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<font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>December </b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>25, 2023</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font><br>
<i>[ Time for a Christmas Miracle - article from Politico ]</i><br>
<b>‘We can reclaim control of our destiny,’ Al Gore says of climate
change</b><br>
The former vice president found hope in the possibility that humans
have the tools to repair the planet.<br>
By DAVID COHEN<br>
12/24/2023 <br>
<br>
Former Vice President Al Gore expressed optimism that humanity can
still repair the damage to the environment that is causing global
warming.<br>
<br>
“The good news is we can reclaim control of our destiny,” Gore, who
has long warned of the dangers of climate change, said on “State of
the Union” in an interview that aired Sunday.<br>
“We have the ability to do this,” Gore said, adding: “And it’s not
impractical,” citing solar power, wind power and electric vehicles.<br>
<br>
“We can do this,” he told host Jake Tapper, “if we just overcome the
greed and political power of the big fossil fuel polluters who have
been trying to control this process. It’s time for people at the
grassroots level in every country to speak up, and the good news is,
that’s happening too. “<br>
<br>
Sunday’s episode of “State of the Union” focused on 2023 as a year
of record-setting temperatures and natural disasters. Gore made it
clear that humans still have to choose the right course and follow
it to fix the planet or face grave consequences.<br>
<br>
“If we don’t take action, there could be as many as one billion
climate refugees crossing international borders in the next several
decades,” he said. “Well, a few million has contributed to this wave
of populist authoritarianism and dictatorships and so forth. What
would one billion do? We can’t do this. We could lose our capacity
for self-governance. “<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/24/al-gore-climate-change-00133166"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/24/al-gore-climate-change-00133166</a>
<p><br>
</p>
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</p>
<i>[ Lecture from long ago, still valid - 16 min video ]</i><br>
<b>Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change</b><br>
3,079,567 views Aug 19, 2021<br>
Original source: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?125856-1/greenhouse-effect"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.c-span.org/video/?125856-1/greenhouse-effect</a><br>
DECEMBER 10, 1985<br>
“Witnesses testified on how the greenhouse effect will change the
global climate system and possible solutions.”<br>
<br>
Instagram: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.instagram.com/saganism/?hl=en"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.instagram.com/saganism/?hl=en</a><br>
<br>
Twitter: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://twitter.com/saganism_?s=21" moz-do-not-send="true">https://twitter.com/saganism_?s=21</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://carlsagan.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://carlsagan.com</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ In this essay, CleanTechnica defines our global predicament ]</i><br>
<b>Pity The Poor Climate-Aware Billionaire Oligarchs</b><br>
Michael Barnard<br>
As we celebrate the passing of another year with the rituals of our
religions, our families and our cultures, spare a thought for a poor
benighted billionaires who are trying and failing miserably to
address climate change. They have a place to stand, a lever long
enough, yet cannot move the world. Everyone around them keeps
telling them that they are right, yet nothing that they do succeeds.<br>
<br>
Imagine, if you will, being Bill Gates, spending another Christmas
in his echoing 100,000 square foot mansion in the suburbs of
Seattle, Washington. No, this isn’t another story about his home
automation system blue screening and leaving him shivering in the
dark waiting for tech support because it runs on Windows, although
that is a reason to pity him as well.<br>
<br>
For two decades, Gates has been funding directly and indirectly
through Breakthrough Energy Ventures innumerable startups in the
climate space. Yet none are disrupting the world. None are actually
breaking through and solving climate change. Not that Gates is aware
of it, but an outsized number of them simply invite ridicule.
Everyone he talks with agrees nuclear and lots of it is absolutely
required to address climate change. His many billionaire buddies who
co-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures with him in 2014 agreed that
renewables clearly weren’t fit for purpose.<br>
<br>
His nuclear energy firm TerraPower hasn’t built and sold a single
reactor after 18 years of existence, despite grants worth up to US$4
billion. He went begging to Congress for billions in subsidies for
nuclear and didn’t get it. The Breakthrough funded Heliogen puts a
meter-wide disc of light in a completely nonsensical place a hundred
meters in the sky, only provides heat a few hours around noon and
requires square kilometers of free and flat land, and as a result no
industrial customers are remotely interested in the non-solution...<br>
- -<br>
More recently, Breakthrough funded HeirLoom, a hipster Rube Goldberg
device that captures homeopathic amounts of CO2 from the air with
technology that could have been built a hundred years ago. This is
on form for Gates as he also backed Carbon Engineering, a direct air
capture nonsense burger whose only natural market was enhanced oil
recovery, which only ever started one project which was for enhanced
oil recovery, and then was bought outright by the oil major doing
the enhanced oil recovery. Breakthrough also funded AirLoom, a
nonsensical wind generation device which actually adds failure
conditions to vertical axis wind turbines and is a conceptual design
that has failed multiple times in the past as well.<br>
<br>
At COP28, only 22 countries signed up to triple nuclear 30 years
from now, while 120 countries signed up to triple renewables by
2030. And the countries that signed up for the nuclear pledge
included Ghana and Moldova, hardly power houses of technical and
economic might.<br>
<br>
Of course, Breakthrough loves itself some green hydrogen for energy
and synthetic fuels made from green hydrogen, as if thermodynamic
and economic nonsense was manna from heaven. They want to use it for
industrial heat. They want to use it as a fuel for jets. They want
to blend it with CO2 captured from the air to make trucking fuels.<br>
<br>
So many people agree with him, after all, that he knows he must be
right. Vaclav Smil agrees with him, after all, and he loves Smil’s
books, all 46 or so of them now. Pity that Smil was too far from
energy and so made three fundamental errors that render his
conclusions virtually worthless, the most glaring of which is
assuming that the roughly 20 billion tons worth of energy in fossil
fuels consumed annually had to be replaced, instead of just the
third that isn’t lost as waste heat.<br>
<br>
Gates turned Microsoft into a global juggernaut through shrewd
business dealing, some technical insights and good luck. He is
courted at Davos. Heads of state ask his opinion. Epstein included
him in the small group of people privileged to fly on his private
jet to his private island (oops). He’s not just some crank sitting
in the woods in Washington state.<br>
<br>
I could go on (and on and on) about Gates’ failures to align with
empirical reality since the 2000s. But I won’t. I am strongly of the
opinion that the success of the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation
related to communicable diseases had a lot more to do with Melissa
than Bill based on the evidence of the past 20 years, but that’s an
assumption on my part.<br>
<br>
How has he been so consistently wrong in such flagrant ways for so
long without being corrected?<br>
<br>
If he were alone, this wouldn’t be worth writing about. He’d just be
Howard Hughes in his long fingernails and Spruce Goose phase. But
Gates isn’t alone.<br>
<br>
Let’s talk about Elon Musk. The guy is clearly brilliant (and driven
and very lucky). He was deeply integral to figuring out an
alternative payment system with PayPal, well into the engineering,
fiscal and regulatory weeds in the late 1990s and first couple of
years of the 2000s. He rebuilt his brain as a rocket scientist in
the 2000s, working with not only fundamental texts but actual rocket
engineers, and created SpaceX, a firm which has reinvented and
disrupted throwing mass into orbit. He took over Tesla in the
mid-2000s, seeing clearly that battery electric vehicles were the
future and working with hardcore battery and automotive engineers
and some of the best thinkers in the industry to create a business
model, technology stack and distribution system with roughly 15
different fundamental innovations. The modularized, highly automated
and replicable Gigafactory and eliminating dealerships alone are
worth books by themselves.<br>
<br>
But since then? SpaceX and Tesla continue, thankfully, despite Musk.
The Boring Company was a company created because Musk didn’t like
the traffic jam at the entrance to the California Tesla HQ, and he
didn’t bother to learn anything about tunneling or traffic, instead
spinning up a deeply over valued firm that’s managed to dig 2.4
miles of tunnels that don’t add any value except as novelties in
seven years, roughly a mile every three years instead of the mile
per week Musk was touting. He’s on record as saying he doesn’t
believe induced traffic demand actually exists despite a century of
empirical evidence from everywhere in the world that it is a very
real thing. The firm has 200 employees wasting their lives on this
nonsense.<br>
<br>
His Hyperloop concept was equally brain dead. More tunnels, but
these ones with partial vacuum in them, mostly above ground, with
maglev passenger bullets supposedly traveling at 1,000 kilometers
per hour. This design ignores the lessons learned from mass transit
and rail systems globally and if built would have led to every
passenger projectile vomiting on every trip. Claims that the entire
exercise was intended to disrupt California’s high speed rail plans
don’t stand up to scrutiny, as if he’d actually spent any time
looking at that boondoggle he’d have realized it was dead without
his assistance. Others formed a Hyperloop company, spent scads of
money and wasted lots of engineers’ time before it inevitably failed
in the past couple of weeks.<br>
He bought Twitter and managed to turn one of the most successful
social media platforms in the world into a smoking dumpster fire in
a cesspool, alienating every user and advertiser except the furthest
right conspiracy theorists and the con artists who prey upon them.<br>
<br>
He’s been the richest man in the world multiple times! He married
Grimes! Twice! Or was that the other one? Every engineer with an
idea in the world wants to pitch it to him! His tweets were able to
sell 10,000 weed burners with The Boring Company logo on them! He’s
a genius! Everyone he works with tells him so. Other billionaires
love him. Now Republicans love him too!<br>
How has he been so consistently wrong in such flagrant ways for so
long without being corrected?<br>
The list goes on. Richard Branson is part of the group that founded
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and owned a big chunk of Hyperloop
before they realized that putting humans in the thing was the worst
idea since putting hydrogen in cars. Despite being climate change
aware, he bought a space tourism firm which gave decamillionaires a
few minutes of free fall above the 100 km notional line delimiting
our atmosphere from space, a pure vanity waste of time and money
that predictably went bankrupt, costing him $1.5 billion.<br>
<br>
Vinod Khosla was part of the Breakthrough Energy Ventures founding
crew as well, is on record as blaming environmentalists for nuclear
energy’s failure to deliver on time and on schedule, and is
investing in other direct air capture nonsense technologies. In
energy his fund is into the fusion of solar energy, perovskites,
despite decades of failures and no actual requirement for the
cheapest and simplest form of electrical generation we’ve ever
invented to get a slight bit more efficient. The fund is also into
actual fusion, throwing good money after decades of bad. It’s
invested in thermal energy storage technology whose first use case
is returning electricity, ignoring fundamentals of thermodynamics
and energy markets. Khosla — with Gates again! — invested in
LightSail, the Thiel acolyte compressed air storage in expensive
carbon fibre tanks nonsense that inevitably collapsed.<br>
<br>
Jeff Bezos founded the Bezos Earth Fund, so is definitely climate
aware. Yet he also created a different space tourism rocket concern,
one which in his mind is somehow competitive with SpaceX, although
it’s best known for making rockets that look like phalluses and not
delivering on any of its commitments to customers. He’s also
invested in fusion. There’s good stuff in there, as there is with
Khosla’s fund, but there are many purely inane choices that defy
rational thought.<br>
<br>
Larry Page and Sergei Brin founded Google, building the world’s
monopoly search engine and advertising platform. No flies on them.
Yet on climate they wasted tens of millions on Makani, the airborne
wind energy gizmo that was clearly a failure before it ever took
off, and yes, wasting good engineers’ time and energy in the
process. Then Page funded Kitty Hawk, yet another electric vertical
take off and landing failure, something that was clear before the
first stylus hit the first drafting tablet. Yet more talented
engineers’ time and energy wasted.<br>
<br>
Why do these talented, intelligent, successful billionaires all turn
into funders of snake oil, boondoggles and vanity projects, despite
their hearts being in the right places, at least according to their
PR teams?<br>
<br>
And here’s where we get to pity them. An inevitable feature of life
for these billionaires is staff. Those staff know that their entire
wealthy livelihood exists at the whim of a single person who has an
inflated ego due to their massive early success, regardless of how
much luck played a part in it. That means that they inevitably end
up telling that person what they want to hear, not what they need to
hear.<br>
<br>
And some of the staff are solely there as filters. Their entire
purpose is to cull the massive stream of information and requests
and media that might be of interest down to what is actually of
interest to that single person they serve. And those people fear the
person at the center of the system not liking something that they
send onward because it contradicts their biases or highlights their
failures.<br>
<br>
Without massive, ongoing willpower to counter this by the person
whose every whim is catered to, billionaires inevitably end up in
bubbles of disinformation that confirms their biases and doesn’t
conflict with their biases. Their inevitable failures are explained
to them as not being failures, or just being bad luck. Their absurd
whims for tunnels for their cars under traffic jams turn into
reality because no one will look at them, get their attention and
tell them that they are being idiots and to drop the idea.<br>
<br>
It’s not like clearly explained assessments of why the technologies
listed above are dead ends aren’t published fairly constantly by
experts and independent analysts. The links in the article are mine
and go back a decade, but I’m one of a myriad of bright, technically
oriented analysts who can do math and assess business models. I
can’t tell you the number of times people have tried to get
Breakthrough Ventures or Bill Gates to read my material and take my
advice, but his filters mean that I’m treated as a virus he must be
protected from, not a cure for the intellectual pathology he has
devolved into.<br>
A Khosla fund junior staffer recently reached out to see if I’d be
interested in doing a direct air capture technology survey to see
which ones would be suitable for investments. I told them that I was
pretty sure that they were uninterested in giving me lots of money
to tell them no multiple times in different ways and sent them a
copy of my Carbon Engineering case study from 2019, gratis. I
offered to assist if there were a chance to get the fund to stop
investing in the space, and of course haven’t heard back. The odds
that even if the new member of the staff floated the idea, they’d be
quickly put in their place. After all, Khosla thinks direct air
capture with mechanical devices is something useful, and he can’t be
challenged in his biases.<br>
<br>
The billionaire oligarchs, no matter how good their intentions,
drift into being equally coddled and mocked shadows of their best,
younger selves. Where once they were deeply attached to reality,
positioned with the right skills and resources at the right places
to change the world, now they have all the time and money in the
world and no idea how to use it. The odds of them being right in
anything that they do at this stage of their devolution approaches
zero, and the people around them are terrified of telling them that.<br>
<br>
Kings used to have court jesters. The jesters weren’t just
entertainers for the king, his court and his guests. They had the
license to say anything and to mock anything. They were often the
sole source of truth and reality in courts that had matured into
degeneration, providing a useful service to keep the absurdities of
courtiers and sycophants from becoming policy.<br>
<br>
Billionaires no longer have court jesters. Those of us who analyze
failures like airborne wind energy, direct air capture, Smil’s
energy writings and more publish with the vain hope that something
will get through the filters, but nothing ever will. The hangers’ on
surrounding the billionaires will protect their privileges at all
costs, just as the courtiers of old would do anything, no matter how
petty and vile, to preserve their place in court.<br>
<br>
Do you think I’m wrong? Remember Davos in 2019, when headlines
around the world announced that a historian and author had shocked
everybody by telling the assembled billionaires the truth? Those
headlines weren’t about the material, just the person having the
temerity to tell billionaires something that they didn’t want to
hear to their faces. It was a man bites dog headline.<br>
<br>
And so, let’s feel some pity for these poor benighted oligarchs. All
the power, influence, money and connections it is possible to have,
and little remaining connection to empirical reality to allow them
to direct those nigh infinite resources. They’ll reach the end of
their days and wonder why they accomplished so little for the last
decades of their life, despite everyone assuring them at every step
of the way that they were doing so much.<br>
<br>
Nah, screw that. Screw the billionaires too. It’s not like this is a
problem that hasn’t been understood and documented for thousands of
years. It’s not like the tale of King Canute isn’t a frequently told
allegory about ensuring that you know when to remind your courtiers
to stop blowing smoke. And screw the filterers and handlers of the
billionaires as well. Their cowardice and venality isn’t worth
respecting.<br>
<br>
These billionaires claim to be using their vast power, wealth and
influence to address climate change, but they fail the first test of
good strategies, which is to get reality right. That’s on them. It’s
not like reality isn’t readily available and they can’t pay for good
advice. It’s not like their many bad investments couldn’t have been
avoided simply by seeking out actual expertise, ensuring it’s
independent with very simple tactics and keeping a strong leash on
their arrogance. The climate is arguably worse because of these
guys, although Musk gets a bit of a pass simply because he got Tesla
off the ground before ascending into the La La Land of Billionaires.<br>
<blockquote>Have a tip for CleanTechnica?<br>
Like other media companies, we need reader support! If you support
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/23/pity-the-poor-climate-aware-billionaire-oligarchs/"
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<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[ Opinions and revelatory activist discussions - with Andre Malm -
No he is not promoting sabotage.]<br>
<b>Climate Change Is Violent, That’s Why We Need Sabotage |
Downstream<br>
</b>Nov 9, 2021 Downstream - NEW episodes every Sunday 6pm UK<br>
From food scarcity to extreme weather, climate change will affect
the lives of billions of people around the world. But at what point
are its future horrors unacceptable? And how should that shape
climate politics now?<br>
<br>
Aaron Bastani speaks to author Andreas Malm about the limits of
today's activism and what is to be done in a world of runaway
warming.<br>
Novara Media<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clMazbSFdsk"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clMazbSFdsk</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[Article gone as </i></font><font
face="Calibri"><i>WAPO is wiping out archives - when does wisdom
become lost? ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>December 25, 2008</b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> <br>
December 25, 2008: The Washington Post reported: "The United States
faces the possibility of much more rapid climate change by the end
of the century than previous studies have suggested, according to a
new report led by the U.S. Geological Survey."<br>
<br>
<strike><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-12-25/news/36892488_1_climate-change-ice-sheets-sea-level-rise"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-12-25/news/36892488_1_climate-change-ice-sheets-sea-level-rise</a></strike><br>
<br>
<p><br>
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<p><font face="Calibri"> <br>
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