@Olivier5,
Olivier5 wrote:
This is not the kind of response the Great Generation would have given. This is the modern-day USA chickening out of a very serious threat, and even sabotaging the efforts of those nations who want to do something about it.
I really don't understand your repeated conflation of AGW zealotry with courage. Nations all over the world dutifully sign up to the largely European-sponsored agreements and just as easily ignore their supposed "commitments" (if indeed any meaningful ones are given) to corrective action. Does that require courage??
On either a GHG emissions per capita or per unit of GDP we do rather well compared to the rest of the world - certainly far better than our Canadian neighbors.
Most of today's so-called corrective actions are at best only marginally effective. Government subsidies and mandates for the use of wind turbines and/or photo voltaic solar cells have significant negative effects in terms of reducing incentives for investments in technical improvements in the very processes they purport to advance, and in limiting price competition from other sources. Given the very low capacity factors ( = actual power produced/theoretical max capacity) wind and solar are at best 30%, compared to conventional sources closer to 90%, and they don't contribute to base load requirements. Market driven technical innovation and cost competition generally delivers better and more lasting solutions - as the fracking revolution has already demonstrated.
We lack efficient technologies for the efficient large scale storage & retrieval of energy - 50% recovery is about the best currently achievable. That and solar production of free hydrogen (through something like photosynthesis), together with less deliberately unpredictable licensing of modern nuclear plants in the US and other countries, offer real solutions ...... and that is what the Chinese are working on. The contemporary world of AGW zealots in Europe and America see solutions through political mandates for wasteful inefficient technologies and rationing. Those are hardly "scientific" solutions, and it doesn't take "courage" to mandate their use - P.C. group think and stupidity will suffice.
Angela Merkel, herself a physicist (who surely knows better) shut down Germany's older nuclear plants, replacing their power with imports generated by coal, and invested many billions in wind turbines in not-very-windy areas of north Germany - all to defeat and destroy the Green Party. It worked, but it was politics, not science.
