500 billion every year? Please show your source for that statistic.
It just hit $600 billion in 2023. There's a link to the source in the
post, possibly you're not reading sequentially? Hyperlinks are the blue words that get an underline when you hover the mouse over it. I mention this as numerous posts of mine only contain headline hyperlinks from various sources I came across and are meaningless unless you realize they are hyperlinks. My only contribution to those are only the occasional and almost witty
Opinion: tags you see. But if I ever do forget a reference, please do let me know - only human.
But even if true though, eliminating fossil fuels would cost us our freedoms, which to me is more important.
ROFL... Why on Earth would giving up fossil fuels cost us our freedoms, other than the freedom to harm yourself and others.
Russia for example has the money to wage war because of their fossil fuels. What would they be able to do if no one bought their fuel?
Did the people in Washington state who use hydropower give up any freedoms? What freedoms exactly are you giving up?
Energy is energy whether it is derived from fossil fuels, solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. As the
LCOE of solar with batteries is on par with gas, expect to see more of it.
Not only are you not giving anything up, a lot of solutions save tax dollars (see Simon's
video). Not everything though, we've delayed so long that to keep to 1.5C we'll probably need to add active GHG removal and that sounds pricey. That and some of the ideas he talks about won't work in the states (e.g., bike sharing was laughable, just don't see that except a few cities. It's one of the things Europeans don't get until they come here and see how vast it is.).
I appreciate the effort you are putting into trying to educate these guys, but I think you are wasting your time.
Once upon a time I was a denier too. It was only when I challenged my beliefs by digging into why I thought that I realized that it really was incontrovertible that climate change is caused by humans and accelerating us towards a very bad future.
While those that members that attack people or are intolerably rude end up on /ignore (if everyone did this the trolls would only be able to troll each other), many others like
@Bob B I feel are honest good-hearted people with real questions or are willing to post something that helps them deny climate change. A lot of those are fun to debunk, but some are really interesting (Bob posted some great ones on volcanos last year and brought up a really confusing topic on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and
how the greenhouse gas effect really works, which unless you already know about stratospheric cooling surprises a lot of people.)
That leads to some good discussions I think the thread Lurkers are interested in.
Wait? Those aren't factual?
It's actually worse than you did a search
specifically for that. I posted an article a while back in the thread on an interesting paper that found that cognitive bias was made even worse by search engine algorithms... basically, the more you looked into a topic (e.g., climate change denial) the more the search engine learns and starts filtering out differing responses. Because hey, it's giving you what you want....
There's also a few PR tricks to make your searches come to the top. Not sure if it's still true, but posted once a test on Amazon searching for climate change books and on the first page it was something like 18 books on it's a hoax versus two books it was true. If anyone re-tests, please post your results! I'm still getting all sorts of tire advertisements from my recent research on
EV tires (it's most irritating when they list cheaper prices than I paid ; -).
The internet makes true scientific research meaningless in the eyes of trump supporters and allows any 6th grade drop out to thinks he's smarter than a phd.
I believe the internet can still be a great tool for research. But you have to look at the source. For example, websites funded by the American Petroleum Institute or the Koch brothers may have an agenda. Ditto anything from the Sierra Club. There are always extremes on both sides, it's just that fossil fuels have a lot more money to throw around.
But yeah, it's hard and it's getting worse (e.g., AIs generating fake papers). As much as I complain about sensationalized news, what do I do? Yup, post link to headlines in the news. ; -)
