In addition to not being real, global warming is a problem so huge that we might as well just give up and invest in oceanfront property in Kansas. Seriously, there is no way we could ever afford to do what needs to be done:
On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, a new report from Oil Change International, entitled A Climate of War(pdf) quantifies both the greenhouse gas emissions of the Iraq War and the opportunity costs involved in fighting war rather than climate change. Here are some facts on the war and warming:
- Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.
Yeah, well, Al Gore farted methane, so there. Via. People, listen: reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Obtaining all the energy we need directly from sunlight? These are the kinds of insurmountable engineering challenges overcome every day by plants. Plants. And not just those clever trees or those cunning shrubberies, mind you – single-celled algae-type bullshit figured out workable solutions to these questions several billion years ago. Call me speciesist (kingdomist?), but I’ve never found the flora to be particularly deep thinkers. I suspect we can probably do as well if not better, but we might have to cease our incessent whining and excuse-making for a while. Oh, and stop spending billions of dollars a week so that Friends of Dubya don’t have to admit that they fucked the dog.
March 26, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I think you’ve got something there:
Slimemold/Alga ‘O8
A step up from the current crowd
March 26, 2008 at 5:43 pm
yeah.
i got a prius. i had a new battery put in by the good people at hybrids plus in boulder, CO. i have solar panels. the solar panels generate power that runs into my house, and is used by my car which is now a plug-in hybrid. so far i’m getting at least 250 MPG, and the electricity i’ve replaced the gas with is being generated in the main by socal’s sun.
none of this technology is far off in the distance. none of it is cold fusion, or cellulosic ethanol, or hydrogen fuel cells. none of it is “ready in 5 to 10 years.”
it’s all here. now. i’m lucky. i have some cash to spend on these things. but you know what? if our society can spend upwards of a trillion dollars (and yes, i trust joseph stiglitz, that guy knows whereof he speaks, and that’s his price tag on the war) on a FUCKING USELESS FUCKING WAR (please do watch the iraqis on charlie rose–holy shit do they hammer us but hard), then maybe, just maybe, we could subsidize some solar, some PHEVs, and be done with petroleum and take a massive savings on our carbon footprint.
and we could do all of this tomorrow.
dog fuckers.
March 26, 2008 at 5:44 pm
[...] March 26, 2008 The Editors At Poor Man Posted by John O under Political | Tags: facts schmacts, global warming, The Editors, The Poor Man Institute, yeah but those are scientists so what do they know | Hilarious, as usual. [...]
March 26, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[...] The Editors on the energy crisis and global warming: People, listen: reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Obtaining all the energy we need directly from sunlight? These are the kinds of insurmountable engineering challenges overcome every day by plants. Plants. And not just those clever trees or those cunning shrubberies, mind you – single-celled algae-type bullshit figured out workable solutions to these questions 3.4 billion years ago. Call me speciesist (kingdomist?), but I’ve never found the flora to be particularly deep thinkers. I suspect we can probably do a well if not better, but we might have to cease our incessant whining and excuse-making for a while. Oh, and stop spending billions of dollars a week so that Friends of Dubya don’t have to admit that they fucked the dog. [...]
March 26, 2008 at 6:18 pm
You know what else is totally not real? Ice caps shrinking at a pants-shittingly fast rate.
And, of course, Arctic ice doesn’t matter, anyway. All that matters is the current temperature outside my house — which says it’s kind of chilly right now!
March 26, 2008 at 6:44 pm
[...] bullshit figured out workable solutions to these questions several billion years ago… — Global warming: we must give up before it’s too late — No Comments [...]
March 26, 2008 at 6:47 pm
[...] bullshit figured out workable solutions to these questions several billion years ago… — Global warming: we must give up before it’s too late — addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stumplane.us%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D39′; addthis_title = [...]
March 26, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Let’s harness the power of the multiverse via quantum space magic! The Flora only seem to stay still with your eye. It’s a matter of perception. Listen to their messages in our paper.
Solve global warming? No way man, we need to escape to a another time-space reality. We’ll take our rainbow car, man!
March 26, 2008 at 7:08 pm
“Family Guy” does suck. Thank you for pointing this out. Thank you thank you thank you.
March 26, 2008 at 7:09 pm
So we flower children from the sixties had it right all along! Peace, love, and plants.
March 26, 2008 at 7:54 pm
1. Fall of the plants.
2. Rise of the machines.
3. Global warming.
4. Rise of the plants, again.
5. But then… God’s natural cycle ruined by postmodernism.
March 26, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Wait until global warming is embraced by the religious right, and proclaimed as a sure sign of the imminent apocalypse.
March 27, 2008 at 12:31 am
Luckily, the Democrats are promising to cut our bloated military budget, raise the top income tax bracket, and make these necessary investments in converting to a sustainable economy.
Wait…they’re not?
So what exactly is the political solution here?
It’s all well and good to make fun of the GOP’s crazy refusal to admit the reality of global warming, but the last time we had a Democratic administration, they (Al Gore, actually) fatally weakened the Kyoto treaty and failed to get the Senate to ratify it anyway. Clinton and Gore didn’t even raise CAFE standards.
March 27, 2008 at 5:00 am
Jimmy Carter told us to cut back on our energy consumption.
So we ran him out of town.
March 27, 2008 at 6:27 am
the Democrats are promising to cut our bloated military budget, raise the top income tax bracket, and make these necessary investments in converting to a sustainable economy.
Oh right, Eds., you forgot this one: There’s no magical pony party that will solve all these problems immediately without and political messiness, so why bother even trying to tell who’s better from who is worse?
Thanks for reminding us, Incontinentia.
As your next act, maybe you’ll provide us with some actual evidence that Democrats are not talking about ending the war, progressive taxes, or investing in alternative energy. Or, then again, maybe you won’t.
March 27, 2008 at 7:04 am
These are the kinds of insurmountable engineering challenges overcome every day by plants. Plants.
Not quite insurmountable, but pretty fucking hard. Y’all remember the hand wavy explanations of how photosynthesis works when you were in grade school? Mostly just guesswork – sure, we know the chemicals involved, energy use rates, blah blah blah… but the actual mechanism of how the glucose molecule gets constructed? Still pretty much a mystery.
Nobel prize and worldwide acclaim to the first ones to figure it out – Hop to it!
March 27, 2008 at 7:43 am
Fucking hilarious. And sad. But then, that’s why I come.
March 27, 2008 at 8:12 am
Shift war spending to reducing greenhouse gasses? Dream on.
March 27, 2008 at 8:30 am
Luckily, the Democrats are promising to cut our bloated military budget, raise the top income tax bracket
From today’s WSJ (the news pages, mind you):
I hate to break it you, Incontinentia, but if you want to criticize the Dems for not talking about something, you first need to find out if they are, in fact, talking about it.
March 27, 2008 at 11:07 am
Hmm, a couple of thoughts:
1. We still haven’t, um, actually paid for this war, or even tried real hard to say how we’ll cough up the cash when the IOUs come in. But yeah, I’d much rather spend a trillion we don’t have on an enormous boondoggle that doesn’t kill so many people, and may even work.
2. Plants get all they need from sunlight, if you call that living. I mean, just sitting there, soaking it in all the time. I’d at least need beer.
3. It’s not like untold billions couldn’t still be shifted to defense contractors. Surely Raytheon et al., could cough up a solar department if they wanted to, and that’s where most of the optics, electronics, and materials people can still get adequate-paying jobs go anyway. Oil companies are less likely to adapt to this (but even there). Obviously a Decider with connections to non-conflicting lobbying groups would be a plus.
March 27, 2008 at 1:09 pm
So what exactly is the political solution here?
The oldest and most predictable one…extinction.
It’s just that we’ll be the first species to actually cause it, know about it, and yet ignore it.
March 27, 2008 at 2:56 pm
When it comes to electricity, I want it the way NARAL wants abortions: an infinite supply, on demand, without apologies. Let someone else deal with the details.
Now, I could make the same point using the word “commodity,” but I always thought “fungible” sounded cooler, like a combination of “fun to eat” and “edible” — as in “Dude, this jerky is majorly fungible.” Oil is about as close to liquid money as you can get. Which is why I always thought the real hypocrisy on Gore’s part wasn’t his record in favor of high gas prices so much as his incessant promises to “protect” the budget surplus.
Well, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, economically speaking, is indistinguishable from a budget surplus, and he blew that like a fat man with free ice-cream coupons that expire at midnight just to win the votes of a handful of soccer moms who carpool their kids using gas-guzzling SUVs.
March 27, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I’m fairly certain Al Gore was never president.
I’m fairly confident of this.
March 27, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Hanging chad.
No, it’s not the name of a new necrophilic gay porn movie.
There’s a huge downside to a Gore presidency — and not just the fact that my stock portfolio could continue to nosedive.
March 27, 2008 at 3:33 pm
It might have rained?
March 27, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Apparently, Poppa Gore thought a boy who couldn’t both plow a field and parlez French existentialism could never be president either. Then there’s the fact that young Al got C’s in French at his tony Washington high school, St. Alban’s. That’s some school if a kid who can intelligently discuss Sartre’s “La Nausée” and Camus’ “Betwixt and Between” in apparently pitch-perfect French still can’t earn a B in French class. Mon dieu!
March 27, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Shameful. Maybe, when thinking of his shameful HS French grades, he wipes his teary eye with the Nobel Freaking Peace Prize. What a CRYBABY!!
VH-1 Presents: I Love The Political Arguments of The Late 1990’s. Up next: NAFTA – threat or menace?
March 27, 2008 at 3:51 pm
This could get more tedious. Of course that would require a dentist coming to my house and drilling a cavity down to my sphincter while I listened to MSNBC’s coverage blasted in Spanish simulcast. But, theoretically, it is possible.
But the reality is that this stopped being exciting a while ago. The gears of intellectual consistency and moral principle have been stripped clean off Al Gore’s arguments.
The Republican Party voted for NAFTA and took the lead on the Cold War when the Democrats ran and hid after Vietnam.
March 27, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Nah, if it wasn’t this, then it would have been spent on something similar, like building a Death Star. Five hundred billion in one hand, half a trillion in another.
March 27, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Sorry, but it’s too late to move to Kansas.
The latest news is that little towns out in western Kansas are being inundated with toxic levels of ozone pollution seeping up from Dallas.
Even the middle of nowhere isn’t safe any more. Fortunately, once you’re dead from the ozone, global warming isn’t such a big threat anymore.
March 29, 2008 at 7:49 am
Actually I’d say we have a fairly good idea how purple bacteria (Bacteriorhodopsin) goes into its excited state upon absorption of light and releases a proton assymmetrically to one side of its membrane, generating an electrochemical gradient. Monkey with this system a tad and you can certainly generate H2.
It will require lots of genetic enginnering and materials science to maybe encapsulate a very similar system into a non degradable bunch of tubes or something. But nothing a hundred billion wouldn’t solve in 10 years.
Making carbon carbon bonds a la true photosynthesis is of course a bit harder. Mostly because the precise Q-M meaning of ‘bond’ is, from very close up, kind of ill-defined. I would say in DFT language: ‘a local correlation of the one-electron density function with the exchange-correlation hole density, which is at least a local saddle point in energy.’
March 29, 2008 at 9:48 am
Local being defined relative to nuclear positions. So, between two nuclei situated < 2 A apart, if such a spatial correlation with such given energetic properties exists, and between 3 nuclei < 3 A apart or so, the central nucleus being a proton, likewise.
March 29, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] The people at Oil Change International provide some analysis. The current cluster-fuck in Iraq is creating a whole lotta atmospheric carbon. It’s not hard to believe that major combat operations burn a lot of fossil fuels. But 25 million cars worth of GHG? I guess it’s possible. On the bright side, the Iraqis themselves have significantly reduced their electricity consumption since we took over!Aside from the direct contributions to global warming, the occupation of Iraq is consuming a lot of money that could be better spent, you know, mitigating the climate catastrophe upon us. And it is upon us. Just ask the penguins. Or the polar bears. Or the penguins and the polar bears (yes, there are penguins and polar bears together in the photo on that box).Via via. [...]
March 31, 2008 at 10:24 am
In terms of dog fucking, I am reminded of a doorway I saw emblazoned with this graffito which I used to see every day going to and from work:
Fuck
Them
Hole
Dogs
March 31, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Global Warming? It’ll just help our transhuman-microprocessors run faster!
April 22, 2008 at 6:01 pm
[...] energy available is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. And extracting it is, fundamentally, not a very difficult problem. So a couple of [...]