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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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What a petty sob.
2017 ...
Saturday marks two years since President Trump https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-trump-paris-climate-accord/ he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement — and the chasm between scientific findings and political action is only growing.
The big picture: Climate science is now more clear than ever about the damage that climate change is causing. But many countries aren’t on track to meet their Paris emissions targets — and now there’s no U.S. leadership to push them to try harder.
The details: Scientists tell Axios they now have:
- More confidence in the observed amounts of global warming, showing the planet has been heating up faster than previously thought, from the poles to the depths of the seas.
- Clear evidence that virtually all of the observed warming since 1950 is due to human activities.
- Robust data showing that limiting global warming to the Paris targets of 1.5°C or 2°C would have significant, tangible benefits by reducing damage.
- This compares to just 2.3 feet if warming is limited to 2°C above preindustrial levels, coauthor Robert Kopp tells Axios.
- The lower the amount of warming, the less likely it is that the planet will trigger climate change tipping points like the loss of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets.
- The emissions reductions required to meet the 1.5°C goal are drastic and would be costly. They include getting to net zero emissions by 2050, and negative emissions by 2100.
- There are few signs that governments are willing to undertake such radical actions.
- China and India are poised to meet their targets with currently implemented policies, the group says, “which may suggest they could be doing even more,” said Elliot Diringer, of the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
- Canada, Australia and the U.S. aren't on track to meet their goals.
- Global greenhouse gas emissions reached a record high, while America’s emissions ticked back up after declining a few years.
- Support for technology that captures CO2 emissions is increasing, through investments and legislation, but it’s still nowhere near enough.
- “What’s harder to assess is the degree to which it’s undermining political will in countries to push forward the policies needed to meet their targets,” Diringer said. “I’d say it’s a fair bet that over time continued U.S. inaction will have a corrosive effect on political will globally.”
Since taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump has dramatically reshaped the nation's climate policies, rolling back dozens of environmental protections and regulations put in place by his predecessors to reduce emissions and prevent catastrophic climate change.
Now his administration is taking aim at climate science itself: The New York Times reported this week that the White House plans to change the methodology some United States agencies use to predict the future climate—including, among other things, eliminating worst-case climate projections from government reports such as the National Climate Assessment.
Sometimes called "business as usual" projections, the worst-case climate scenarios provide a view of what the climate could look like decades from now if the U.S. continues emitting at its current levels.
Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the non-profit World Resources Institute, called the move a "new line of attack" for an administration that quickly established itself as hostile to science and climate action. "Since the beginning of the administration, we've seen science and really truth at large under siege all around us," she says.
Since the inauguration, Trump has stacked his administration with vocal climate skeptics, slashed funding for basic research, limited the types of scientific studies that can inform policy, and tried to bury the fourth National Climate Assessment by releasing the report on the day after Thanksgiving—a strategy that backfired, according to Andrew Light, a distinguished senior fellow at WRI and a former senior adviser on climate change to the U.S. Department of State.
The 1,600-page report showed that, unless the U.S. steeply curbs emissions, rising temperatures could lead to more deadly heat waves, disease outbreaks, and powerful storms that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year by the end of the century.
[1984] FREEDOM GAS
Freedom Gas
And you thought “Freedom Fries” was ridiculous.
Back when we invaded Iraq and France thought it was a bad idea, conservatives initiated an I-Hate-France-And-All-Things-French campaign, forgetting that without France, we wouldn’t have won the American Revolution against our English overlords.
I never heard the term “frog” for the French until the Iraq war. Maybe I was sheltered. What I did start hearing though was “freedom fries” because we Americans are too fat to stop eating french fries but so stupid, that we had to rename them to consume them. It’s bad enough that the majority of us pour ketchup on the delicious creation. I’m just surprised we didn’t start referring to french toast as “freedom toast.” Keep in mind, this is a nation that insulted French people everywhere when we took the croissant and made the croissan’wich, which I have to admit, is delicious.
What happened then was that two House Republicans made the congressional cafeteria take “french fries” off the menu and relabel them “freedom fries.” They changed it back in 2006, about the time everyone except John Bolton realized France was right about the war in Iraq.
Now, a Department of Energy press release has referred to exporting natural gas exported from the U.S. as “spreading freedom gas throughout the world.” Another official from the same department, headed by Texan Rick Perry, used the term “molecules of US freedom.” No, none of this was from The Onion.
All of this is from the administration that refers to dirty coal as “clean coal.” There is no such thing as clean coal. The Trump administration and conservatives have waged a war on science. To confront climate change, first, we have to acknowledge its existence. Second, we need to stop glorifying fossil fuels that are destroying the planet.
I don’t believe we should be referring to an export from the U.S. as “freedom gas.” It only reminds the world that for the past two years, we’ve been exporting racist, stupid policies from a racist gasbag.
Freedom Gas
And you thought “Freedom Fries” was ridiculous.
Back when we invaded Iraq and France thought it was a bad idea, conservatives initiated an I-Hate-France-And-All-Things-French campaign, forgetting that without France, we wouldn’t have won the American Revolution against our English overlords.
I never heard the term “frog” for the French until the Iraq war. Maybe I was sheltered. What I did start hearing though was “freedom fries” because we Americans are too fat to stop eating french fries but so stupid, that we had to rename them to consume them. It’s bad enough that the majority of us pour ketchup on the delicious creation. I’m just surprised we didn’t start referring to french toast as “freedom toast.” Keep in mind, this is a nation that insulted French people everywhere when we took the croissant and made the croissan’wich, which I have to admit, is delicious.
What happened then was that two House Republicans made the congressional cafeteria take “french fries” off the menu and relabel them “freedom fries.” They changed it back in 2006, about the time everyone except John Bolton realized France was right about the war in Iraq.
Now, a Department of Energy press release has referred to exporting natural gas exported from the U.S. as “spreading freedom gas throughout the world.” Another official from the same department, headed by Texan Rick Perry, used the term “molecules of US freedom.” No, none of this was from The Onion.
All of this is from the administration that refers to dirty coal as “clean coal.” There is no such thing as clean coal. The Trump administration and conservatives have waged a war on science. To confront climate change, first, we have to acknowledge its existence. Second, we need to stop glorifying fossil fuels that are destroying the planet.
I don’t believe we should be referring to an export from the U.S. as “freedom gas.” It only reminds the world that for the past two years, we’ve been exporting racist, stupid policies from a racist gasbag.
At the risk of losing street cred as a tough-as-nails tech pundit, I’ll confess that I couldn’t muster much outrage when Facebook declined last week to delete a video doctored to make https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/23/faked-pelosi-videos-slowed-make-her-appear-drunk-spread-across-social-media/?utm_term=.fd7c64614411 (Nancy Pelosi look like a drunken mess).
Sure, there’s a good argument that Facebook should have taken down the fake, as YouTube did. But what the company did do — label the clip as misinformation and limit its virality so that very few people got to see it — struck me as a reasonable effort to quash the lie, especially since I worry about Facebook’s overreach.
Demanding that Facebook remove posts that cross some hard-to-define line may end up dragooning lots of legitimate political speech into its memory hole. Such a policy would also enrich Mark Zuckerberg with the last thing we should want him to have: more power over what we read, watch, listen to and think about.
Mostly, though, I felt indifferent to the debate. Whatever Facebook decides to do with this weird little video is a big meh, because if you were to rank the monsters of misinformation that American society now faces, amateurishly doctored viral videos would clock in as mere houseflies in our midst.
Worry about them, sure, but not at the risk of overlooking a more clear and present danger, the million-pound, forked-tongue colossus that dominates our misinformation menagerie: Fox News and the far-flung, cross-platform lie machine that it commands.
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