ABC News: Climate Change No Longer a Theory, It's Happening

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Thirty-forty years ago it was people driven, Rachel Carlson, Silent Spring, brought out the damage DDT was doing,

But we were a bunch of Pinko, hippy, fellow travelers, until the report on lead in gas came out, A 10%-20% drop in IQ scores, just as we were going to outsmart Ivan. Gas got cleaned up in a year, and while new cars got pollution controls in 1972, leaded gas was the problem, and the oil companies walked free, claiming that the high lead content in children was because they ate paint chips. A well paid Congress agreed.

The obvious was pulled, DDT, Dioxen, Lead, and after the river in Clevland caught fire, clean water and air acts.

What was not covered was sewer. As long as there were no Cholera or Typhoid outbreaks, everything was certified clean water. When Nitrates were blamed, soap and sewer, it was blamed on farms and cattle. They dump theirs on dirt, cities discharge directly into rivers.

Farms and cattle could be regulated, cities never were.

Stopping it at the source, cleaning up, brought the EPA as an Agency, who blamed private parties, and controlled all complaints. Nothing happened, except the EPA got paid and retired.

No progress in thirty years. Discharges increased, but were certified allowed.

Economics closed the steel mills, that were allowed, just as coal fired electric still is. They do cause acid rain, and release CO2. They have bought Congress, and to avoid building cleaner plants, propose Freedom, everyone has the right to produce CO2, and they can buy those rights, and continue as always.

Cap means a full house, no cleaner burning plant can move in, for we have capped emissions. Trade means a closed steel mill could sell it's emissions quota. As coal and steel had the same owners, then electric, they could sell to themselves, and block any clean plant from being built.

This is what is called an "Industry Solution." Like letting Goldman Sachs take over the Treasury, and The Federal Reserve.

Global Warming has a political start. It was not the old line groups, they were all for reducing the by products of humans. They were for expensive smokestack scrubbers, Cap and Trade is an Industry counter offer, with government payoffs. That is cheaper than using existing technology to clean up the source.

Atomic power is the same, Licensed for twenty years, the license keeps getting extended because of the cost of deactivating a plant. They will be certified safe till they Chernoble.

It was the same for bridges and dams that were built for fifty year use, and are now closer to a hundred.

Such is the will of industry, government always agrees, and only when the people demand, does anything change. The people paid the cost of replacing all of the above, on their electric bill, or when buying gas. Every business includes replacement in the price.

A modern Atomic Plant would make the rest unprofitable, so no new ones get built, as industry controls the regulations.

A Breeder Reactor would ruin, Coal, Atomic, Oil, so research is not funded, and no one can do that on a lab bench. Anti-Matter? The Supercollider was cancelled mid project.

Vested Interests have bought Congress, and with it our future.

Under START, we have a lot of retired warheads, enough to produce fuel rods to light up this country for a thousand years, ours, bought and paid for.

Oak Ridge was an off shoot of TVA, Government produced power. Nothing is stopping building plants at Oak Ridge, and Hanford in Washington, and returning the energy we bought. The plants built thirty or forty years ago were a test. We know how to do it right, decommision in place, and both sites are already hot.

When mandated, sewer is a rich feedstock for materials recovery, Even if it runs at a loss, it is better than what we are doing now. Smoke Stack recovery also produces industrial chemicals. Clean may cost, but it is not an entire loss, and it produces something while keeping a clean world.

We paid, it is no different than Social Security, you took the money then, pay now. Congress will not do this for us.

Mitigating damage is one point. The other is climate does change, we do have an impact on other species, we need the bees, soil microbes, and they need some buffers.

Planting a two hundred mile wide strip down from Canada to Mexico, with food, water, shelter, would keep the wild alive. It would also change the weather, maybe not for a hundred years, but something good sometime. Just watching the Monarch butterflies, the Hummingbirds, is worth it for me.

Like building reefs in the ocean, which works, we need to build long land reefs. We are part of nature, the only one who can use a shovel. Little creatures have kept us alive for thousands of years, it is time for us to repay them.

It is all within our reach, we own it, and our claim comes before those with friends in Congress who would clear cut, strip mine, and use it for a land fill.

Clean cities could be built along the sides, watch the buffalo migrate from the deck, and it would provide jobs for a hundred years, protecting the land, building new and clean, and tearing down the past. Elevated high speed electric rail could cross two hundred miles in an hour, the same north and south, four cities within commuting distance.

We need to start living like backpackers in a wilderness area, inventory everything taken in, and check off every candy wrapper coming out.

We are still in the game, sea level has been seven meters higher, around 25,000 years ago, and 150 meters lower, around 20,000-12,000 years ago. What survived repopulated the planet.

The only way to preserve ourselves, is to preserve all life.

Awesome post, Inventor.

If, within twenty years, we experience another mini ice age in the northern hemisphere, we'll know something's going on.

we may already be past the point of "pay me now or pay me later." so we might as well buckle our collective seatbelts and hold on, it's going to be a bumpy ride. it's going to be a long time of "mourning in america" before it's "morning in america" again, if ever.

We are not only post industrial age, we are post information age.

The next thing to base an economy on is Biological. Bio tourism would be big. A few million buffalo, Hummingbirds, butterflies, enough ducks to darken the skies for days in their passing, and the last refuge of song birds. I have not seen a Bluebird since childhood.

As for funding, we are spending money on people who do nothing, will be doing nothing for at least five years, and those who are graduating from the University who cannot find any job, and the Student Loans are due.

We need a WPA style project that is large enough to stop these people from becoming roving bands of cannibal pirates.

Inputs are little needed, clear land, houses, fences, roads, powerlines, cultivate, fertilize, plant, here some sewer and feed lot wastes could do good, and plant tall grass. One hundred and fifty years ago there were 90,000,000 buffalo.

They eat grass and die, killing most of the males, old females, leads to more grass for the young females and young, and a pile of good lean meat. They also keep the grass, which prevents drought. We would lose some marginal farmland, and gain rainfall.

Last time it ran without management for thousands of years. Even two million buffalo will produce a billion pounds of meat a year. That is income from bio industry. People also pay $5,000 to shoot an Elk. Deer, Elk, will always overpopulate. Africa has lost the big game market.

There are few good investments, Bonds would work. Private Capital with a return based on land producing grass, producing meat. Look at all the money invested and lost in the tech bubble, this one has a set outcome.

We have cities in decline due to the river boats quit coming, barge traffic, manufacturing ended, and we can leave them as ruins, like Detroit, or reduce them by half, and perhaps save half. That will cost, is non productive, but clears the ground for another cycle.

Nothing will restore the manufacturing past. We have machines for that. What we need are jobs, and Deconstruction has the potential to remove many from the workforce, which will drive up wages.

City Planning comes after the fact, and has never come first. Plan a city where there is water, transport, and hire the economically displaced to build it and live there. Jobs and food supply should come first.

We have cities that have lost people, I live in one. Houses stand in ruins becaue no one wants to live here. Suburban sprall worked with cheap gas, but now we need to bring people closer.

Our oil problem would end with half the miles driven, there would be a market glut.

Electric costs would drop by half if all production went into a supercooled net. Just transmission loss is 25%, and with no loss shifting power across the country, production could be steady, much cheaper than trying to produce peak power, then shutting down. Tesla laid out how to do it a hundred years ago. Westinghouse wanted powerlines, because they were cheaper to build in the short term. He was thinking Niagra Falls to New York City, times have changed.

We do not have any problems that cannot be solved.

I do not consider speculators losing in the stock and housing markets a problem, no more than the losers in Vegas.

Our last National plan was the Interstate Highways. That works for me, and take up as much room as my land reef. Time for an upgrade, piping water, power, running rails, forming a national grid.

We need a future to move to.

"Where there is no vision the people perish."

Besides, the ice in the glass is not anything like a glacier melting. A glass of water doesn't have currents in it, like the ocean. It doesn't have weather systems and climate, either.

If the glaciers melt, it will be nothing like a few ice cubes melting inside your Big Gulp. You can see, your watered down Dr Pepper is not going to affect anyone but whomever tries to drink it and thinks it tastes weak.
When the glaciers start to melt full force, the northern hemisphere will get extremely cold. Canada will be virtually uninhabitable. Parts of the northern US will be covered by glaciers, depending on how severe the climate change is.
Imagine living on Greenland...

So, if your plan is to migrate someplace near the Tropic of Cancer, Capricorn or equator, you should do okay. There's going to be a lot of people wanting to live there, so expect crowds.

The problem is not that the climate is changing so much as it is the rate that the climate is changing. The fear is many forms of life will not be able to adapt. Many forms of oxygen producing life. And that could cause a chain of mass extinctions that includes humans.

That said, life will persist. There are deep, dark places in the ocean where life would continue on as normal even should all organisms on the surface perish.

Nobody is saying humans caused climate change. They're saying we're speeding it up to dangerous levels and extremes.