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The Obvious Solution for Climate Change
On Thursday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey unveiled their Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions while putting Americans back to work. There’s only one problem: The US produces only a small fraction of global greenhouse gases. Even if the Green New Deal reduced US emissions to zero, that would do little to address the issue.
Here's annual U.S. carbon emissions vs. emissions from the rest of the world.
This gives a pretty clear picture of the situation we're facing. pic.twitter.com/lTyqCsIsDw
— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) February 9, 2019
Clearly, while Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is ambitious, it is nowhere near ambitious enough. The solution is obvious. What we really need is a Green World War II.
After defeating China and India in battle, making the world safe for humanity again, we can install military governors and rewrite those countries’ constitutions to ensure they never return to their dangerous emissionism. A Green Marshall Plan to build them a wind-and-solar energy infrastructure will help cement their status as a green ally for generations to come.
This solution has the added benefit of emulating the FDR policy that actually ended the Great Depression and put Americans back to work.
Lest you think a Green World War II is excessive, the Green New Deal’s own backers support its goals.
“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” [Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff] told the Huffington Post back in June.
It acknowledges that climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the US, which is also the position of the US Military. Considering that the US is responsible for roughly one-fifth of global emissions, and also has the capacity for developing high-tech solutions, it declares that the “the United States must take a leading role in reducing emissions through economic transformation.”
We must address this threat now before a Green Pearl Harbor puts Hawaii under water. Or are you a denier who doesn’t take the threat of climate change seriously?
Published in General
Brilliant, SOS! Where have you been (in more ways than one)?!
Welcome back, SoS! (whistles through her teeth) The fun begins to return…
Does this include a Global Treaty Organization (GTO) in which the US owns, runs and supplies the world’s energy needs, and charges the world 2% GDP of each member nation, which they never pay, and in the process subsidizes each nation’s economy to out strip ours in fifty years? I like it!
Thanks! I’ve been busy with a new job that’s left me less free time in front of a computer. One of my 2019 goals is to scale back my Twitter and spend more time here.
Yes, yes I am. However I also support nuclear power. A massive first strike could destroy their infrastructure removing any need for expensive occupation troops, get rid of some of our outdated nuclear stockpiles, and possibly usher in a nuclear winter. It’s a win-win-win.
Let’s not overlook the basics by not asking the most pertinent question: exactly how is it that a small increase in one of the toxins, carbon dioxide, which to begin with is only a very small portion of the Atmosphere of the planet overall, can change anything at all?
And there really is no way to explain that carbon dioxide alone can set off tornadoes that zip around in parallel to one another, a drought that has gone on for six to seven years in Calif, despite the fact that supra amounts of volcanic activity ensure that lots of moisture is off Calif’s coast eight months of the year, super stalling of storms over low income areas that cause flooding, et al.?
Instead, when a person understands the dynamics of weather, and how the multiple man- made secret programs that are of course labelled a conspiracy actually are causing the weather crises, then such a person can create youtubes that can explain what is really happening. “!PacificRedwood” is extremely mad in this youtube because he sees what all of us who sky watch notice – the planes in the sky that dessicate the rain storms, again and again, depriving us even of the usual rain that fo0llows the wake of large fires! The youtube about weather manipulation is from a few days after the fires raging, Paradise and Malibu, Nov 11th 2018:
1PacificRedwood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeVqWt_i4iE&t=20s
Can’t we just wait for the global heat wave, then nuke China and India… thereby simultaneously counteracting the heat with nuclear winter and severely reducing carbon emissions by eliminating excess breathers? As a bonus, you could talk about indians here in America with less confusion.
For the satirically impaired hunting for thought crimes, that too is sarcasm.
These lunatics are gonna suffocate us all. The only sure way to zero out man made CO2 emissions.
Good to see you, S0S!
I read this to my wife and she raised a troubling question; “Could we win a war against China and India if we fought with a zero-emissions, green battle plan?”
We obviously are trying to phase out air travel, so how is our stock of weaponized railroad bombers and will the Europeans agree to let us travel through their land?
Do we have solar tanks and transport carriers?
Shouldn’t we first completely revamp our current armed services to ensure they are completely free of racism and LGBTQI prejudice? Obviously, we must scrape the Air Force, but do we know whether the Army, Marines, Coast Guard, and Navy currently offer vegan options for soldiers?
Great plan, but there are so many questions for the new Just Green War philosophers and theologians.
I salute your courage. Bailed on Twitter. Do not miss it. Just you, big fella (applies headlock, then nugies).
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the global warming Armageddon is everything AOC predicts, the first order of business is to ensure that her government-dictated, nationwide solutions don’t make matters worse.
So far, the feds’ record has not been good. We know for sure that corn-based ethanol has hurt rather than helped. Because solar panels and wind turbines are heavily subsidized, we don’t know whether they are profitable. And because we don’t know whether they produce a net monetary profit, we don’t know whether, over their expected useful lives, they produce a net energy profit. Estimates vary all over the place.
Also, we know that the Green New Deal will be very expensive and, as now proposed, will have little environmental benefit, if any. As in France, there may be a strong backlash against measures that are all pain and infinitesimal gain. While AOC and company argue that their GND is a necessary first step, the reaction may well be strong enough to ensure that there is no second step.
I treat Twitter like it was a periscope on a submarine. I pop up, take a peek, then return to the depths.
Not me. I joined Twitter in 2011, but wasn’t active till a few months ago. I love correcting the left. Fwiw, my twitter handle is 1TeamAmerica ( plain TeamAmerica was already taken)
Percival
I treat Twitter like it was a periscope on a submarine. I pop up, take a peek, then return to the depths.
Wait… I thought Twitter was the depths. You go lower than that?
I was going to ask that and you beat me to it – I’m still worrying about your brother’s nasty new neighbor!
Say they really eliminate all air travel. How ever do they get to Davos every year? Swim? Ooh, I want to see that! And I’m betting AOC doesn’t ride the train getting to and from her district now. And I don’t think the Acela is fully electrified yet. Cancel all those diesel locomotives. She can just walk home every time she wants to visit her constituents (if she ever thinks about those constituents anyway).
Actually, there was once a train that could do it, and it might still be around. Doc used it in Back to the Future III. This is a job for DARPA.
Not needing roads will save us a lot on infrastructure spending.
And you can’t get cleaner than cold fusion. I think AOC is on to something.
Flicker
I think AOC is on to something. (Drop “to” and you’re on to something.)
Welcome back and a great way to return. Thanks for the post.
Hot air balloons. Self-propelled.
Thanks. That’s an image.
I’m not on Twitter. I would act like a submarine as well. I’d nuke everyone from the safety of the depths and only surface when the radiation subsided. I post under my name because if I didn’t, the anonymity would tempt me to be a real <redacted>.
I think they would prefer a green Vietnam or Afghanistan war where it would go on and on, and without even more money we can’t win it.
I think this guy is Management material.
If the cost of the green new deal is $3-4 trillion, we need to get some folks working on the cost benefit analysis. The Green WW2 and the Green New Deal need not be mutually exclusive, we just need to show we are team players in both war and peace.
Yeehaaa! Let’s take ’em all on!
I am not familiar with that and I can find no mention of it on the internet. Are you trolling us?
Trolling? No. He was merely asking a question, since the US is obviously far better than the rest of the world at controlling emissions.