Why is a guy with a bachelor's degree in political science making sites about climate and making claims contradictory to experts? Does he have the tools to be a skeptic?
"Joe Biden Is Campaigning On The Green New Deal, Minus the Crazy": https://slate.com/business/2020/07/...an-is-the-green-new-deal-minus-the-crazy.html excerpt: Joe Biden has embraced the Green New Deal. He might not have uttered those magic words on Tuesday while unveiling his campaign’s new, far-reaching plan to combat climate change and revitalize the U.S. economy, but he didn’t have to. In substance and spirit, the Democratic nominee has signed on to the concept’s most important pieces, while doing away with some of its more controversial, and less essential, trappings. It’s understandable why Biden might avoid the branding. For many moderates and conservatives, including our president, the phrase “green new deal” itself has become a shorthand for leftist overreach. In part, that’s because no one group can really claim complete ownership of the idea and some maximalist versions favored by young activists have included things like Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, along with zeroing out carbon emissions, which make their proposals look a bit like democratic-socialist wishlists disguised as plans to stop global warming. When Democrats in Congress actually tried to write up an official Green New Deal framework in 2019, a bizarre, unofficial FAQ circulated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s staff explained that they’d lowered their 10-year emissions goals a bit “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The result has been a never-ending stream of jokes about banning hamburgers—the kind of crazy that Biden, whose whole candidacy is basically comfort food for America’s moderates, would like to avoid. But when it comes to actual climate policy, the Green New Deal has always represented a very specific and serious philosophical shift. In the past, Democrats have wanted to reduce emissions through market-oriented mechanisms like a carbon tax or cap and trade. You still see prominent strains of that thinking today, such as when a bipartisan group of 45 renowned economists, including former Federal Reserve Chairs and nobel laureates, signed an open letter in the Wall Street Journal calling for a carbon-tax-and-dividend scheme. Green New Dealers have taken a different, less market-focused approach, combining clean power mandates that would force a shift away from carbon, massive government spending and industrial policy designed to create jobs, and a strong emphasis on environmental justice for communities hardest hit by pollution. Instead of putting a price on CO2 and letting capitalism do its magic, the new generation of climate hawks want to force power companies and other emitters to abandon fossil fuels while using the federal purse to put people to work and reinvent the American economy. Biden’s primary season climate plan included some of those pillars, and even referred to the Green New Deal as a “crucial framework,” but the new version adopts it much more fully. The candidate’s original platform called for $1.7 trillion in spending over 10 years, and set a goal of zero net emissions by 2050. The new edition ups the price tag to $2 trillion over four years (there’s your massive spending), and aims to scrub carbon from the electricity sector by 2035 using a clean energy standard for utilities (there’s your mandate). Biden has also rolled out a “made-in-America” economic plan that would use gobs of government procurement and R&D funding to build up domestic sectors like renewable batteries and electric vehicles (there’s your industrial policy). And the campaign has outlined an extensive proposal to “secure environmental justice” by directing 40 percent of its climate spending to disadvantaged communities. Biden is borrowing some of his new ideas directly from Washington Governor Jay Inslee, whose short presidential run made him a folk hero to climate hawks. The proposal to achieve clean electricity by 2035 comes from Inslee. So does Biden’s call for to create a Civilian Climate Corps that would work on restoration and resilience projects, a direct nod to Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps. As writers like Vox’s Dave Roberts have noted, Inslee’s campaign essentially wrote a a nuts-and-bolts “instruction manual” for achieving the Green New Deal’s climate goals, even if he didn’t quite use the name. Now, the former veep appears to be reading from it. “Basically, Joe Biden endorsed a Green New Deal in our view, substantively,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, the vice president of strategy and policy at the progressive polling and policy shop Data for Progress, told me. (His outfit was among the first to outline what a Green New Deal might actually look like, releasing a plan in September 2018.) Other left-wing groups haven’t gone quite that far, in part because Biden’s plan doesn’t adopt some of their more absolutist stances on energy. Unlike his former opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, Biden wouldn’t ban natural gas and oil fracking or phase out nuclear power, and he leaves the door open to carbon capture technology, which some environmentalists see as distracting techno-optimism, and a lot of others think will be absolutely essential if we want to keep the planet from frying . Also, on the list of differences: AOC and Sen. Ed Markey wanted to move the country to clean energy in 10 years, whereas Biden’s timeline is longer and more realistic. And, of course, he isn’t signing on to Medicare for All. But activists are still clearly happy with Biden’s leftward shift. The Sunrise Movement, the youth activist organization closely associated with the Green New Deal, issued an approving statement that took credit for teaching Joe Bide to “talk the talk” on climate, and promised to make him “walk the walk.” The group had previously given Biden’s climate plan an “F” grade during the Democratic primary. more at the link
"Joe Biden's $2 Trillion Green New Deal Is Just a Worn-Out Democratic Jobs Program": https://reason.com/video/joe-bidens...l-is-just-a-worn-out-democratic-jobs-program/
Well, here is one way for climate change to spur economic opportunity. It isn't all bad, right @Os Trigonum 2.6T just for mad-man-made state of the art control walls to fence off the ocean and its water invasion. In Houston/Galv, it's 26B. A $26-Billion Plan to Save the Houston Area From Rising Seas (undark.org) No one can guess the barrier proposal’s exact fate, given its enormous price tag. And as sea levels rise and storms intensify with global climate change, Houston is far from the only U.S. coastal metropolitan region at serious risk. Multibillion-dollar coastal megaprojects already are underway or under consideration from San Francisco to Miami to New York City. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the U.S. needs to spend $2.59 trillion — more than a third of the entire federal budget for 2020 — to bring infrastructure up to standard. Meanwhile, other cities are seeking federal dollars for billion-dollar-plus coastal proposal, and Biden’s infrastructure plan, which initially called for $50 billion for such projects, remains stalled in the Senate. President Joe Biden’s new $2 trillion national infrastructure initiative specifically calls for projects on the country’s embattled coasts. The initiative for Houston, the fifth-largest U.S. metro area and the vulnerable heart of the petrochemical industry, spotlights the tough decisions for coastal megaprojects, which must balance societal needs, engineering capabilities, environmental protections, and costs.
This looks similar to the project in Italy to close off the Venetian Lagoon. That project though is also controversial as the flood control gates potentially could affect the ability of the lagoon to wash out pollutants and silt. That system might end up making the lagoon both toxic and eventually cause it to fill up so Venice ends up in a nauseous swamp.
we don't exactly have a lagoon here and if it's bad enough to close the gate for an extended time that turns it into a swamp, we got a bigger problem with flooding and the tradeoff is bad either way but protecting Houston is probably much higher value than the lagoon in Galv
The biggest issue is protecting refineries and the port…to prevent what we are being told would be America’s Chernobyl if the right storm hit at the right spot…which is really more a matter of when than if.
Galveston Bay isn't a lagoon but it is an estuary and as such is maintained by a balance of sea water and fresh water. Even if these gates aren't closed all the time they will still affect the flow of the water and retention of sediments through the bay.
