energy, to stave it off.
I’ll agree with him here (and only here). There is no fucking way we’re going to run a high-tech, multi-terawatt civilization on wind farms, solar panels, an other fucking-hippie-tech.
Sorry let’s retry that.
I’ll agree with him here (and only here). There is no fucking way we’re going to run a high-tech, multi-terawatt civilization on wind farms, solar panels, an other fucking-hippie-tech.
StonedRanger @8
They print what the powers-that-be want people to believe, in a style which panders to the privileged classes’ snobbishness. They spin or falsify or suppress news so that what’s “fit to print” is whatever the bosses want people to believe. So the powers-that-be insist that it is prestigious, and the privileged classes flatter themselves that they only read the elite newspaper. And since they don’t read other sources, they don’t notice how often what the NYT reports is biased or out-and-out false. The NYT prints just enough stuff that could be construed as critical of the status quo that people can think it’s independent.
From what I’ve seen from the few NYT staffers that I have known, it sounds like it’s kind of an establishment echo-chamber, so the staffers don’t see the spin as false, they see it as the One True Way to see things.
@8
the reputation accumulated in the last hundred or so years not so much on what they have been doing lately .
Taxing the rich and removing them from positions of global power sounds nice. Unless election season is rolling around, at which point you guys stop making meaningful criticisms of the plutocratic, anti-environmental status quo of your own party, and foreclose any threat of not voting for them, because the opposition is supposedly so much worse.
It’s been too many replays of that to count at this point. We vote for the lesser evil, and then we wonder why the lesser evil is on the same team as American oligarchs who want to destroy all human life.
I finally had enough and went from “supporting journalism” to getting access without paying for it. It turns out you can get a vacation suspension for up to six months while retaining online access. After six months, you go on vacation again. I’ve done this for six years.
I’m less angry about their heavy overweighting of rightwing columnists; including pretend Liberals like drunken Maurean Dowd with her hate campaign against any Democrat especially Hillary Clinton; and as “my job is comforting the comfortable David Brooks; than with their supposed news coverage. How many sympathetic articles have they written about MAGA’s in diners and the fraction of a percent vaccine-refusers in hospitals, workplaces, police and government while completely ignoring the majority of people? How many years did we have of the “now Trump turns Presidential” and “Javanka is a moderating influence” and now endless horserace articles about the infrastructure packages without any interest in what is actually in them? Oh yeah, they ran an article today unfairly & inaccurately picking at small pieces of the package while still ignoring the effects of the package itself.
Isn’t it a spectacular lack of self-awareness to talk about how a meeting at Glasgow didn’t require doing anything hard or making any sacrifices and then to talk vaguely about “innovations” that might solve the problem, as if “innovations” are magically much more difficult than at least some people having to cut their income and consumption levels?
@11: The energy experts are nowhere near that sure, and nuclear power is no salvation. But it does appeal to technocrats like Friedman and does let people adopt “both-sideism” as a default position. I do agree that nuclear power should be on the table and there is irrational opposition to it, but there’re also real concerns.
Akira @11:
Heh. You sound a bit like Gerrard the Obsessed.
What I do find most amusing is that modern solar PV and wind farms are much more advanced tech than old-fashioned nuclear tech.
PS
@18
More advanced than thorium reactors and fusion? I doubt it.
I suppose I’m the only one who realizes that the 60s-70s counter-culture was the WORST thing to happen to the Left. The “Old Left” knew to bathe daily and visit a barber/stylist, wore suits, ate meat, kept their recreational drug use private, deny the existence of god snd “spirituality,” and not to make themselves into the clownish objects of ridicule the hippies became. I’d say the only things the “New Left” got right was the 1970s sexual revolution, but that was pre-dated nearly a century earlier by the free love movement, and rejection of Abrahamic sexual mores is a very low bar to cross.
So please, take your filthy granola-tech back to your shit-covered, poor-addled commune, and let the rest of us power our superior civilization with more powerful split or fused atoms.
Was going to stay out of it, but because i think that this could benefit from direct citations and quotes.
What makes an energy expert an “energy expert”? Because they say so? I know what most of the climate scientists say, and it’s pretty direct and unambiguous.
Quoting leading climate scientist Dr. Ken Caldeira:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=121https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=3109Quoting leading climate scientist Dr. Kerry Emanuel:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=251https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1297https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=1956https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/Quoting preeminent climate scientist Dr. James Hansen:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdfAkira MacKenzie @19, and there I was thinking you were one of the reasonable ones. Where I live solar and wind provide over 60% of the electrical energy used by the entire state and that percentage is climbing every year. Hardly any hippy communes either, just engineers and businesses doing their sums.
Akira:
Your doubt is duly noted.
You USAnians amuse me greatly.
<snicker>
You imagine boiling water to drive turbines is more technologically advanced than photovoltaics?
(Lemme guess, you think internal combustion engines are more advanced than electric motors)
BTW, how’s it working in the land of the free, the capitalist exemplar of the world, where profit is king?
<clickety-click>
https://ieefa.org/solar-wind-replacing-nuclear-according-to-2021-u-s-power-plans/
Huh.
—
BTW, I exported more than 7 MWh to the grid, last year. Got solar panels on my roof. ;)
(No electricity bill, I’m in credit)
Sigh
Gerrard, you also amuse me. Thing is, grid storage, smart grids, demand management etc are things. All going gangbusters, both in R&D and deployment.
You’re stuck in this mid C20 mindset, so you won’t get it.
(The buggy-whip mindset)
@23
A much more reasonable reply than your usual wall-o-text, anyway.
John
Your argument “BTW, I exported more than 7 MWh to the grid, last year. Got solar panels on my roof. ;) / (No electricity bill, I’m in credit)” is fallacious. It pretends that the grid is a giant free battery. As soon as I call you on it, you backpeddle to a slightly more defensible position. It’s dishonest. You should know better by now. But you don’t really care about what’s true – because if you did, you wouldn’t continue to make such flagrantly dishonest arguments.
PS:
Smart grids can’t conjure electricity from nothing. Won’t help in the week in winter in Europe with near zero solar and wind, which is a thing that happens.
Batteries are often a combination of too expensive and requiring scarce resources. Lithium ion, for example, is both too expensive, and there’s not enough feasibly mineable lithium worldwide for even 1 day of grid storage. We need a miracle breakthrough for solar and wind, and by extension all renewables, to work, and I don’t think that miracle is coming. I’ll side with the scientists who can do the math, and my own ability to do the math, instead of a dishonest fool like you.
John,
You also cited some clearly dishonest rhetoric about capacities – directly comparing solar and wind nameplate capacity vs nuclear capacity. You should know this is dishonest. Just for starters, wind and solar often have real capacity factors around 20% and 30%, and nuclear is around 90%. Doesn’t look so impressive then, does it? It’s all these little things that you do which are dishonest, and it’s infuriating.
Gerrard:
In your imagination. I get 12c per KWh from my provider, but I pay 15-24c/KWh depending on time of day. They profit from it, my power gets onsold to other users who aren’t fortunate enough to be able to afford solar panels. Also, remember I still power my own home; for example, re demand management: I have a timer on my system that runs my electric hot water system (9:30am-3:30pm) when it’s sunniest. Which is when I use my dishwasher, my clotheswasher, when I run my AC etc. None of this off-peak (night) tariff stuff of days of yore.
Thing is, overall, I end up sending a shitload more out than I suck in.
I do live in a sunny place, mind you :) And so do a lot of other people.
In your dreams. I’m telling you straight. Facts.
You do get that my provider still profits, right? $1/day supply charge, for example.
Again, facts.
No, but they can manage generation and demand and distribute it, well… smartly.
Well, it helps here, where I live.
(As for Europe, well… <clickety-click>
Renewables met 97% of Scotland’s electricity demand in 2020)
There are heaps of types, and not just batteries.
Again (you keep ignoring this) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage#Forms
You only say that because you’re clueless, and mired in mid C20 thinking.
I’ll side with reality.
(Hey, what’s your power bill?)
Gerrard, did you imagine that because I’ve departed Marcus’ blog, I would ignore your wankings?
And yet, that’s where the money is being spent by businesses who desire to make $$$, instead of nuclear. Worldwide.
(Apparently, they value profit more than being impressed)
Says the guy that seriously argued with me that, even were renewables utterly free (no cost whatsoever for however much one wanted), they’d still be useless and worthless.
Right.
You could at least have the integrity to properly quote me dipshit. I said that regarding solar and wind. I also said that I like hydro and that hydro is generally good. Conflating all renewables is ignorant, and pretending that I do is also dishonest.
Ahem. Are not solar and wind “renewables”?
But sure, just for you: “Says the guy that seriously argued with me that, even were solar and wind utterly free (no cost whatsoever for however much one wanted), they’d still be useless and worthless.”
There you go.
Are you really saying that the following are remotely equivalent?
1- Says the guy that seriously argued with me that, even were renewables utterly free (no cost whatsoever for however much one wanted), they’d still be useless and worthless.
2- Says the guy that seriously argued with me that, even were solar and wind utterly free (no cost whatsoever for however much one wanted), they’d still be useless and worthless.
Go fuck yourself. Fucking troll.
Heh. Sure, not all renewables are wind or solar (though what mechanisms do you imagine enable the hydropower dams?). Look up the hydrologic cycle, if you care to.
Anyway, point being, once one has electrical power one can transform/store it in any number of ways.
Yes, I know you imagine it’s not doable (despite my various adductions over time, which I note did not include hot rocks, for example), and I know you imagine hydrogen or higher substances can’t be generated from renewable power. But that’s just you, Gerrard.
(And possibly Akira, though I sense a strategic withdrawal from them)
Your piteous whining is music to my ears. Can’t argue my facts, so all you have is bluster.
(There, there!)
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=3109
Emphasis mine.
AND
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=251
No emphasis needed. Says it all right there.
Ooooh, AND…
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041
Again. No emphasis needed.
I don’t see where they say that solar and wind are useless and the only solution is nuclear alone. How about you, John Morales? Did I miss something?
tuatara,
Not really. Though I note that many of those links Gerrard adduces from his stash are often quite old — I’ve seen some over a decade old. Cost and performance curves for
renewablessolar and wind and storage are rather impressive over that period.(Kinda embarrassing when those articles refer to, say, solar at half the power for three times the cost, for example)
And FWIW, I’ve made it quite clear that I don’t have any problem whatsoever with nuclear deployment (subject to sensible safety and regulatory regimes), but rather with the attitude that the goal can’t possibly be met with renewables. Of any sort :)
Jonh Morales.
It may not appear so but I also agree that appropriate nuclear deployment will be helpful.
What riles me is the attitude that nuclear is the only solution and renewables are useless.
While citing climate scientists is all well and good one cannot cite the nameless engineers that are making the SA power network here work on wind and solar alone for large parts of the day, exporting renewable power to neighbouring VIC. This has got to be assisting in the immediate reduction of CO2 emmissions that we all so desperately need to see.
It has to be better than doing nothing while we wait for the mythical SMRs and other theoretical reactors to arrive.
OT
Thomas Friedman ?
here is more garbage from the past:
The forgotten oil ads that told us that climate change was nothing.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ads-that-told-us-climate-change-was-nothing
EDIT @ 19 (damn autocorrect and seething anger):
F00k right off and die, Gerrard, your hypocrisy, dishonesty and obvious double-standards have already been exposed and debunked on stderr’s “Argument Clinic” post.
I doubt whether even GerrardOfConspiracyTheories in his latest wall-of-text (which, since he routinely spouts the most ridiculous conspiratorial garbage, I’m not going to bother reading) said anything quite so fucking stupid as that. Thorium reactors, despite numerous pilot projects, have never managed to displace or even seriously rival their uranium-using counterparts There are reasons for that. As for fusion, “It’s the power of the future… and always will be!” It’s at best decades away from actual power production, and may well never get there. For one thing, it requires tritium, and the only feasible source of tritium is bombarding lithium with neutrons, but it’s far from clear this is actually workable. But of course we already use fusion power, since solar, wind, hydro and wave power are all generated by the fucking great fusion reactor experts call “the sun”.
Now now, John, you know it’s cheating to point out that lithium-ion batteries are not the only form of energy storage!
Well Akira, you’ve intentionally blown the dog whistles winding up GOTS to come and derail the thread. Way to troll!
I doubt whether even GerrardOfConspiracyTheories … said anything quite so fucking stupid as that.
Well, he has repeatedly blamed “greens” for practically ALL of our present-day environmental problems. And he claims to be a supporter of nuclear power, while spewing absolutely unhinged hatred toward others who also support nuclear power, simply because they don’t support it EXCLUSIVELY. So don’t underestimate his stupidity.
at the risk of sounding like one of those “pot and LSD addled hippies” so disparaged by the “expert” above I have to start at the beginning.
The power needs now and projected are for the “modern world” as it is constituted now. Our modern world is based primarily on profit and consumption fueled by continuous growth. We ship vast amounts of commodities and cargo across all the oceans of the world to every possible port in search of profit, chasing raw material, cheap labor and high prices. Most of the finished goods, the products that end in the consumer’s hands are designed with as short a usable life span as the market will accept. Little of it can be repaired most ends in land fills or incinerators or dumped into the sea. A small percentage gets recycled. The whole world economy is based on the consumer market and economic growth. There is no way to sustain perpetual growth the very idea is a delusion. So the answer is bigger and “better” power supply, a bigger and better markets more finished goods filling more land fills all existing on a very finite planet that does not care a thing about any of our desires. We need to expand to exploit the stars before we devour our home world into a vast industrial dream of power and glory.
one of the answers to our power needs may be in imagining, in reevaluating what we are doing and why and figure out a more realistic way to order our lives in the world we have and how its systems really work. To debate and struggle how to maintain our modern world the way it is today is just to put off the disastrous collapse of the unsustainable and make it much more difficult to make any kind of desirable recovery after the collapse which may be abrupt or just as likely slow, prolonged and agonizing .
Raging Bee@43,
Oh, I don’t! I guess I shouldn’t really have said that without reading his latest screed.
tuatara @34: So even the people GerrardofTitanicStupidity keeps on citing as the eminent scientists who agree with him…don’t really agree with his policy demands? Thanks, that just shows I underestimated GoTS’s blatant dishonesty and willful stupidity. What a bad old joke.