I mean, they're not entirely wrong. Watch the cops throwing down Jewish Voices for Peace members and tell me there isn't a rising tide of antisemitism going on...
Of course, like all bigotry, antisemitism is on the rise. Those Charlottesville protests which had "very fine people on both sides" were fueled by Nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us". How many Jewish space lasers or similar right wing conspiracies have gotten national attention out of the unrepentant mouths of the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green in the last decade? It's VERY MUCH on the rise, antisemitism.
The problem is, being anti-genocide isn't antisemitic. Being anti-apartheid isn't antisemitic. Hell, being anti-Israel isn't necessarily antisemitic (regardless of what the ADL claims).
Do you know what's actually antisemitic? The american police state. Because those cops breaking up peaceful protests one day are the same ones that will be turned to sniffing and hunting out the tribal out-groups another. There's been a long history in our collective culture of antisemitism, but the worst offenses basically always flowed from abuse of the state. Anyone who sides with abuse of a state -- any state -- should think long and hard about what side they'll be on when the violence starts. Such as when peaceful protests are beaten up, tackled, run down by horses on the UT Austin campus at the direction of the mayor and blessing of the governor...
Your completely disingenuous use of verifiable numbers confirm that the Jan 6 riot was violent and only 20 out of 535 gaza protests could be called violent, based on this definition.
It does not, in any interpretation, conclude that Jan 6 was nonviolent. Jan 6 was undeniably violent.
Donald Trump offered to weaken climate regulations in exchange for a $1bn contribution from oil company bosses to support his return to the White House later this year. During a dinner for senior oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago club last month, Trump “vowed to immediately reverse dozens of president [Joe] Biden’s...
I don't care if anyone likes Biden. His stance on Israel has been pretty heinous, though it is showing signs of caving to public pressure, and there's lots of intensely milquetoast stuff coming from this term -- a predictable result of not controlling the legislature.
But on climate? Biden has a nearly spotless record. The Inflation Reduction Act has most climate wonks hopeful for the first time in a generation -- which is why Trump is so terrified of it. Industrial policy bills like this, when crafted as well as it appears to be, have a habit of becoming very sticky and transformational. Very hard to repeal or argue against. Future reforms in the sector can be expected to be doubling down on the investments and incentives it offers as more and more communities and industries, even ones backed by very slow capital, wake up and start entering the sector.
He managed to pass the IRA through an actually-hostile congress. I don't know how he got Mr. Coal Manchin onboard (who has since been vocally opposed to the bill, I guess once he realized that it was actually very bad for the fossil fuel industry). I don't know how he's so far avoided the corrupt SCOTUS making up some bullshit to strike it down. But the bill's killer. Certainly the most important piece of climate legislation from all of US history, possibly as important as the clean air and water acts, and it might even been the most influential piece of world policy in the field.
If you, like me, thinks that climate is a sine qua non issue, you ought to be able to feel pretty good casting that vote for Biden. Protest his bad foreign policy in the meantime, though, because I think the cracks in his relationship with Bibi have grown worse than most believe.
They are not worse for the environment than ICE vehicles. This is total FUD nonsense that is significantly fueled by right wing and auto astroturf campaigns. Their lifecycle emissions are vastly lower. It's so mundanely bad a talking point that even low-level sources like factcheck.org publish informers on it. Don't spread misinformation.
EVs aren't good for the environment. They're less bad. Auto-dominant culture remains a non-starter for longterm sustainability, both fiscal and environmental, for most communities around the world.
There are some situations where BEVs are maybe worse overall than ICE counterparts. Rail and busses, for example, where the BEV just makes no sense (put up a pantograph or third rail for a huge LCCA discount and massively lower emissions). Cargo trucking may also fall in this camp; trucks simply cannot be that heavy on modern asphalt design. But for regular passenger vehicles there is no question.
I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He's a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.
Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires -- pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.
MTG didn't entirely lose in this whole debacle, either. She now gets to point to Johnson and say "See, he's with the Democrats". That'll be super useful to her in campaigns and all that kind of shit.
I doubt that was her intention -- she doesn't strike me as a person having intentions beyond the most superficial ones -- but she's definitely enough of an opportunist to make hay with it now that it's worked out this way.
The dems backing Johnson was a cynical move. It was a nasty piece of business. But that deal was to get aid to Ukraine, and that's a deal I'll take. And hey point, it may be the end of Johnson's career, getting all those democratic "votes of confidence". Unfortunately, his replacement would doubtless be an even more creepy little gremlin.
And this right here is the greatest obstacle to long-term change in the current administration's policies on Palestine - because instead of taking a win, the left shouts "look at this bitch eating crackers!" Not to mention your sprinkle of conspiratorial thinking here.
It's clear to anyone who follows the issue but the Biden administration has been moving further and further from Bibi. Not fast enough, but the protests and campaigns are working. The right wing is clearly terrified of them - look at how overwhelmingly they feel a need to put negative coverage on it. But the actual Gaza supporters are the ones shouting loudest that it's a waste of time?? A self-fulfilling prophecy.
Politically it's no-win. Morally it's also no-win; things will be worse for Gaza with Trump in the White House. But people like you are here to tell their allies to give up. Cool.
The problem with flying cars is that it's doubling down on the same faux "freedom" ideal that the car lies about personifying.
Even setting aside the safety/technology concerns, if we actually could have flying cars, the result would rapidly be a society where you MUST have your flying car to function. We'd get the Jetsons and it would be horrible. People would be even more isolated ant antisocial in their lives. People would be even more dependent on big box megastore corporate overlords because local industry would be dead instantly.
And anyone who couldn't afford or didn't want to be in a flying car? Too fucking bad, because the sky congestion would still be real and the only way to avoid it would be to ensure everyone's points of conflict were WELL spread out. The faster a free-moving vehicle goes, the more space it needs clear around it to function safely, after all. They'd definitely adjust zoning and building codes to make sure the flying cars weren't running into each other, causing huge, massive sprawl. No city would be able to afford the infrastructure costs of the ever-expanding road system -- they already can't, after all -- so they'd do the logical thing and get rid of asphalt connection entirely. Fly or be offroad. And once those land connections were dead, nothing would inhibit the spread-cycle anymore.
Any way I imagine it it would be fucking horrible.
At least for North America, it's really more a story about the housing crisis and fake-rural suburban sprawl than anything.
Sure, you'll get those doe-eyed types -- usually wealthy folks -- that talk about wanting to quietly live out in the countryside with no one and nothing anywhere near to them. But most people don't want to move somewhere so inconvenient, at least not if they have to actually face the disadvantages of it (like unpaved roads, no municipal sewer/water, unreliable internet/electric, long trips to highway big box stores for even the most basic necessities, etc).
When push comes to shove, most want to live in an actual town. Maybe not a huge metropolis, but a place where you have knowable neighbors, convenient shops, basic city services, restaurants and bars, and all those things. A place where you don't have to fight through a 30 minute highway commute just to get a loaf of bread.
But they can't. We have vanishingly few functional towns. Instead, we mostly have massive cities with tons of amenities but which you can't afford to live in, vast sprawling "suburbs" and "exurbs" of said cities that are completely parasitically dependent on their host city to function and aren't places in their own right, "small towns" which are just weird little growths off of an interstate offramp with no meaningful local industry of their own.
When your choice is an unaffordable metropolis, a "small town" which is nothing but national chains huddled around a place a major road crosses a highway, or the inconvenient but affordable "exurbs"/countryside, the comparison gets bad. It's all just a byproduct of our incredibly bad housing policy -- policies that favor national builders spawning whole subdevelopments out of thin air over local infill, policies that make it nearly impossible to build modest density/mixed used places, policies that care more about the financial products the housing underwrites than actually homes. Policies that rob people of choice and instead push them to all live a weird, unnatural way that violates thousands, tens of thousands of years of human development.
These advantages you see in office commutes... aren't advantages of office commutes. They're advantages of good urban living. And the idea that you wouldn't live in a city if not for a job forcing you has such intense American energy I bet it drives a lifted Ford F150 covered in bad eagle decals.
~60% efficiency, I believe? Not far off from pumped hydro in terms of overall efficiency.
The extraordinary cheapness of solar energy has actually made some real green hydrogen commercially viable in the US, especially in conjunction with IRA subsidies. It's hard to overstate how huge the inflation reduction act has been at promoting transition and renewable technology. The hopeful new tech developments in the field of green hydrogen would be "peaker" electrolyzers -- current economics make it pretty hard to have a viable electrolysis plant without having it operate at very high utilization rates. Truthfully, the issue is more one of financing than technology, though tech developments could change that picture. Far better to run electrolyzers than curtail a renewable generation source and I have no doubt this will be a major transition industry.
The bigger issue is that there are no remotely viable hydrogen aircraft. Theoretically, maybe one day, but maintaining liquid hydrogen tanks is impractical even for automobiles. It makes even less sense in the goddamn sky. Revolutionary new tech would need to happen before this was a viable option for airlines. So this kind of plant is probably smarter to be producing e.g., ammonia, especially since some major shipping companies have already signed contracts to build ammonia-fuel cargo ships so the demand will definitely exist.
Unfortunately, there's no carbon-free alternative to flying in the near future. Which is why the best approach is to minimize flying. The EU way is the right way; pick busy flight corridors and focus on them for high speed rail.
Now look at the top 3 US flight corridors. Last I looked, it was LA-Las Vegas, Hawai'i-Ohahu, and Atlanta-Orlando. Brightline is currently deploying high speed rail service for that first route. Flawed as hell service, but service nevertheless. The second is probably always going to be stuck to flight (but also, less tourism to the islands would benefit them tremendously either way). The third has huge potential to be built out into a rail corridor (Brightline Florida already has plans to expand to Jacksonville and an Atlanta-Savannah Amtrak route is already in development -- would not be hard to close that gap).
Even without accidental site leaks, the infrastructure itself leaks terribly. Residential fossil gas systems are constantly venting tiny amounts of methane from throughout the system, with occasional major issues that can go days or weeks without notice until a sniffer van or something like it catches it. This happened at my house just recently -- my gas was fully capped off the week I moved in, but a guy showed up now several years later from the utility and said he was there for a detected leak and he had to remove the meter and re-cap everything. The whole time trying to convince me that gas stoves are better than my undeniably-superior induction one.
For all I know it was venting at a decent clip this whole time. Nothing I could really do about it. It's not like I was checking the meter what with my no service, and as far as the guy could tell the leak was from before the meter anyway.
And it'll get worse as the systems are used less. A smaller subscriber base means these companies will inevitably cut repair and maintenance budgets, leading to more leaks. More methane. The only safe and sensible thing to to have public takeovers on them and then immediately start working to decommission.
Propane's a different thing. It's just trading in bottles. Those bottles will keep being available for a long time and are, frankly, not a major emissions source. Still one we should get rid of, but it's not a low-hanging fruit. Propane is also still one of the more climate-friendly refrigerants, so it's definitely sticking around.
As far as people in situations like that relying on fossil gas distribution infrastructure... one way or another they're going to be left holding the bag.
Electrified appliances are almost universally better for consumers both in quality and economics. Electrification and gas-free new construction will keep happening. Keep accelerating.
The infrastructure of gas is already built. It costs a lot to maintain it even as poorly as they do. As fewer ratepayers are using the system, the remaining ratepayers have to pay a larger and larger share of that cost -- making the gas even more expensive and an even worse choice for consumers. Inevitably, the poorest folks who cannot afford to replace their appliances but also cannot afford to keep using gas will be left behind. That's the reality of the privatized system we have.
I feel bad for all the people who are going to get fucked, especially since for many it was bogus that they were saddled with fossil gas in the first place (e.g., bribes to builders/subdevelopment managers).
Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.
Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that's a highly competitive title.
They also don't offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they're intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.
If you've ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service... you'd probably be the first.
The reality is, there are meaningful cultural differences between even relatively nearby geographic groups of Japan -- though it is hard to deny an appearance that they are shrinking. The goal of all this "one culture one language one people" stuff is a soft genocide of these diverse groups to make administration of the state simpler by eliminating sources of friction.
The same shit happens in every authoritarian state. China, Russia, Hungary. No one thinks there was only ever a single ethnic group in North Korea, but that's likely the reality of what remains there today. It's an impulse of right/conservative thinking -- to view those outside of your tribe as enemies and diversity as a threat to your way of life.
Police and private security throng every entrance but one. Steel barriers line the streets. Students pack up belongings in their cars and leave for home - classes are cancelled, and exam plans are up in the air....
Literally makes more sense to fill the fields with solar panels and just do electrolysis to make hydrogen/ammonia. It nearly makes more sense to do the same with DAC plants to "make up" for regular old jet fuel.
If we actually care about aviation emissions, there's a solution: less aviation. Best way to do it: intercity high-speed rail. Bonus points, it will make for a more comfortable, pleasant, affordable world in the process. Let's start with LA to Vegas... oh wait. So since trains in Hawai'i probably don't make the most sense, the next target is Atlanta-Orlando... and go figure, there's currently an Amtrak route being built to Savannah and Brightlight already has plans to connect to Jacksonville, so finishing that route wouldn't be terribly hard either...
We try sooooo hard to come up with these techno-wizard solutions that we lose track of how simple and straightforward the actual problems are.
The dumbest thing is that some of the best greenfield urbanism in the country is in Florida (places like Seaside, which may be failing on their promise but are at least trying to do the right thing). They're building first-class high-speed rail (no, Brightline isn't really private -- they function only because of vast support from the FL government). They have huge solar buildouts that are certain to continue scaling up simply by market forces. All things that, on paper, could look like they were totally climate-motivated even though they really are business-oriented.
And yeah, they also have things running opposite to all of this. Florida IS objectively the worst urban/transportation design in the country. They're committing to use more fossil fuels for literally no reason other than Desantis's war on woke. They're forcing/subsidizing insurance companies in order to keep vulnerable people living in places that won't even exist in the coming years/decades.
Even still, they have tons of things that could be part of a "climate action plan" which are just activities they are already doing. They could be real schmucks here and take the money without changing any behavior. They're refusing to do so for entirely partisan reasons.
And the truth is, Desantis is (politically) right to do so. Once that transition money started coming in, it will built constituencies for renewable projects and emissions-reducing operations. It will motivate people and money to do the right thing, and in so doing create more inertia for doing the right thing. As the actual people of Florida experienced tiny, visible improvements to their lives motivated by this money, they'd become more open to the idea of doing more of it -- weakening the power of the anti-science authoritarian right that currently run roughshod on the state. To a dictator, any loss of power is an injustice that must be avoided at all costs.
One note for anyone getting ready to switch to a heat pump water heater themselves: the fuckers are pretty loud. Make sure it's somewhere where the noise won't bother you when it's installed.
Newer models are getting quieter but the damn things are almost as loud as a small, modern window air conditioning unit when running.
Mine was installed right in the dead center of my house. Works great but I have to close several doors to not hear it at night (and I have it set up to mostly run overnight, though in someone else's situation it might be possible to have it run while everyone is out of the house at work or some such instead).
Extreme energy use for pretty low deltas on temperature. Best possible efficiency is 100%, far less than the 2.5+ cop a heat pump unit will get you. If it's at all manageable, get the heat pump.
Frankly, their inefficiency means the emissions they cause are still pretty bad unless you know your energy source is more renewable than most.
But they don't need venting, which is nice. They do take a big fat electrical connection though - the one I installed was two 2 pole 40a breakers - hopefully you have at least 200A service. Mostly they work as intended.
Analysis Finds Nearly 100% of Campus Gaza Protests Have Been Peaceful (www.commondreams.org)
Trump told oil executives and lobbyists that he would undo Biden’s climate policies (www.carbonbrief.org)
Donald Trump offered to weaken climate regulations in exchange for a $1bn contribution from oil company bosses to support his return to the White House later this year. During a dinner for senior oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago club last month, Trump “vowed to immediately reverse dozens of president [Joe] Biden’s...
Climate Protestors Storm Tesla's Gigafactory in Europe (www.wired.com)
Archived copies of the article: archive.today web.archive.org...
An Interview With Jack Dorsey (www.piratewires.com)
Marjorie Taylor Greene fails to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson (www.bbc.com)
The House killed the far-right Republican's motion to remove Mike Johnson over support for Ukraine aid.
Biden withheld bomb shipment to Israel out of fear it could be used in Rafah (abcnews.go.com)
Here's what one of the first flying cars looked like and what the modern version has become (www.infoterkiniviral.com)
When it comes to new transportation ideas, the thought of flying cars is one of the most interesting
Forcing workers back to the office could be terrible for the environment (www.motherjones.com)
Can corn ethanol really help decarbonize US air travel? (www.canarymedia.com)
New documents show oil executives promoted natural gas as green — but knew it wasn’t | It's the first evidence of an oil company acknowledging that gas wasn't as climate-friendly as promised. (grist.org)
Local woman convinced that misogyny is no longer a problem thanks to man shouting "Not All Men" every time she talks (chaser.com.au)
I'd watch it (lemmy.world)
What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs (archive.ph)
The governor of Kansas vetoed four anti-abortion measures. Republicans rammed them through anyway. (www.motherjones.com)
Biden calls U.S. ally Japan 'xenophobic,' along with China and Russia (www.nbcnews.com)
Columbia University community 'shattered' after police raid (www.bbc.com)
Police and private security throng every entrance but one. Steel barriers line the streets. Students pack up belongings in their cars and leave for home - classes are cancelled, and exam plans are up in the air....
Analysis: Trump explains his militaristic plan to deport 15-20 million people | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)
A US push to use ethanol as aviation fuel raises major climate concerns (www.technologyreview.com)
Archived copy of the article: archive.today
Florida Says No to Federal Funding Aimed at Greenhouse Gas Emissions (insideclimatenews.org)
Water Heaters Use Lots of Energy. The D.O.E. Wants to Change That. The Biden administration is tightening efficiency rules for water heaters, stoves and other appliances (www.nytimes.com)
Washington Post coverage for comparison