Trump: The First Year

“In the Paris Agreement, each country determines, plans and regularly reports its own contribution it should make in order to mitigate global warming.[5] There is no mechanism to force[6] a country to set a specific target by a specific date,[7] but each target should go beyond previously set targets.”

So basically you set your own target for carbon reduction and your trend of cO2 should obviously be downward.

The United Mine Workers, Steel Workers, Auto Workers etc… and their families were solid 99.9% Democratic voters for generations. It used to be a requirement to join. My dad had to register Dem to get his foot in the door at a union. This is the “blue wall” that fell.

Well. That story is entertaining, Mueller will either give it teeth or not. Say hello to President Pence if he does. Doesn’t matter that Hillary was working with Ukraine or accepting money from Russian Uranium companies while that deal was in front of the State Department.

What we’re witnessing is a politician trying to accomplish what he promised on the campaign trail. Albeit in a hapless screwball manner. He is trying to live up to his word. That shouldn’t be so rare in US politics… If he gets taxes, growth, wall, deregulation. Good luck democrats. I don’t think anyone can fix Healthcare in the US. At all.

This is a 100% made up statistic with no basis is reality. Just a heads up. A metric shitload of these people vote R, and have for years.

Correct. Doesn’t matter in the slightest. Would have mattered if she won, imo.

Cough taxes cough

Problem is, many of the promises were screwball to start with. (A wall?)

Which ‘taxes’? The soak-the-rich reforms that the Bannon wing was pushing, or the trickle-down cuts for the wealthy the Ryan wing is pushing?

As he made multiple contradictory promises, this is quite literally impossible.

I could, but for some unfathomable reason, no one in Washington will return my calls…

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That’s all well and good. The fracking technology hit during Obama’s reign. It wasn’t there yet with W. Tell me, did Obama:

Delay the Keystone XL pipeline for 6 years before rejecting it?

Put 94 percent of onshore public lands and 97 percent of offshore public lands off limits to oil and gas explorers?

Cancel all progreas on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site?

Preside over increasing electricity rates while the costs for fuelstock fell?

Obameter: | PolitiFact?

Forgive me. Unions were 100% Democrat in New Deal times. They still skew Dem really heavily.

"Obama would have lost 1.4 percentage points off his vote share in 2012 without unions. Instead of his margin of victory over Romney being 3.9 percentage points, it would have been 1.1 points.

Obviously, this sort of analysis doesn’t take into account what would really happen without the union vote. The two parties would go about courting voters differently. And unions also play a big role in fundraising and organizing for Democratic candidates.

But the 2.8 percentage-point difference in the presidential vote margin is nothing to sneeze at either. It’s larger than the margin in two of the past four elections, and it’s about the same as it was in 2008. Even if unions make up a lower percentage of voters than at any point in the past 60 years, they are a player in presidential elections."

Doesn’t matter. Pols live and die by their simplest statements.

“A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”
“Read my lips, no new taxes.”
“I am not a crook”
“Not just peanuts”
“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
“I shall go to Korea”
“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
“I will never lie to you”
“The era of big government is over.”
“I did not have sex with that woman, Monika Lewinsky”
“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”
“Mission accomplished.”
“If you like your plan you can keep your plan.”

Agreed. As roughly as the military and roughly a fifth of the population still supports Maduro, he’s not going anywhere soon. Look how Assad is clinging to power with around 15 % of Alawites.

Another thing - such apocalyptic conditions destroy human capital and any semblance of trust in the community and decades need to pass for any semblance of normality to return.

“Hey neighbor, remember how just a few years ago bodies were lying in the streets, we had to break in other people’s homes to search for food, we ate all our pets and zoo animals, how your infant died of malnutrition and you tried to strangle my wife in the driveway because you suspected she might have a can of beans of her and you wanted to feed your starving children. Ha, ha. Good times. Now let’s rebuild our country from scratch”

That’s a fact of life. The US has been doing it for centuries, as have other global superpowers in their times. How would Sweden look like today if all those Swedes didn’t settle in Minnesota? More ethnic Swedes and less immigrants from the Middle East?

That’s why successful world empires throughout history tried to manage immigration to get the best and brightest and address labor shortages. To elaborate on an example from before, graduates from nursing colleges in Romania have jobs waiting for them in nursing homes in Germany. Is it fair, especially to the Romanian taxpayer who’s partly paying for their education? No. But that’s a feature of life in a globalized economy, much like deindustrialization and the outsourcing of jobs.

Yes. Lebanese Christians and Shiites are dramatically over represented among business leaders and CEOs in France. One may argue that some have integrated too well as the most notorious extreme rightwinger and neo-Nazi in France nicknamed “le klansman” (yes, le klansman) is Lebanese.

Yes. You can’t survive on a diet of pets and zoo animals for two decades until the situation improves.

Also, surprising how this may seem to Americans, migration works in both directions. In many countries of Eastern Europe, a large number of former and current civil servants who spearheaded Western reforms were second generation American citizens who moved to the country of their parents’ to help them ween off from the socialist mentality.

For example, I came back, my great-great grandfather came back after he lost his job in a Pittsburgh steel mill during the Great Depression.

I have no doubt that in due time many patriotic Venezuelans will return from Florida once situation is sufficiently improved and people aren’t you know, eating pets to survive.

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I get how powerful unions are. I also get that they skew heavily towards Dems (mainly because Dems tend to do union-esque things while Republicans do the opposite). I was merely taking issue with how many people believe that union employee = vote for Dems. It might make them more likely to vote Dem, but it’s by no means a slam dunk.

“I’ll release my taxes after the election.”
“My campaign didn’t collude with Russia.”

Underlying your questions seems to be the assumption that those are all bad things.

They must be bad. As Trump is opposed to Obama’s policies, and the following graph shows how much of a friend Trump is to them, QED.

Surely the increased electricity prices at a time of cheaper supply can only be considered a net consumer negative?

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Not necessarily, if one considers the unaccounted-for costs of the massive externality that is carbon-induced climate change.

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But it certainly cannot be declared a per se good either, and the cost component of fuel as a response to climate change should be treated as a good based on the efficacy of the cost increase on combatting the issue.

Not educated enough on the issue to fully contribute, though.

All this for .1 degree Celsius improvement in the rate of warming by 2050 (If it’s followed by all 188 nations and extended past 2030)?

Worth it? No. If ACC is the giant threat it is billed as then we need to get serious about nuclear now. It’s the only CO2 neutral fuel that can actually provide a real amount of megawatts. Spending all this money and time making carbon fuels incrementally better isn’t going to slow warming to any appreciable degree.

https://globalchange.mit.edu/news-media/jp-news-outreach/how-much-difference-will-paris-agreement-make

LOL, I hope this is true.

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This guy sure seems ready to agree with you.

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This cannot be emphasized enough.

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Hey @pfury , was that a spoof from a show?

Also to clarify I think humanity can function with nuclear and renewables, just not yet. I don’t think we can legislate the technology into being. When a system emerges that beats drilling for oil, transporting it, refining it, burning it and using the energy… then we’ll use that.

But the new system will have to beat the conventional ones without any subsidies before the whole world switches over willingly. Cars were better than horses without subsidies.

Its from a show called the Newsroom (amazing show for anyone that hasn’t watched it).

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible. With the infrastructure that currently exists (ie, piping, jobs, buying politicians, ships, etcetc), these companies quite literally can’t afford for the current energy system to become obsolete. They’re going to fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn’t.

In a world of open markets and humans being less shitfaces, I’d say let supply/demand/innovation take care of it. In the real world, we had high level financial people effectively light the planet’s economy on fire with the knowledge they would suffer almost no negative side effects and would then get bailed out by said govt with which they bought politicians. That’s the system we live in.

Imo, subsidies exist to fight human nature. You can call it whatever you want, but change doesn’t happen peacefully. And when the side enduring the change has as much power as they do, I’m not keen on letting nature take its course.

Agree to a point. But those subsidies can fund some really dumb things in the name of climate change.

Wind mills for instance. They are 300ft high made from metals mined using coal/gas/nuclear fired electricity, transported with diesel or bunker fuel, Then made into components with more dirty electricity in factories. Generators with steel and copper, gearboxes that are 10 ton and use 55 gallons of oil per change.

The amount of carbon to make a wind mill is astounding. Then you have to run and maintain the windmills. Wind farms usually keep a few mechanics on board, but to do specialty work on the gearbox, generator, blades etc… They fly in contractors for service. There’s more carbon.

The subsidies aren’t saving CO2 is my point.

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