Russ’s Recent Comments

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  What will Peak Oil do?

  Biod, what do you think of the Sail Transport Network, which I think is located in your neck of the woods?

  Wolverine, do you hold hopes that Peak Oil and its accompanying economic and systemic corrections will soon bring about the end of "globalism"?

  Well, it's already being "downsized", to use one of its own pet terms against it (and how sweet that feels).

  Now it's just a matter of how the endgame plays out.

   On Former Washington Gov. Locke would bring a strong voice for oceans to Commerce posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 3 Responses

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  trolls

  Joe Romm runs a pretty tight ship over at Climate Progress. As soon as he sees them he deletes already debunked denier points, and if a troll is being obnoxious Romm puts him on "moderation", so his comments don't appear until authorized.On Coen brothers shoot an ad busting the 'clean coal' myth posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 36 Responses

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  chicken and egg?

  When it comes to carbon policy, most legislative bodies seem to favor option No. 2, in part because ideological purists on both sides of the aisle can't find middle ground in option No. 3. But real, lasting reform inevitably comes out of that fourth approach, finding ways not to penalize those who benefited from the old status quo, but rather to give everyone an incentive in a better future. (Think Mandela.)

  Assuming I found much plausibility in this, I'd consider it at least as likely that "ideological purists" didn't start out that way, but became that way out of disgust at the corruption, cowardice, and paltriness you're sticking up for there.

  But I don't think your construction is plausible. I hardly think most of these people need any encouragement from ideologues to go in for bribery, appeasement, laziness, and wretched smallness of vision. I think they do that just fine on their own.

  As for this:

  4.Change the rules so that everyone makes money from doing the right thing....

  ...But real, lasting reform inevitably comes out of that fourth approach.

  "Inevitably"! So I guess all the history books I ever read (about Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Reformation, Elizabethan times, the English civil war, the Thirty years' war, the czars, the French Revolution, the whole 19th century revolutionary ferment....I could go on but you get the idea), where few of the attempters made much money, and few seemed to be particularly trying to, are all wrong.

  I guess I could have saved myself alot of effort and just read one grist post.

  Or maybe not:

  (Think Mandela.)

  It's certainly an odd view of reform which considers the complete betrayal of the Freedom Charter, the thoroughgoing privatization of the country while the vast masses remain just as impoverished as they were under apartheid (indeed in some ways they've been worse off), and the thuggish regime of Thabo Mkebi, to be a rip-roaring success.

  But those who were rich under apartheid remained rich, and you did say that's important to you. "Don't seek to bring criminals to justice", and the rest of it.

  After all, those of us who still believe in quaint things like justice are just "ideologues", "naive"*, poets. Especially because we have the temerity to not particularly care about your profit motive.

  [*BTW, I stand by my assessment, which I've written about elsewhere here, that in these days of crisis and potential to dare great things in the name of great values is no more naive and no less politically practicable than the defeatism of picayune goals and conventional prejudices about what's politically "possible", which latter course has been going on for so long now with such meager results.

  I don't say these things to gratuitously heckle anybody, but to defend and fight back against these increasingly nihilistic attacks on principled people and on the very concept of principle itself.]

   On South Carolina misses an opportunity for energy efficiency with Duke's Save-A-Watt program posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 18 Responses

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  bobfj

  1. The climate crisis is a true crisis that people should be scared of far more than they are (both for their own posterity and, if they had any human feeling, for the 3rd world right NOW). If anything Romm, Hansen et.al. understate the peril.
  This is in contrast to all the gutter fear-mongering of right-wingers like you on trumped-up "threats" like terror, crime, hippies, not to mention the fraudulent warnings over the allegedly dire economic consequences of climate action.
  What do conservatives even have left now but pure fear-mongering (no doubt mirroring their inner fear over their own imminent extinction) and pure obstructionism?

  2. Although you wish it still were, there is nothing "esoteric" about the Luntz gameplan you lackeys carry out to the letter (as in your posts here). The fundamental dishonesty, instrumentalism, and mercenary nihilism of the whole Republican endeavor are all too clear, in part thanks to Luntz writing it all out so clearly.

  3. Unfortunately for your obfuscatory post about Pielke Jr. (listing all his irrelevant awards and titles, but suspiciously omitting his actual credentials, the lack of which is of course what Romm attacked), anyone else can just as easily go to wikipedia and see for himself that Pielke jr has nothing but poli sci degrees.

  Whatever else a Poli Sci degree may do, it does not make you a formally credentialled scientist.

  I suppose you consider "Dr." Laura, a glorified gym teacher with her doctorate in gym science or something, a real scientist too?On Does the New York Times also employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers? posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 11 Responses

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  Ragging on Kunstler

  It's nothing against civilization, he just wants to be right for a change.

  I wish I'd said that. In fact, someday soon, I will.
  

  It seems we skeptics regarding the fossil fuel platform and exponential debt civilization are looking pretty good these days, and not because we got lucky, but because we correctly analyzed the situation a long time ago, and things are happening as we forecast.

  As for the wonks of green cornucopianism and carbon policy arcana, I'll have to state the obvious: all that has existed of these on earth so far is talk, talk, talk, while emissions everywhere including among the most punctilious Kyoto signatories keep going up.

  So although I still hope this may change in time (and according to your own luminaries like Pachauri you have less than four years left to REALLY get started), all the evidence is it won't, that man is simply going to burn fossil fuel and emit profligately for as long as supply fundamentals and economics allow, and that nothing short of a cap imposed by Peak Oil itself is going to set the final concentration maximum.

  Sorry to get ornery, but these days I'm no longer willing to listen to Kunstler be the object of armpit noises when his record as a prophet, while imperfect, is vastly greater than that of almost anyone else, and his real-world accomplishment, while so far perhaps modest, is again greater than that of his critics, who have accomplished nothing but talk.

  "Just wanting to be right for a change" - don't we all. You guys ought to know.
    On Why not medium-speed rail? posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 8 Responses