This. In a case around LinkedIn courts ruled that in the US it’s legal to scrape publicly available data. The company doing the scraping was selling that data to corporate customers, but ultimately use might depend on the information you’re accessing and under what permissions. (Not a lawyer)

A lot of science around trees and forest management has gone this way. Forest used to be seen as competitive areas that needed to be thoroughly managed to be healthy. Now we know that’s not true at all, and overall would be better off if we just let them be (in most, though not all cases). Same with the idea that trees communicate with each other and share resources. This was dismissed and ridiculed for a long time, but has now been pretty resoundingly proven true. Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees talks a lot about this.

I mean, we obviously need to do both. The conversation in the thread is about nuclear, which is a supply side resource. DR and demand shaping do even more to enable truly renewable resources. Why do the demand shaping to enable nuclear when renewables are cleaner and cheaper?

This would be true, except for the fact that nuclear is terrible at filling in slack times. Nuclear power for the most part needs to run really consistently, 24/7. Better to fill gaps with a diversity of reasources, more transmission, and storage.

Basically no one outside of china is advocating for coal use anymore, so this is a BS comparison. The much more apt comparison is against wind, solar, and storage, against which nuclear is far more dangerous. Also, it’s hard for environmental damage assessment to take into account the EXTREMELY long-lived impacts of fuel “disposal”.

I like the Bourne Ultimatum theory better. We peaked there and will never achieve that high again!

Same! And most of that’s just rent!

Don’t get me wrong, Trump would be terrible for the environment and climate change, but saying that it might be a stretch to say he would be able to repeal all the policies listed in the article. (Then again, the last Trump presidency was wildly destructive, so who knows).

1 & 2: EPA rules on coal and gas and tailpipe emissions: the EPA has intentionally announced these pretty early so they wouldn’t be subject to the Congressional Review Act (CRA) making them harder to repeal quickly. Trump also can’t unilaterally repeal them, just like how Biden couldn’t unilaterally execute them, they have to go through the EPA rule making process. The power plant rules face significant threats from the courts, but less so from the executive. Similarly for the vehicle emissions standards, and those have the added benefit of being similar to rules adopted by states, which means that even if they are repealed federally, car companies will still have to comply with them in several major markets (e.g. California).

3. The IRA: So much IRA money has already gone out that it’s a pretty durable piece of legislation. Big moneyed players have invested a lot because of the legislation, and they don’t want to see it go away. Trump is clearly in the pocket of billionaires, so it could be hard to repeal. It’s also huge, so even if piece of it are undercut, the law itself could stay more or less intact.

4. Oils and Gas Drilling: sure, Biden has made drilling for oil more expensive and building clean energy in federal land cheaper, but he head still leased a TON of oil and gas land, more than Trump in the first two years, so I’m not sure we’ll see huge changes there anyway! I don’t think the land that Biden has protected will be easily opened back up again, and it’s unclear how long the LNG pause will last regardless of the administration.

5. Global Climate Negotiations: this is the big one. As with everything else Trump does, a second Trump presidency would set us so much further back in the global stage it’s ridiculous. The US is already a laughing stock for how un-seriously we take climate change, and while that has improved, a Trump reelection would tank us.

All of that to say, a Trump presidency would be disastrous for the climate, not necessarily because the progress made by Biden wouldn’t stick, but because we would stall here and have very little possibility of getting more done for the next four years, leaving us two years before our Paris commitments (god that’s a terrifying thought).

I didn’t know that reference but this makes is so much better!

The pilot on my plane a few years back was named Max Power

Is this what the Cheese of Truth guy does?

It’s impressive that every part of this is wrong!

I visited Molossia a while ago, dude was awesome and super friendly. Plus the weather in Molossia is always perfect, although with the close borders with Nevada sometimes the bad weather from the US bleeds in.

Exactly! In the report, the companies that do have meaningful goals of at least 80% emissions reductions by 2030 do WAY better than the rest of the companies! But a 2050 goal is meaningless, and “net” zero by 2050 is even more meaningless because they can claim to fill it with carbon capture or carbon credits.