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Climate change: The huge opinion gap in the US – politicalbetting.com
Climate change: The huge opinion gap in the US – politicalbetting.com
As the world’s focus moves to the Glasgow climate change conference YouGov US has published the above polling which I find quite shocking. The figures for college graduates show the huge gulf that exists with just 21% of Republican ones agreeing with the statement compared with 95% of Democrat college grads.
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I was thinking about my views on climate change the other day. My view is that it's happening, and it's man made. Of course that's my view. But it's a view which is increasingly challenging to hold in the face of the messianic fervour of its most vocal exponents. I don't think I'm alone in being generally suspicious of people trying to make me feel an emotion. I can't help wishing the climate change lobby would tone it down a bit.
500 million years ago, the Earth was almost entirely covered in ice. If it hadn't been for a few volcanoes emitting CO2, it would have been stuck as an ice world pretty much forever.
50 million years ago, there was a period when it was about 10 degrees warmer than the present day. The _increase_ in biological activity this caused eventually brought the temperature down by dumping carbon in the deep oceans.
There's no runaway happening here - either way - otherwise such a thing would already have happened.
The big issue for _us_ is what happens when a large proportion of the world's cities are flooded and lots of people have to move.
Perhaps the empty spaces of Siberia will become easier to live in...
Technologically, yes, it probably is, but only by making _better_ things than we already have. People are very reluctant to give anything up.
We'll end up having to adapt. Things might change a bit, but life will go on.
We suffer from having short racial memories and a short history. We have lived through a relatively stable period that has allowed civilisation to grow in an extremely unusual period of climate stability. This has meant we have planted much of our population in places where we should not have done. Places that would flood in the not too distant future even if man had never appeared on the planet. Moreover our failure to understand or ignore processes such as isostatic readjustment - and to take steps that have made it even worse in places like New Orleans means that we have simply added to our woes.
We are a short lived species lacking a proper sense of how much the world changes of its own accord. As such we will continue to believe we can do something to change it and will remain woefully unprepared for when it is finally realised that we can't.
Change is normal, stasis is not. Adapt or die, as they say.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland
The City traffic will all be driving themselves to Andover right about now, no way they want to be on a replacement bus service!
That, and the midweek football matches finishing at 01:45 instead of 12:45.
Climate change is actually a pretty good example of where passion tends to rule ahead of reason, on both sides. Otherwise you wouldn’t have Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump involved in the debate.
Drive to Amazingstoke, Southampton or Exeter>Taunton>Westbury>Pewsey>Newbury if you really need to get to London today, otherwise a couple of days WFH is on the cards for everyone West of Salisbury.
I remember everyone with a brain fell about laughing when Parmjit Dhanda, the then MP for Gloucester (who lived in Chelsea) said that the Mythe treatment works should be rebuilt on a hilltop so it wouldn’t be flooded again causing the loss of Gloucester’s water supply.
What’s really funny is he couldn’t see why that wasn’t really an option…even when it was explained to him.
Which is why a cool headed assessment would ignore such emotions as a metric or judging the science.
Trick and treaters out in force around 6pm last night.
On climate change, I suspect that we, as a family, will make some small changes, although Younger Son's carbon footprint will still be large.
The effect of the pandemic will, perhaps, mean he travels a bit less, though.
NEW: PM spox contradictory read-out on Macron/BJ bi-lat
- PM told Macron to withdraw threats
- Should Fr enact threats & break treaty UK ‘stands ready to respond’ [trigger trade dispute mech)
- PM hasn’t agreed (measures to ease tensions. Deesculation must come from Fr side
https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1454778157748326403
Deesculation? I hope she doesn't think she rides on the esculator..
No trick or treaters round my way. The local parents organised a Halloween party instead. Better all round.
He should IMO have been booted out over his conduct over a Barclays whistleblower a few years back.
It's a reminder that whilst our railways are safer than they have ever been (*), much is down to luck. The fatal crash near Aberdeen last year (Carmont) was very unlucky - the derailment occurring just before a large underbridge. This could have been worse.
Having said that, AIUI the number of serious *potential* incidents has also fallen considerably over the last couple of decades - i.e. we are being lucky from a smaller pool, despite more traffic on the rails.
Time for some pure guesswork: there are rumours that there were two distinct failures; if the root cause of this was due to the recent weather, then it leads to more questions for Network Rail, especially after Carmont, and also how we protect our infrastructure from the effects of climate change.
(*) Cue arguments on privatisation ...
But even by those standards this one sounds bad.
I shall miss some really warm weather, though. I recall reading that Lloyd-George bought a house in Surrey later in life, as he wanted somewhere warmer in winter than NW Wales.
Cruising is always an option, but crossing the Bay of Biscay isn't always 'fun'!
What can be observed is that there has been a broad scientific consensus on man made climate change for at least 20 years. However, even though they accept this; people are not willing to change their habits of consumption in any significant way. People still like cruises, cars, flights, new electronic gadgets etc etc, and this will continue to be the case, however bad the situation gets.
Yes world will be OK, humans on the other hand will have big problems if a tipping point is reached - such as the permafrost melting significantly and releasing huge amounts of methane which sets off much faster warming etc.
I always take my summer holiday with family on the IoW, but do crave a bit of winter sun. Madeira is lovely then.
The shift to renewables is already on, and Aberdeen is already a hydrogen hub. Note the last paragraph: “It is, I expect, a huge political regret that we missed out on a manufacturing windfall from wind. We have massively invested in wind but we don’t make a lot of the kit here,”
How is it we missed out on this? Half our energy generated by wind yesterday and all the turbines are imported. Subsidy is/was needed to get that industry going, we're supposedly hosing money at all kinds of fripperies so how about cash to get the Renewable UK sector competitive? Then we can be an exporter of our own technology instead of increasingly reliant on imports.
If you go on a new plane that is completely full, then flying isn't bad. If you are a serious environmentalist, what you really need to do is stop travelling completely, which of course no one wants to do.
That suggests the GOP could be out of power for a generation, certainly at presidential level, unless they move back in tune with the majority of US voters who want action on climate change and believe it is man made.
The fact the few Republicans who did back action on climate change eg the late John McCain's wife, Kasich and Schwarzenneger all backed Biden over Trump in 2020 makes their position even more difficult, Trumpism has driven moderates out of the party.
Long gone are the days when a Republican President could sign an agreement to take action to solve climate change, as Bush Snr did at Rio in 1992
Without binding international agreements there can be no success at stopping the catastrophe (and it will be so for much of humanity) but too many selfish carbon emitters in the world on both an individual and national basis for this to be anything more than the lowest common denominator.
So might as well see the world before it gets destroyed.
Changing consumption vis a vis liking cruises, cars, flights etc won't affect climate change.
It is the Prisoner's Dilemma scaled to seven billion participants, even though if every single one of us changed their consumption it would, we know that is never going to happen. So we quite logically are not prepared to either.
The only viable solution is clean technology. Switch from dirty electricity to clean electricity, dirty cars to clean cars, dirty flights to clean flights, etc
The entire effort we need to put into this is both finding clean alternatives and putting them in place, or mitigation. Stopping consumption is barking up the wrong tree.
By contrast, planes have got continually more efficient over the past few decades, and the space allocated to each person has got a lot smaller than it used to be!
I’m happy to be doing my bit, not been on a plane in 21 months!
I'm not someone particularly fond of flying, so it doesn't affect me much. But it might my son: and seeing people who have contributed to the mess now pretending to be environmentally conscious is a bit amusing.
Like people who have the wealth to buy electric cars (and gaining from hefty subsidies from the government), sneering at poorer people who can only afford ICE cars. TBF, not an attitude seen much on here, but I've seen it a lot elsewhere.
The French, well they’re trying to roll their own government cloud computing platform, I’m going to take a random guess that they can’t find enough good people for the offered salaries, and that the project runs very late and very over budget.
Doesn’t mean government shouldnt be investing in this sort of thing though, but as a longer-term project rather than to satisfy an immediate need.
If a country as vast as China can have one time zone then so can Europe.
There is also a high crossover between anti Vaxxers and climate change deniers (both of whom are disproportionately GOP and Trump supporters, hence the chart figures).
Indeed some of the most hardline evangelicals are both and are not bothered about climate change at all as they see it as the End Times being near, leading to the Rapture and reunion of humanity with Christ
Indeed, we have already had one government cutting the "green crap" in the last recession; why do people think this won't happen again? Is it really different this time?
They are a great example of the fallacy "something must be done, this is something, so this must be done".
Thankfully after a false-start in Blair's years in putting everything into taxation that actually led to no real fall in CO2 at all, simply exporting our CO2 to other nations instead, we've in recent years got things more on a sensible footing both in this country and abroad.
Investing in clean technologies that work is the only fix, not wasting our time yammering about people taking flights.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/10/31/will-take-crisis-force-boris-johnson-radical-economic-reform/
https://twitter.com/skynews/status/1455079284285087747?s=21
All leaders (even of small teams) have to have an element of ruthlessness and a willingness to take tough decisions about them. (I include myself in that.) But you can still do that and have integrity.
The trouble with Jes Staley was that he was allowed to think himself indispensable - by the Board and the FCA. See here -
https://barry-walsh.co.uk/seeing-the-bigger-picture/
and
https://barry-walsh.co.uk/setting-the-right-example/
for my thoughts on the fundamentally weak and very bad decision the FCA made a few years ago about him, one which dismayed pretty much everyone in compliance in the City. The FCA lost a golden opportunity to send out a really important message.
Barclays itself has had a pretty poor culture over the years - despite endless inquiries and fine words. Its investment banking arm, Barclays Capital, pays well, but is a hideous place to work by all accounts. The whole bank is at the top very very political. I was once approached to work there. A half day of interviews was enough to convince me that the bulk of the working day would be spent trying to avoid the knives that everyone would be trying to stick in your back.
I'll be interested to read the FCA Notice even though it will tell - at best - half the story.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59114871
Hence Boris and the Tories are still in power and Trump and the US Republicans are not
Which is why GE are opening on Teesside.
Some green crap is stupid. Charging everyone in order to pay others to install solar panels with exaggerated feed in tariffs, was a good example. The UK's energy demand comes from heating etc in the winter when solar panels are least useful, they're not a viable solution to the UK's energy demand even if they're perfect for sunny nations which use air conditioning in the summer.
In order to be a viable alternative, the alternative needs to be affordable, but that is increasingly possible. Wind power can now be cheaper than coal and is far cheaper than gas if I recall correctly, so its eminently sensible to invest in it.
The issue of course is reliability but that's being worked on too and the cost of storage is coming down massively each year.
Similarly electric cars are coming down massively in cost each year and new electric cars should very soon be cheaper than new ICE cars. Once that happens it won't take many years ideally for second-hand electric cars to be cheaper than second-hand ICE cars too.
We don't need green crap, we need green stuff that works.
However I disagree with the Brexit comment. Brexit has only minimal impact on the ability to travel. The big impact is freedom of movement which impacts the young more than the old, and is not a climate change issue.
On the face of it not too disastrous but still significantly below the 51% of graduates and 42% of postgrads Romney won in 2012 and well below the 52% of graduates and 44% of postgrads Bush won when he was re elected in 2004
The political will to combat climate change (*) is a massive disruptor. As such, it is a massive potential negative for people / organisations / countries stuck in the old way of thinking, and a great opportunity for those willing to think, and invest, in the new.
Words are fine; and to be fair, the UK government has been doing more than just spouting platitudes. But I'd like to see much more investment in the potential technologies, from the near-term and less risky, such as solar panels and wind turbines, to the medium-term (perennially so in the case of wave, tidal), to the risky long-term, such as fusion.
The opportunities are there.
(*) Yes, I know ...
No "people" are not going to be taking less flights. Even if everyone in the UK never left our island, the trajectory of the number of people taking flights is only going up.
Either we discover clean aviation, possibly through renewably-generated jet fuel, or we don't. If we do, we solve the climate issue with aviation, if we don't we're pissing on people and telling them its raining.
The financial relationship Epstein had with people interests me rather more than his sexual horrors, TBH. It is not looked into or talked about as much as it should be.
For me the decisive point about EV's is how long they last. In our experience, the expense with fixing up old cars comes with electrical issues where you have to take them to the main dealer to sort out. After a certain point it becomes uneconomic to fix them and they need to be scrapped. However, this is not much of a problem on old ICE cars where most issues can be patched up adequately by the garage on the local industrial estate.
With EV's, as far as I can see, after the manufacturers warranty expires you are at the mercy of the main dealer who has no incentive to provide cheap repairs; they exist to sell new cars.
I'd be curious to hear what our Scottish posters make of it.
If we do find a clean alternative way to power aviation then stopping aviation becomes pointless.
If we don't find a cleal alternative way to power aviation then dropping our own personal demand is meaningless on a global scale.
The Chinese aren't going to stop flying just because we stop flyiing. They will adopt a clean alternative if we discover it and make it affordable.
We emit next to nothing in this country on a global scale. What we do help lead on is science and technology. That needs to be our sole overriding focus.
'No more Charles!' Laurence Fox makes brutal dig as he claims Queen should be last monarch
https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/1514370/Laurence-Fox-twitter-prince-charles-queen-G20-summit-rome-speech-cop26-news
1. We missed the boat so to speak, our competitors did this years ago
2. You don't need a Freeport to do so
3. Even their own report shows that Freeports move jobs rather than creating jobs