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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>November 9, 2020</b></font></i></p>
[Dave Roberts audio interview with transcript]<br>
<b>THE 2020 ELECTION: ANXIETY AND INCREMENTALISM (part 1 of 3)</b><br>
November 6th, 2020<br>
<blockquote>
<p><b>PROGRAM PART 1 - DAVID ROBERTS</b><br>
<b>David Roberts:</b> Well, I think the climate community
doesn't necessarily like hearing this but I just don't think
climate was a particularly salient factor in the elections this
year. There's too much else going on. There's too much chaos.
And I think what we learned is what we keep learning over and
over and over again what I personally keep learning over and
over again. Every time I think I've learned it I learned that I
have not learned it hard enough which is just that polarization
is the strongest force in U.S. public life now, nothing is
stronger than it. And we have sort of like this almost sort of
like ludicrous case study like what if a president came in and
allowed a quarter million people to die like what if there was
the greatest mass casualty event in U.S. history on a visibly,
you know, sort of incompetent president's watch. It didn't move
the poll numbers at all like the Biden-Trump poll numbers were
not dented at all by these catastrophic historical events. And
I think that's just what you see up-and-down the ticket is just
that with just sort of very, very, very tiny moves along some
margins basically the sides are set and it appears that
literally nothing can break through that.</p>
<p><b>Greg Dalton: </b> And you've written about this how people
sort of process information and make decisions whether it's
election or what information to accept based on tribal
motivations, queues from social elites. So, does not just makes
sense that people, a quarter million people died, but my family,
my tribe, my people have this narrative about that that it's not
his fault that it came from China. And that just, you know, we,
we're not rational beings we're tribal animals. <br>
<br>
<b>David Roberts: </b>I just think that something like, and
especially people of the liberal temperament. Let's say the
sort of your standard highly educated, highly verbal, liberal
arts trained liberal wants to believe even though I think
liberals have come to acknowledge the sort of basic
irrationality and this basic sort of like social determinism in
the U.S., I think they still want to believe on some level that
it has limits, that there is some edge, some limit to it
something that could happen that could break through it people
really want to believe. And I feel like now like if a pandemic
that kills a quarter million people and is very clearly one
party's responsibility. If that can't do it then I think we
have to acknowledge that literally nothing can. There's nothing
climate could do could break through that. <br>
<br>
I mean these people, they are also the ones dying, their
communities are dying. It's worse in rural areas right now, the
virus, than it was, you know, a few months before the election.
And it just didn't change anything. It's just hard to imagine
what could change anything. So I think the conclusion for the
left has to be at least for the time being, you're not going to,
you know, like there's stuff you can do to change numbers along
the margins, but the big problem is just the structural features
of U.S. government exaggerate the power and the voice of
Republican constituencies. And so even though they have a
minority, even though there are more Democrats you know like
everyone knows Joe Biden's gonna win the popular vote by a
pretty big margin, it's just common knowledge now, there are
more Democrats. It's just the system is set up so that the
minority of Republican constituents have a lock on the
structures of the U.S. government. As long as that's in place I
think we're just in for spinning our wheels like this for
forever.</p>
<p><b>Greg Dalton:</b> During the election there was some
discussion of energy. There was the talk about Joe Biden's
comment during one of the debates about transitioning away from
fossil fuels. That created quite a stir. Even though polls
show that American support that, Americans support moving
towards clean energy, etc. until you put a price tag on it or
there's a personal impact. So, tell us your thoughts on that on
how the debate around climate change energy in the election and
how that played out.<br>
<br>
<b>David Roberts:</b> Yeah, I think if being honest I think
most of that was a bored national media wanting for there to be
something to say or write about. Because I mean one of these
things about partisanship being so frozen and the respective
candidates' numbers being so steady and frozen no matter what
happens is it gets very boring as a political journalist. I
mean the question is like will this gaffe or this incident or
this little thing affect the race. The answer is just always no
it won't. <br>
<br>
I don't think I honestly don't think energy play that huge of a
role in the election or in the election results. I don't think
any substantive policy related discussion did. We're in a level
way deeper than that now. We're like identity, gut identity
level, basic values level. Like policy is just sort of the
least of everybody's worries at this point. So, you know, and
on the larger point of like how the public thinks about energy
is just I tried to get at this in a post the other day is just
the general public by and large, and this something political
scientist know but like can't seem to persuade everybody else to
take seriously is that the general public doesn't know
anything. They have lives, jobs, worries like sports and TV
shows to watch like they just don't have time to keep up with
politics. And so, they just don't have substantive views on
issues as such. Their views on issues are very shallow and
often self-contradictory and often just pull together scraps of
information that have managed to make it to them. And so,
they're very malleable so you can push them easily either one
way or the other. <br>
<br>
So, if you talk about energy in terms of cleanness and lack of
pollution in like the future and innovation, they'll give you
positive poll responses. And if you emphasize, oh, a cost, a
penalty, some sort of restraint on your life or lifestyle you'll
get a negative poll result. But there's no deep conclusion to
draw from either of those. <br>
<br>
<b>Greg Dalton: </b>In this program we're exploring election
and climate, anxiety, grief and hope. Some experts, including
psychologists Renee Lertzman in our next segment say that after
divisive elections people on both sides should like inward and
someone compassion for voters who see things differently rather
than ridiculing them to listen and seek to understand. Your
Twitter feed is full of strong statements about people who don't
see climate the way you do. How often do you reflect on your
own tone and seek to understand people who are not as concerned
about climate as you are?<br>
<br>
<b>David Roberts:</b> You know, maybe it's just the mood I'm in
today, which as you can probably tell is not a good one. But to
me there's something so characteristically left about losing and
then spending the period after losing telling one another that
losing isn't really so bad after all and let's be nice and let's
feel compassion for the people who just destroyed us and want to
destroy everything we care about and want to roll the country
back centuries. And want to do nothing about climate change and
want to put refugee kids in cages and want to, you know, bring
in federal troops and beat protesters. Yeah, if we compassioned
them a little harder, you know what that would do, it would make
us feel good. And it would make us look good to one another,
but the alleged targets of the compassion don't give a damn.
They just want us dead and they never pretended otherwise. <br>
<br>
<b>Greg Dalton:</b> Several years ago, Trump announced his
intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate
Accord and the day after the election that officially happened.
U.S. had already stopped pursuing Paris pledges and today the
country is roughly halfway to the Obama era reductions in carbon
pollution. Europe has stepped up with more ambitious goals.
But how big a deal is this that U.S. is now out of Paris?<br>
<br>
<b>David Roberts:</b> The U.S. will get back in Paris if Biden
wins as it sorts of mostly looks like he's going to. That's the
one, I mean the one clear I think good outcome of this that
people can hang their hat on, is the president has a lot of
power and latitude in foreign policy, more so than on domestic
policy. So, there's a lot Joe Biden can do on foreign-policy to
get us back in Paris, he can start you know, drawing together
small groups of nations that are willing to move faster. He can
pressure Brazil to stop burning its rain forest, things like
that. <br>
<br>
So, on foreign-policy there is, you know it's good but
ultimately the U.S. can't lead on this if the U.S. isn't acting
on this, right. I mean there's only so much you can do with
words and plus now all our international partners like well
whatever you say Biden, for all we know in 2024 you're gonna
flail back the other direction and the next president will undo
all this. The international community can trust U.S. intentions
and steadiness less and less and less, which is just bad. I
think unequivocally bad for the global climate effort. As much
as people criticize the U.S. and US foreign policy. The U.S. is
about as good as it gets in terms of who can play a leadership
role in this international effort who has sort of the power and
the money and the influence, the soft influence and the hard
influence, to lead these things in the right direction. I don't
think the E.U. is gonna be able to do it and I don't think we're
gonna much like the way it looks when China is leading the
effort. But at least on foreign-policy there's a chance now to
sort of send a different message to the international community,
but ultimately like things are moving in the right direction too
slowly. <br>
<br>
This is the big story of climate change, right. I mean
everything is moving in the right direction. Clean energies
rising public opinion is changing very slowly policy is changing
across the world it's changing in cities, companies are coming
around big companies like things are moving in the right
direction just much, much too slowly. And what this election
was, was a chance to speed them up substantially. And now I
think that chance is lost and as you know, slow, slow action
leads to 3 to 4 degrees of warming which is extremely not good.<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.climateone.org/audio/2020-election-anxiety-and-incrementalism">http://www.climateone.org/audio/2020-election-anxiety-and-incrementalism</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[NYTimes report]<br>
<b>Where Does Joe Biden Stand on Major Policies?</b><br>
Here's an overview on President-elect Biden's positions on
coronavirus, health care, the economy, taxes and climate change.<br>
By Sydney Ember<br>
Nov. 8, 2020<br>
<br>
Progressives think President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s policies do
not go far enough. President Trump and his administration have
called Mr. Biden a Trojan horse for the radical left.<br>
<br>
Since the primary, Mr. Biden has shifted leftward on issues
including health care, climate change and education. But even then,
he has hardly embraced the bold agenda of progressives like Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont.<br>
Here is where Mr. Biden actually stands on...<br>
- - <br>
<b>Climate Change</b><br>
Mr. Biden laid out a plan over the summer to spend $2 trillion to
develop clean energy and eliminate emissions from the power sector
by 2035. In addition to the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting
economic crisis and racial injustice, he has referred to climate
change as one of four "historic crises" that the United States is
facing.<br>
<br>
But notably, he has declined to support the Green New Deal, a
sweeping climate plan embraced by progressive groups and criticized
by Republicans, though his website calls it a "crucial framework."<br>
<br>
And while Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Biden of wanting to "ban
fracking," Mr. Biden has repeatedly said he will not do so. Instead,
he has proposed ending the permitting of new fracking on federal
lands, but he is not proposing a national ban.<br>
<br>
During the last presidential debate, Mr. Biden also said he would
push the country to "transition away from the oil industry" and end
federal subsidies. He later tried to clarify his remarks saying,
"We're getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we're not
getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time."<br>
<br>
Sydney Ember is a political reporter based in New York. She was
previously a business reporter covering print and digital media.
@melbournecoal<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/joe-biden-policies.html">https://www.nytimes.com/article/joe-biden-policies.html</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[finally, inhale and relax - I have not tested this]<br>
<b>Earth Power: Hemp Batteries Better Than Lithium And Graphene</b><br>
Science & Medical<br>
17th September 2019<br>
By Barnaby De Hoedt<br>
<br>
Henry Ford's Model T was famously made partly from hemp bioplastic
and powered by hemp biofuel. Now, with battery-powered vehicles
starting to replace those that use combustion engines, it has been
found that hemp batteries perform eight times better than
lithium-ion. Is there anything that this criminally-underused plant
can't do?<br>
<br>
The comparison has only been proven on a very small scale. (You
weren't expecting a Silicon Valley conglomerate to do something
genuinely groundbreaking were you? They mainly just commercialise
stuff that's been invented or at least funded by the state.) But the
results are extremely promising.<br>
<br>
The experiment was conducted by Robert Murray Smith - who has built
up quite a following on his YouTube channel - of FWG Ltd in Kent. He
observed a Volts by Amps curve of both the hemp and lithium
batteries and found that the power underneath the hemp cell was a
value of 31 while that of the lithium cell had a value of just 4.
Although he does not claim to have proven anything, he said that the
results of his experiment showed that the performance of the hemp
cell is "significantly better" than the lithium cell.<br>
<br>
It comes as no real surprise, which is presumably why he conducted
the experiment. In 2014, scientists in the US found that waste
fibres - 'shiv' - from hemp crops can be transformed into
"ultrafast" supercapacitors that are "better than graphene".
Graphene is a synthetic carbon material lighter than foil yet
bulletproof, but it is prohibitively expensive to make. The hemp
version isn't just better, it costs one-thousandth of the price...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ukcsc.co.uk/earth-power-hemp-batteries-better-than-lithium-and-graphene/">https://ukcsc.co.uk/earth-power-hemp-batteries-better-than-lithium-and-graphene/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
November 9, 2011 </b></font><br>
<p>The Guardian reports:<br>
"The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power
stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in
the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global
warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous
climate change will be 'lost for ever,' according to the most
thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change">http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change</a></p>
<p>may be here
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110819012259/http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/b.aspx?new=10">https://web.archive.org/web/20110819012259/http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/b.aspx?new=10</a><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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