Climate Change/Global Warming

One of the reasons I'm rather pessimistic about the prospect for our world's beating the global warming/climate change problem is that not enough is being done about it. We hear the world's politicians talk about it but any action being taken is at some point going to be seen to have been too little, too late.

Americans (for one) don't appear to be changing their habits, and I don't really hear anyone urging them to. Where are the leaders urging people to drive less? To not buy big and thirsty SUVs? (The equation is simple: more fuel consumed = more greenhouse gases being emitted.) And who has—or would have—the bravery to discourage Christmas lights in the name of saving energy? Anyone who did so would be accused of being anti-religion or even anti-God (show me where in the Bible we are commanded to string electric lights upon our houses to celebrate the birth of Christ).

Electric vehicles are expected to do much to reduce production of greenhouse gases; but so far, in most countries, the penetration of EVs into the car market has been rather insignificant--on the order of 3% to 6% of car sales. One reason is that electric cars suffer from a serious price disadvantage. And, I do not see any great numbers of charging stations in my area. On the other hand, "range anxiety"--the fear of drivers that they will be traveling and their car's charge will be running out when they are not near any place where the car could be charged--might be diminishing because electric cars' range (on a charge, that is) has been increasing.

I myself have given some thought to getting an electric car. If I got one it would probably receive all or nearly all of its charging in my garage. But, to have and use only 110 V charging is very slow; and to install a faster, 220 V charger in my garage I'd have to buy a charger and pay an electrician to wire it into my house wiring--for a total cost of nearly $1000. 

I'm sure electric cars are the wave of the future, but it's going to be a while before they are truly common. Better, cheaper, lighter-weight batteries must be developed, and I don't think anyone is sure when that will  happen.

Another thing, on a somewhat different note: Rainforests, as we hear often, are a very important repository of carbon, and cutting down and/or burning these trees not only reduces the amount of carbon that can be absorbed from the atmosphere, but the burning of the trees releases carbon that has been locked up perhaps for centuries. Yet in Brazil, the trees of the Amazon rainforest, one of the most important on the planet, are being cut down and burned, to make room for pasture land or farmland (e.g., plantation of palm trees for the palm oil that is showing up in so much of our food)--not to mention that this process is depriving indigenous people of their land and homes. Yet Brazil's President Bolsonaro does nothing to stop this pillaging and destruction of the rainforests of his country.

In many nations there are conferences, there are speeches. But is enough being done, aside from talk? At least a few scientists warned of the problem decades ago. True, we have some renewal energy--wind farms, etc.--but they still are providing only a small percentage of energy consumed. We need "transformative" change, and it doesn't seem to be happening.

Copyright © 2022.

What's Wrong in America (at least in my opinion)

 

I haven't posted to this blog in a long times, so I thought it might be nice to start the new year with a blog posting.

So, here goes: What's wrong with the world (or perhaps mainly America), according to me.

1. The prevalence of guns. When everybody is carrying a gun, an argument or just one person getting very angry can result in a gun being pulled and then someone being shot. I think this is pretty obvious but the gun proponents (or anti–gun control types) doubtless would dispute it.

When I was younger, the term road rage was not in anyone's vocabulary (nor was school shooting). Nowadays an argument we call road rage my well result in someone being shot.

2. Social media companies fostering polarization of their users and the spread of disinformation--not to mention their near-destruction of any such thing as privacy because they exist to collect--and sell--information about you and me.

3. Growing social and economic inequality. The rich are getting richer, according to all statistics. You may say, "more power to 'em," but when wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals that has to mean that some others are getting poorer It’s a zero-sum game. And, if nothing else, it is simply cruel and unjust that many people live in poverty.

4. More and more, minority groups such as Native Americans, Blacks, Asian-Americans and others are refusing--to put it in terms we used when we were kids--to be pushed around anymore. That's fine, I for one want to see them winning their rights and a fairer shake in our society. The problem arises when there are those--and these groups are growing, at least in number--who oppose all this, who want some real or imagined past order to remain or return. Groups like white supremacist groups. When people with 180-degree opposite opinions and goals get more and more vocal, it's not going to be just words hurled by one group at the other; and of course this has already occurred and there is no way this can be a good thing.

All this is not even to mention the problems which imperil our planet in perhaps a more physical way: global warming and climate change, destruction of the environment, extinction of plant and animal species, runaway world population--it's saddening and wearying even to get into this list.

Some of these problems certainly are not unique to America but are found in many other western countries, if not in the whole world. I've been hearing a number of voices who are pontificating on the direction we (often "mankind") are going. So many of them seem optimistic, and hold out hope of some sort or to some degree. I can't feel so optimistic because it seems to me that there is inertia which keeps us locked in the status quo--not to mention greed, corruption, and many other human failings which mitigate against change, or at least not change soon enough or fast enough. My crystal ball shows me that--for example, regarding action on global warming--it's going to be "too little, too late."

Copyright © 2020

People Are the Problem--I Mean, Human Numbers

Many of the problems of our planet--depletion of fish in the ocean, extinction of animal species, pollution, climate change, scarcity of resources such as water--can be traced to a root cause: people. That is, too many people, or overpopulation. How so?

• Fish are being depleted simply because there are too many people who want to catch and eat those fish, in relation to the number of fish there are. Supplies of fish are not unlimited, and many fish species are close to exhaustion.
• Animal species are being lost from the ecosystem due to loss of habitat (due to natural areas being turned into housing tracts and shopping centers--so called "development") and also hunting, which often is for food for people.
• Pollution, simply, is due to people and their activities: their manufacturing, their burning fossil fuels, their producing all forms of waste.
• Climate change, as many people understand, is due to the production of greenhouse gases, which is due mainly to our burning of fossil fuels but also to other causes such as raising of livestock (cattle emit methane, which is a greenhouse gas).
• Scarcity of water is due to human activities: drinking bathing and cooking, of course, but also manufacturing and agriculture. Of course more people means more water consumed and this is already a critical problem in some places.

In some parts of the world, such as Latin America, where the birth rate is producing a growing population, a serious obstacle to controlling population has been the Catholic Church.

In America, we have many single mothers who have four, five, or six children. (I hope it will not sound racist if I say that these are often "minority" women.) When there is no father in the home, this is a recipe for poverty. Some of these women work two or even three jobs to try to support their children, and their jobs are often low-paying. Also, their children are apt to receive a less-than-ideal amount of supervision and thus they get into trouble.

I don't know why these women don't use birth control more. I can only guess. Some of them may be Catholic (but what percentage?). Many presumably don't know enough about the available means of artificial birth control or are the victims of misconceptions and misinformation.

If they work at jobs that provide health insurance (and, surely, many of them do not), they should have access to birth control through their employer-provided health insurance. However, the Trump administration is doing what it can to worsen the population problem. Under former President Obama's health care plan (often nicknamed "Obamacare"), employers, through their employee health insurance plans, made access to birth control easier. But Trump and his cabinet want to make it easier for employers to opt out of providing this coverage on "conscience" grounds, i.e., they can claim it violates their religious beliefs. (In the interest of the greatest accuracy possible and to avoid over-simplification: there was provision for such objections, which involved submitting a form, but some employers--for example, Catholic  hospitals--object even to doing that, and Trump is trying to make greater accommodation for these employers.)

And, perhaps even worse, Trump has undermined, curtailed, and even eliminated US aid to family planning programs in other countries.

Copyright © 2018

Your SUV Is Helping to Destroy the Planet

Transportation in the US--that includes all our cars plus, of course, trucks, buses, and so forth--is responsible for 20% of greenhouse-gas production. (And, as nearly all scientists will tell you, greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels contribute to climate change.)

And people do not realize that, when they buy a big SUV that is thirsty for gas, they may be producing more than their share of CO₂.

The equation is very simple: More gasoline consumed equals more greenhouse gases out the tailpipe.

So, please, to avoid doing your share to destroy the planet, please think twice when purchasing that SUV. Ask yourself whether you really need such a big one, and look at the gas mileage of any model you're considering.

Copyright © 2018.

Donald Trump, Climate Change, and the Paris Accords

Donald Trump has announced he is pulling the United States out of the Paris agreement or accord on climate change. This puts the United States in the company of the only two nations in the entire world who are not party to that agreement: Syria and Nicaragua. Nearly 200 countries are signatories to the accord, in which they pledge to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases.

 

Mr Trump says his first duty is to the US and US jobs. Presumably he means jobs in the fossil fuel industries. Statistics, interestingly, show there are three times as many jobs in renewable energy fields--wind and solar--as there are in coal mining. It looks like Mr Trump's real effort is to aid, not coal miners, but the Koch Brothers, whose wealth depends on fossil fuels, and who are prominent conservatives and big financial supporters of Mr Trump.

 

If Trump really wanted to help Kentucky coal miners, he would not be taking away health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions, which will leave miners suffering from black-lung disease with no health insurance.

 

By this latest action, Trump may have done a lot to secure his legacy--as the single human being who did the most to help destroy the planet.

 
Here is an AP (Associated Press) article, available online, that shows the fallacies of Mr Trump's arguments for his decision:
climate change fact-check

Copyright © 2017

Reading HuffPost: How Any Liberal and/or Gay Can Get Very Disheartened

I mentioned in an earlier posting that I have been spending time reading articles on AOL/HuffPost, reading other readers' comments, writing my own comments and replying to other comments.

I think I spend too much time doing this and I am resolving to stop doing it, not because of the time I'm spending but because it's too discouraging to read what other people think and say.

For one thing, there are so many conservatives who want to bash Obama and the "libs" (or, one time, "libbs"). They demonstrate the stereotypes and animosity they hold. Of course they are entitled to their opinion, and I must recognize that there are people out there—and even a great many people—who do not or would not agree with some of my ideas. But it's looking like America is getting to be very polarized; there could almost be another civil war, I sometimes think.

Secondly, any time there is an article relating in any way to homosexuality (and HuffPost has a subsection called "Gay Voices"), all the homophobes come out of the woodwork. They are quick to state their opinion that homosexuality is wrong, it's immoral, it's a sin (their Bible tells them that). One woman said thinking about it "makes her skin crawl."

It's a disease, a disorder, it's sick, it's unnatural, it's evil. We've heard all this before. We've been hearing it for many years. And all this anti-gay prejudice is one reason why being gay is still difficult (even though, supposedly, things have gotten better in the last 50 years), and why there is a much higher rate of suicide among gay teens than for non-gay young people in the same age group.

And people will chime in with their disbelief about climate change and their antipathy to illegal immigrants (as I said elsewhere, this usually boils down to "we hate Mexicans").

All in all, I see so much bigotry, ignorance, close-mindedness, belief in misconceptions and discredited ideas. (It is a sad characteristic of human beings that they are capable of believing things that are not so.) And, as I have said before, the rhetoric of the Right often includes asserting things which they even know to be incorrect. As an example, a Right-wing anti-abortion group was actually slapped with a lawsuit for incorrectly asserting that "Obamacare" (as they delight in calling it) includes taxpayer funding of abortion.

I wrote in another blog posting about my overall, philosophical view of humanity and its prospects. I think I have become more pessimistic: I don't think we're much further along than the days when people who were nonconforming or in some way odd were burned as witches.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Giant Crabs Invading Antarctic

It's a function of global warming, and was predicted. The giant crabs are eating or driving out other animals.

It definitely sounds like a science-fiction scenario. Here are the last two paragraphs of the article:

The invasion of the long-legged critters doesn't come as a surprise to scientists, given three years ago they predicted the King Crabs would invade within 100 years.

Last month, a study published in the journal Science showed that climate change is driving animals to the poles in search of their more normal natural habitats. The Guardian called it "one of the clearest examples of climate change in action." In fact, the leader of the research, Chris Thomas, professor of conservation biology, told The Guardian that for the past 40 years, animals and plants have been "shifting 20 cm per hour, for every hour of the day, for every day of the year."

Link to the full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/giant-red-crab-invasion-climate-change_n_956090.html?icid=maing-grid7|maing5|dl1|sec3_lnk1|94967