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The 2018 UN Climate Report

rare144 said:
One brow please speak no more about the founders, it's obvious whether you disagree or not that you haven't read a word of theirs. Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Madison, Sam Adams, get to reading.. you're in for a shock.
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Hmm, should I educate the conspiracy theorist about what Sam Adam's book taught us about progressive taxation, and how T Jefferson and James had a lifelong mission fighting primogeniture and entail?

Or should I waste time on @Zombie post about how radicalized revisionismn that sort of stupidity is?

Y'all bore me. Except OB and babe.
 
rare144 said:
No dude liberty gets no authority from government, government gets consent from the people. Liberty > government you believe the opposite provide one quote from any founder that doesn't agree with this. Your ideology is what they crossed a great body of water to prove wrong.

You are in charge of your life, no one else. They were they first to declare this, that you are your own King, your own priest. life liberty and the pursuit of happiness triumphs anything else, everything is legal as long as it doesn't interfere with others same right
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I don't think the Founding Fathers were the first to declare anything, certainly not that liberty is more important than the type of government. There is nothing new under the sun, not for generations upon generations.

I did not understand what you meant by your first paragraph at all. Could you re-phrase it in some way?
 
i could. You believe Government grants us our liberty, our founders were escaping that thought. Were they the very first to do so? In modern history yes. So you believe in Atlantis?

Their whole philosophy is the opposite of yours and the majority here. They weren't worried about too much liberty, it was too much government they were safeguarding from and indeed they'd rather error on the side of too much liberty, many wouldn't sign the constitution unless it was made super clear on certain points, which became the bill of rights, otherwise they wanted no central government and wouldn't sign it.

Franklin and others said their experiment would be assaulted by authoritarians and they'd be surprised if we kept it. Jefferson said the tree of liberty would need to be watered with the blood of tyrants every 100 years or so. That's his quote
 
rare144 said:
i could. You believe Government grants us our liberty, our founders were escaping that thought. Were they the very first to do so? In modern history yes. So you believe in Atlantis?

Their whole philosophy is the opposite of yours and the majority here. They weren't worried about too much liberty, it was too much government they were safeguarding from and indeed they'd rather error on the side of too much liberty, many wouldn't sign the constitution unless it was made super clear on certain points, which became the bill of rights, otherwise they wanted no central government and wouldn't sign it.

Franklin and others said their experiment would be assaulted by authoritarians and they'd be surprised if we kept it. Jefferson said the tree of liberty would need to be watered with the blood of tyrants every 100 years or so. That's his quote
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I don't think you can have liberty with a repressive government (why the capital "G"?), but the relationship between the governed and the governing is a complex thing, so I would not say that governments "grant" liberty, but that the governed either accept a loss of liberties or revolt against them. Writing about liberty goes back to Aristotle, and the notion of inherent rights goes back to Plato, so I'm not sure what you think the Founding Fathers were the first to say.

If by "their" you mean the Founding Fathers, then there is very little philosophy they held as a group. The FFs ran the philosophical, political, and religious spectrum, and engaged in long debates about the governments. Some were very much indeed worried about too much liberty. You are correct that many saw the need for the Bill of Rights, please recall that many did not.

I could not find your Franklin quote. Did you mean this (it's more about people not being able to keep it than assaults from the outside):
In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, — if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
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Longer version of Jefferson quote (written before the Constitution):
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion[This would be the Shays rebellion]. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
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So, the blood he envisions comes from those who misconceive facts. Hmmm....

He backs off this position later on, BTW.
 
I commend you on your discussion, fools argue men discuss. Don't pay particular attention to my grammer as half my posting here is from a kindle.

I mean our founders were the very first to found a nation and government on that principle. No king had every declared that to their subjects. It's a offense for someone (i think it was zombie) to say our founders were elitist.. They were the opposite of elitist in that sense they didn't want control of peoples lives, they empowered the individual. How much more opposite of an elitist notion is that? wow They didn't want to be rulers with subjects and put heavenly effort in insuring we wouldn't be ruled over.

Now elite in the sense of intellect, courage, boldness and virtue? I agree.

They worked their tails off (Patrick Henry) and were molded by that hard work and effort in their brilliance. If one is born into wealth like a Ben Franklin so what? Does that mean we should discount him? Dude was a genius and worked constantly. He was more intelligent and knowledgeable than 99% which is almost unfathomable with our access to information. People slander them in our culture and it's a disgrace. Many don't realize how genius and great they were and what they did for not only us but the world. There's another facet to them people don't understand that I'll leave for another day perhaps, but it involves the esoteric. Examples are why we maintained the inch and fahrenheit scale. If people have trouble understanding what i've said so far then it's not for them. They were far more aware of the human condition than people today.
 
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rare144 said:
I mean our founders were the very first to found a nation and government on that principle. No king had every declared that to their subjects. It's a offense for someone (i think it was zombie) to say our founders were elitist.
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OK. I'm sure you know the ideas of democracy, individual determination, and citizen involvement to back to ancient Athens, so I am guessing you meant the notion of the guarantee of liberties for the governed here (although there are variations of that throughout history as well). Certainly the FFs brought in some novel concepts, like freedom of the press. I agree that kings did not establish democracies, although over time Parliament had been reducing the scope the King's authority in England, even back then.

rare144 said:
They were the opposite of elitist in that sense they didn't want control of peoples lives, they empowered the individual. How much more opposite of an elitist notion is that? wow They didn't want to be rulers with subjects and put heavenly effort in insuring we wouldn't be ruled over.
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This is true to a degree, but very few thought that, for example, people who were not land-owners should have an equal say in government.
 
Red said:
Hip hip hooray for Trump's EPA...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtm...nies-easier-mercury-toxins-regulations-enviro

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/28/6791...imits-on-coal-plants-too-costly-not-necessary
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I've read plenty of the local stories on this and the public concern about our high levels of mercury in some fish and some ducks, and what effect this will have on Utah. Here is my knowledge of this regulation as it pertains to Utah:

I am unaware of a single additional pollution control device installed at any coal fired power plant in Utah. The reason being is they burn very low mercury, Utah coal, so low in fact that sometimes there were issues quantifying emissions because they weren't measurable above the instrumentation background noise. The power plants sought "LEE status" - Low Emitting Electric Generating Unit (on a unit-by-unit basis, not plant-wide averaging). LEE status means emitting less than 10% of the emission limit, or 29 lbs/year, whichever is more stringent (IIRC, but those numbers are close enough if not exact).

From all I've seen, the only thing this regulation has done FOR UTAH is add additional operating costs from testing and monitoring requirements, and thus a potential increase to your utility bill if the power companies didn't absorb it (I doubt they did). I do not see where any reductions were made. There are maintenance requirements specified but in my experience the plants were most likely already performing these or going above and beyond them.

On the other hand, I suppose you could argue that it keeps them on relatively clean Utah produced coal instead of importing potentially cheaper coal from other states. I don't know a whole lot here but I highly doubt it would be cost beneficial for them to purchase and transport dirty coal all the way from West Virginia.

For reference: EPA claims US power emits somewhere in the neighborhood of 59 tons of mercury per year. That sounds like a lot until you consider the volume of air it is put into. In comparison, one of our coal fired plants alone puts out over 25,000 tons of NOx and 5,000 tons of SOx annually. Of course the ppm for NOx, SOx, mercury, and all sorts of compounds are unhealthy at separate levels, so take the comparison as nothing more than a reference to how much the large sounding number 57 tons is.
 
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A million species of life are threatened with extinction worldwide. And this is how Trump responds. Doesn't surprise me at all, sadly. I agree with my mentor Tom Engelhardt, that history will judge this man guilty of crimes against humanity, for his position on climate change, and for the actions taken by his EPA. Now this, establishing himself as an enemy of life on Earth.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...s-act-trump-administration-protection-changes

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/12/20802132/endangered-species-act-trump-weakening

"In May, a United Nations panel on biodiversity released a massive, troubling report on the state of the world’s animals. The bottom line: As many as 1 million species are now at risk of extinction if we don’t act to save them.

Species of all kinds — mammals, birds, amphibians, insects, plants, marine life, terrestrial life — are disappearing at a rate “tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years” due to human activity, the report stated. It implored the countries of the world to step up their actions to protect the wildlife that remains — like the endangered gray wolves and caribou that roam the United States, or the threatened polar bear in the Arctic.

The Trump administration has just done the opposite.

On Monday, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced they were pushing through changes to the Endangered Species Act that will, in effect, weaken protections for species, and possibly give industry more leeway to develop areas where threatened animals live. A draft proposal of these rule changes was announced last summer. And now the rules go into effect in 30 days after they are officially published in the federal register (which the New York Times expects will happen this week)".
 
So, where temperature is concerned, extreme climate change has already reached large areas of the United States. Which is to say average temperatures have risen 2c or more since 1895. Although Alaska is our fastest warming state, my own home state has seen the greatest temperature rise in the lower 48, at about 2.5C higher since 1895. My home is also experiencing the greatest amount of sea level rise in that time frame.

If you run into a Washington Post paywall, you can read this in incognito mode with Chrome browser.

You can use a tool at the link to check if average temps have risen where you live...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-america/

....global warming does not heat the world evenly.

A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 2-degree Celsius mark.

— Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 2-degree Celsius mark.

— Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 2 degrees Celsius. Other parts of the Northeast — New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts — trail close behind.

— While many people associate global warming with summer’s melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states.

hotstates-map-xxlarge.jpg
 
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The 6 things you most need to know about Trump’s new climate plan
It could actually increase air pollution, and it’s a pretty bad deal.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/sc...12243/trump-epa-climate-plan-ace-cpp-6-things

EPA just couldn’t make the numbers work for it.

And so, as Lisa Friedman first reported for the New York Times, according to the EPA’s analysis, “the new rules could also lead to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 from an increase in the extremely fine particulate matter that is linked to heart and lung disease, up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days.” (And the Resources for the Future analysis shows that those numbers are almost certainly conservative.)

Yes, the EPA is proposing a policy that it concedes will lead to 1,400 premature deaths, 48,000 new cases of “exacerbated asthma,” and at least 21,000 new missed days of school every year, through 2030. That should be fun to justify to a court.
 
The right wing populist wave is a threat to the climate:

https://news.google.com/articles/CA...AowlOzSATCaiDUwg7tz?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

The Amazon rainforest is on fire — and the consensus is that Brazil’s far-right populist leader, Jair Bolsonaro, is to blame.

Bolsonaro, who took office in January and has been referred to as “Captain Chainsaw,” gutted funding for agencies protecting the massive rainforest, essentially giving wink-and-nudge approval for illegal loggers to do their thing. Fire is used as a tool for clearing Amazon land for ranching, and the more trees are cut down, the more vulnerable the rainforest is to wildfires. There have been almost twice as many fires detected in 2019 so far as there were in the entirety of 2018.

It’s hard to overstate how threatening this policy is to the climate. The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest: its trees scrub the Earth of a significant amount of CO2 and have captured a huge amount of carbon and methane within their branches and roots. If you lose the trees, a lot of greenhouse gases get released and it becomes harder to capture emissions from other sources. Continued fires and clear-cutting in the Amazon could cripple the fight against climate change.

All of this goes to underscore an important and poorly understood point: The wave of right-wing populism sweeping the world is not only dangerous for the countries who succumb to it, or even to immigrants wishing to move to those nations. It’s a fundamental threat to progress against climate change — and thus the entirety of the human race.
 
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/06...ndigenous-conservation-agribusiness-ranching/

"This is the fruit of a delayed but deepening dialogue between occidental science and Indigenous cultures. After decades of watching from the margins, Indigenous groups have moved close to the center of the ring at global environmental and conservation summits, in tandem with a wave of research that backs up their historical claims to being the forest’s most natural and effective protectors. Last November, an Amazonian delegation delivered a document — the “Bogota Declaration” — to the 14th U.N. Biodiversity Conference held in the Egyptian coastal city of Sharm el-Sheikh. It outlined a plan, devised by 400 ethic groups across the basin, to establish a “sacred corridor of life” of contiguous Indigenous territories reaching from the Andes to the Atlantic. Inside this 500-million-acre stretch of rainforest, Indigenous nations would pool their ancestral knowledge and showcase alternative modes of development and ways of living. The declaration described the proposal as “a first step to guaranteeing the existence of all forms of life on the Planet.”

patrol-04-1562185569-1024x683.jpg


This is the biggest story in the world today....

 
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