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Either Trump and the Republicans are ignorant dolts who do not understand the difference between weather and climate, or they are members of the culture of greed more interested in making a fast buck than in the well-being of our people and country. Or maybe both parts are true. Regardless, they hurt our nation and people.

wordywalt 9 Nov 26
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1

Can't BOTH be true?

1

the two are not mutually exclusive!

g

2

It is a mixture of both.

0

Most wants the money and you know, if you have enough money you actually can do very good in a climatic chaos.
Or they are simply not concerned about it (see south park season 22 episode 6 and 7)
Or they are in a bubble of misinformation that they really believe in the denial, seriously it is not difficult to put people in bubbles. Conservatives and progressists hate each other so much that you can't stand the other speaking, so the leaders know how to maneuver this very well to isolate from reality and keep in the bubble

1

Why not both?

2

Ignorance is part of it, but the corporate influence is the biggest factor. They know that they can get more donations if they reduce environmental regulations, so that is what they do. They claim they are doing it to create more jobs, but there is more job growth opportunity in renewable/clean energy production than there is with fossil fuel and coal.

1

Agreed. And in some sense it's too late. Even if we converted every vehicle to electric today (trucks, cars, motorcycles, trains, ships/boats), it would still take 20 years for people to move over (typically how long a vehicle lasts).

Our two vehicles are respectively 11 and 6 years old and I regularly push that to 15 years or whenever things fall apart at too great a rate, but I think 20 years is nowhere near the average. More like 5 I would think. If for the 2019 model year we sold nothing but electrics, we'd be 80% electric vehicles in 5 year's time, I'd guesstimate.

The problem then is how much of a carbon footprint is involved in the manufacture of all those car batteries and the charging of them. If you charge an electric from the output of a coal-fired electric plant, then it's probably a wash at best. But then if we had the will to get rid of fossil-fueled cars we'd probably have the will to get rid of fossil-fueled electric utilities over the coming decade.

A practical obstacle to an immediate change-over to electric cars is the availability of batteries. Tesla currently produces more batteries for itself and for household solar applications than the entire world produced just a few years ago, and that's after investing billions in giant "giga-factories". The major other manufacturers would have to make those investments and do those build outs as well. It couldn't happen next year even if we legislated it.

This underscores why we need to friggn' get on with it already. These things take time.

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