I'm not going to quote it since hopefully all who have read this are aware of the Federal Report of Black Friday based on the studies of over 300 scientists in the field and backed my NASA, NOAA, the Dept. of Defense, and 10 other federal scientific agencies all stating bluntly that climate change is NOW, Human-Caused, and both expensive and dangerous.

Full report is --- H E R E ---

enorbet you beat me to it... ;)

to balance the scales a bit: https://www.investors.com/politics/e...ng-media-bias/
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/art...ce_103243.html

Interesting on both sides of the aisle.

Sorry, conservative economy commentators don't trump scientists.

(edit: didn't see the double meaning 'till after posting)

double meaning, LOL...you caused me to almost spray earl grey.

"MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: Believing CO2 controls the climate ‘is pretty close to believing in magic’ "
http://www.climatedepot.com/2017/05/...ving-in-magic/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/...us-ian-tuttle/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2225439/posts
https://www.dcourier.com/news/2016/m...dence-climate/

Sorry, but I'm still not convinced. As far as I can tell none of them is a peer reviewed science journal; their credibility as sources of climate science information is, at best, at the same level as my credibilty as an economist.

I haven't done any intrusive hacking in well over a decade so I don't know any 'deep dirt" on Dr. Lindzen but I do know he is overwhelmingly in a miniscule percentage of scientists in any field who now deny the importance of human fossil fuel burning let alone the role of CO2 as a powerful catalyst in climate change. I also know Big Oil has vast supplies of dollars they are quite willing to spend to "motivate" deniers to keep them viable just a little longer.

I just saw an article announcing the invention of a full-sized airplane, running purely on electricity with zero moving parts. Tesla is about to revel electric trucks and electric and hybrid cars are selling quite briskly. Battery technology continues to advance. It seems we are heading to an electric world and Big Oil will have to be happy with petrochemicals which will remain very important for many generations but that still leaves Coal and it is a massive source of CO2 and very common still in electricity production.

I have no problem with individuals who imagine Status Quo - Business As Usual is a workable course of action (or non-action) but I think it absolutely reprehensible that President Trump demonstrates such a lack of knowledge and concern over the safety of his choices in this area. Devil May Care just isn't going to work and a global rally to insure our future would go a long way to easing rivalries and international tensions. For more reasons than just CO2 it is high time we left this fossil from the 19th century pass into oblivion. As the Saudis said back in the 1960s, "Oil is too important to burn".

Ancient Chinese/Taoists have said this for a long time as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abioge...troleum_origin

This is a nice progression, now, what will they do with the toxicity of the batteries, the toxic EMF of solar panels, and how will they generate all of that "clean" electricity? It appears the future some want, will consume more energy not less.

Big Tobacco all over again...

The future has to be electric (you just heard this from a confirmed petrol head). But I'm not convinced that batteries and PV cells are anything other than the short term solution. There's far too high a pollution cost in their manufacture, lithium batteries also have a high extraction cost to the environment.

Nuclear power from fission is technically possible, but not viable because we can't trust the people in charge of generation to do their job properly. It's also worth noting that well run nuclear power stations emit less radioactive waste than coal fired power stations.

The longer term for mobile users (aircraft, watercraft, road transport) would be better served by hydrogen in fuel cells and heat engines (ie internal and external combustion), even sourced from "quick and dirty*" use of solar furnaces to generate electricity for electrolysis as well as for general use. Fusion power is needed, even though it will also have a radioctive waste problem (MUCH reduced compared to fission) from decommissioned plant.

Oil and coal are too precious as a source of organic chemicals to burn. The sooner we stop the better.

Unfortunately that lack of understanding, and it too many cases pride in that ignorance, isn't restricted to any one nation.

*"Quick and dirty" as in "This works, it may not be elegant or efficient but it does the job well enough to be useful" rather than adding to environmental problems.

TANSTAAFL, Bro... There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Every solution comes with it's own set of obstacles and difficulties... costs. Choosing solutions that have the lowest or easiest to solve costs is where smart money goes. Some problems reduce with volume as is the case with PV solar cells. Currently not enough have been made to "go bad" and make recycling profitable but the manufacturing process keeps improving.

Consider that all of us here were born after Oil became Big Oil and had developed enough to make many kinds of extraction, not only possible,. but profitable, thus warranting R&D investment dollars... by the billions) and at the same time by the time we were born Big Oil already had campaigns for favorable legislation as well as stifling any perceived threat to that bottom line, including better batteries. I expect similar development with Big Electric... and somewhat similar problems but even now the greenhouse gasses involved are substantially lower than with burning fossil fuels, and it will only get better.

Also since we are in an age of computers and Moore's Law has kept on schedule, controls for nuclear power are vastly more reliable than they ever were. We hear/read about disasters but rarely about the majority that already, even though they were designed and built as early as the 60s, are continuing to contribute 11% of all electric generation globally and in France that number is currently 78%.

Fossil Fuels need to go and they will... already are, just too slowly thanks to the massive wealth and influence they weild.

Another point that needs to be considered is that solar panels themselves need a lot of energy to manufacture them. It's recovered of course many times over in their use, but you still need to have that energy up front. Consequently while a fully functioning solar economy can probably provide what is necessary to replace defunct solar panels on a rolling basis, that will not be possible when starting from scratch. We need to "solarise" while we still have fossil fuels available to give us that initial energy input.

So what about something like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas

https://www.motherearthnews.com/gree...k-zmaz81mjzraw

It's about as green as it gets. Wood is renewable unlike coal.

Pre-Fossil Fuel? Nah, doesn't get my vote. It's hard to sustain in any sizable scenario and still dumps CO2 into the atmosphere. I'm betting on Solar and Nuclear at the very least as a transition stopgap until the next breakthrough.

As ChuangTzu mentioned earlier, Solar is not so green when manufacturing and disposing. Likely same with Nuclear.

I agree wood seems bulky, but it's renewable.

Another thing I've tinkered with and see huge potential is hydrogen. I'm not talking about the California cars. I'm talking about pouring water in a small tank and generating it "on-demand". This has been proven to work and there is only one problem....it's hard for Big Business to make money selling water for fuel :D

It's not as bad as it seems. The problem with burning coal and oil is that doing so releases carbon that's been locked up, ie increasing the total amount of available carbon in the environment.

Burning contemporary wood doesn't increase the amount of carbon, but changes the form of carbon from organic compounds to carbon dioxide. If trees are replaced at the rate they're consumed there's no net gain in atmospheric CO2 levels, since the CO2 is being turned back into trees. This does require a much smaller global human population (but so do all the other environmental problems we've brought on ourselves) and good management of tree farms.

It also brings me to one of the many hobby horses in my stable - one of the more cost effective ways of reducing atmospheric carbon is for each of the world's other nations to pay a relatively small amount of money each to Brazil, Peru and Colombia to preserve the Amazon Forest.