Never knew this was a thing. No pollution!

Ugh….Newark airport. So sorry.

I went there once…my dad was on federal trial in Newark in the early 80’s. Dirtiest, most industrially polluted city I’ve ever seen, and I lived next to Texas Cityand the Houston ship channel, an enormous refinery and ship channel between Houston and Galveston….biggest and most polluting in America by far at the time.

We went to NYC on the weekend…by comparison it was squeaky clean. I’ve never wanted to go back to either city.

Why are so many here upvoting this anti governmental America hating regressive racist extreme Christian right MAGA anthem the anti government America hating extreme Christian MAGA right has latched onto?

Do you not know what he’s saying?
Do you not understand “people like me and people like you” refers to white Christian nationalist people?
Do you not understand what’s meant by “with an old soul” (it means they want to regress to pre-civil rights era Jim crow)?
Do you not understand the “rich men north of Richmond” he speaks about are just the Democratic “tax and spend” politicians (and maybe RINOS but not MAGA)?
Do you not notice the anti government assistance message?
Did you miss the pro incel message?
Did you miss all the fat shaming by a fat man?
Did you not notice the COMPLAINT that the government protected minors being raped on an island INSTEAD OF coal miners (who in fact have had dozens of government “welfare” programs created to get them retraining and jobs in industries that are less deadly, pollute less, and pay over minimum wage as well as instituted hundreds of governmental safety regulations that have cut miner deaths exponentially).

Did no one listen to the message of the song?
Did no one else notice the completely homogenous angry white middle age crowd?

WTF people!?

Lyrics-
I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don't think you know, but I know that you do
'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end
'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat
And the obese milkin' welfare

Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground
'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down

Lord, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don't think you know, but I know that you do
'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end
'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay

*doublepromote someone else finally noticing global dimming as a significant factor in global warming.

Global dimming from excess sulfur dioxide may be responsible for cutting the current excess anthropogenic heat in the system by between 15% to 50% depending on the study.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering-sunlight-reflection-risks-and-benefits.html
What this means is, if we stop polluting tomorrow, the CO2 and other greenhouse gases will continue to warm us at the same rate for decades to centuries, but the sulfur dioxide that has blocked between .25 to 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise will be gone almost immediately, and a significant sudden rise in temp will be the result kicking off or feeding more feedback loops.

While it may seem he’s onto some global warming solution…just put more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere…that ignores the lower growth rates and lost solar production it causes by deflecting a significant percentage of sunlight, both adding to net CO2 added to the system.
The incredibly scary part is the whitehouse and other international governments are actively researching ways to inject sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere despite knowing it has so many issues.

There’s no easy fix.

I expect this is just the beginning.
Populations of marine animals will migrate to new areas less suited for them (or try and fail), causing disruptions in their new location, spurring more migrations….
When this happens, local fishing industries collapse because their prey is gone and new invasive species either aren’t edible or aren’t caught with the gear they have (like Lionfish, inedible to most fish and mammals, and all but impossible to catch except by spear fishing).
Between ocean acidification, deep water warming, overfishing, invasive species, pollution, loss of ice packs, and other as yet unknown factors, the ocean’s ability to produce food is going to be severely limited in the near future. It already is, in fact.
The crab collapse isn’t the canary in the coal mine, it’s not even the first miner to drop dead. It’s like 1/4 of the entire night shift just disappeared….and they are all the engineers that keep things functioning.

This is like a massive corn blight on land. It not only kills the corn, it takes out everything that relies on corn too, like pigs, chickens, cattle, goats, pretty much any livestock, and an insanely large percentage of the calories humans eat too. A shitload of the ocean relies on crab meat, and more rely on crabs to keep the ocean floors clean….important if we don’t want clouds of hydrogen sulfide erupting from the ocean making all coastal states dead zones.

Might be a tiny bit of good news on the warming front, but what about the sulfuric "pollution" effect of the areas the ashes reache? Vegetation, waterways, etc. I'm not just thinking about the effects on human, but on the living environment of animals.

I think the worst part of these summits is their stated goals.
Paris intended to keep warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050 (no real plan beyond then)…but you might recall, 1.5 degrees of warming is considered the tipping point where feedback loops and natural processes outpace human inputs, meaning even if we hit zero emissions by 2050, and if everyone kept to their Paris agreement promises, and if other nations don’t continue to ramp up emissions, and if unforeseen feedback loops aren’t stronger or faster acting than predicted, we still lose control completely by 2050. That’s the best plan we have, runaway climate shifts in <30 years AT BEST….and no one seems to be living up to even that planned disaster of a plan. Emissions aren’t being cut, they’re increasing. Feedback loops are ramping up 40 years earlier than predicted. All the while, people are complaining that gas is over $3 (I haven’t seen it under $4 in decades where I live) and insisting we adopt some heavily polluting power generation instead of investing in green energy solutions. People assume, it seems, that some last minute fix will solve climate change, ignoring the fact that emissions from today are reactive in the atmosphere for between 25 and 150 years, so we needed to be at net zero 25 years ago to even start effecting the atmosphere today…and some emissions from the industrial revolution are still effecting us now. Net zero by 2050 (a pipe dream, and the best plan so far) is planning to fail completely…like turning off the blast furnace in your house when the thermometer hits 450.5 inside and thinking you can stop it from burning down.
If Covid taught us anything, it’s that there is 0% chance humans will be able to cooperate enough to tackle climate change. People were asked to simply wear a mask and distance a bit to save their lives, and enough refused to do it that the methods that worked beautifully elsewhere failed miserably to control a virus. If we can’t pull off such a simple, blatantly obvious plan against a virus, what chance is there of cooperation across the board to sacrifice enormous amounts of money and completely revamp our wasteful way of life in uncountable ways to stop something seen as a future problem by many? IMO, there so little chance of pulling it off that it’s statistically correct to say there’s absolutely no chance at all.

Derp.
Here’s your class for the day, Bobby.
To start with, >1/2 goes to preexisting transportation spending…and you just accounted for the rest…..wrongly. New transportation funding accounts for +-$280 billion. +-$240 billion for water, electric, broadband, and resilience.
Only one category grew in the final bill, cleaning up mines and superfund sites, now $20 billion. Funny how everyone can agree to spend tax dollars to clean up after corporate pollution instead of asking the polluters to pay.
100% of funding for schools, housing, home health care, r&d and manufacturing, and clean energy tax credits….gone. Not a penny left in the final bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/28/upshot/infrastructure-breakdown.html

Better go back to math class, the bill is $1.2 trillion….$540 billion is almost 1/2, not 1/4, not 24%….the rest is funding pre existing costs like road and bridge maintenance. Duh. Don’t you ever get tired of being so wrong so often?

The EPA just today announced plans to set actual enforceable limits for drinking water contamination by the two most common variants, hopefully well below the 70/1000000 unenforceable recomendation they previously issued, before the 2023 deadline, and to study the health effects of other variants and regulate them.
They also announced plans to force polluters to clean up the places where they dumped, which seems to be impossible considering the size and mobility of these molecules, and the fact that they've already migrated everywhere so can't possibly be fully removed.

They’re banning materials because they can’t be made without the toxic, easily spread, impossible to remove chemicals, and aren’t ever made without illegal dumping of the byproducts of their creation, according to the reporting….not simply because they share some chemistry.
Everything in the universe shares some chemistry with everything else, chemistry is the mechanism through which matter functions….it gives matter it’s properties.

Lead paint shares chemistry with other lead products….and a chemical. It’s that chemical’s toxicity that makes it appropriate to ban substances that contain it. Same thing here. These materials share a toxic substance (or toxic variant of the same substance). Less toxic substance than lead, sure, but still toxic, and much more widely spread. Contaminating the entire planet. As if we weren’t already in a mass extinction, we feel the need to create more toxic pollution for a tiny bit of convenience.

Perhaps you aren’t bothered by having every waterway near any manufacturer that uses these chemicals becoming toxic for animals and humans forever…most people are bothered by that kind of permanent environmental destruction or degradation.

That’s why humans don’t deserve to survive. As a species, we’re so irresponsibly self centered it’s going to kill the planet and us with it, all for nothing worth having.

Duh....install as many high power using carbon sequestering designs as there's room for. Use that surplus clean power to offset some of the enormous dirty power emissions...suddenly there won't be enough wind and water power again.
Too much clean power is only a problem for the completely unimaginative.

He touched on why I've said for 20+ years that it's already too late to stop out of control climate change or save civilization as we know it. Even if we managed to produce more clean energy than we can distribute, switching older polluting technology over to clean energy is a bigger problem than clean generation. Assume we had the ability to power every form of transportation using clean and cheap energy....it would still take decades and tens if not hundreds of trillions to replace the combustion engines alone, with the corresponding new ecological issues of creating, building, and implementing a new power usage method across the board. In order to reverse the carbon trend, we needed an excess of clean energy and the desire to use it exclusively decades ago, because the change over will take decades after the clean power generation ability exists.... decades we no longer have.


Side note, aren't they worried all those wind turbines are going to give them all cancer?

Interesting.

Is there a time map of pollution from major cities?

What does end of life mean? Are they not capable of producing electricity or something? It's like people who buy a new, more fuel efficient car thinking they're doing the envoronment a favor, but fail to realize that most of the environmental pollution from a car is from building it.

I am certain. Science doesn't lie, and I don't have to take someone's word, I can examine data, understand chemistry, and see short and long term trends. The data is undeniable, the only thing wrong with what the media tells you is they paint FAR too rosy a picture. You would think, based on media reports, that if we did stay at only 1.5C above pre industrial levels all is fine, that's nonsense. Truth is 1.5C is where they theorized we lose all control and skyrocket up from there to....nobody knows where, but hot. I think we are on track to 1.5C before 2030, and the feedback loops are already kicking in now. Does that mean we die in 2030? No, but it means our collective fate is sealed and completely out of our control.

I do plant trees, I already have solar, I drive well under 4000 miles a year, in fact I haven't driven anywhere but the grocery store in the wife's car in over 6 month when my car broke, and I don't miss it, I don't have AC, and yes, I need to get on my bike more, for my weight and blood pressure. My money IS where my mouth is, and I still was willing to put it on the line....you aren't.

A big difference is, if somehow I am wrong, what I do is still proper, cleaner, safer, and actually cheaper. Your ideas and ideals lead to detrimental, polluting, dangerous, and more expensive actions and processes even if miraculously they don't lead to our extinction this century.

Are you snatching up cheap uninsurable coastline in Florida and Louisiana? Are you selling off your water rights because they're a dime a dozen? Are you short selling produce and grains on margin? Are you doing anything to risk your money based on what you say?

Your turn.

Edit: I don't do mobs. I prefer people who think for themselves.

Give a hoot. Don't pollute.