Cheap and efficient solar power didn't seem to require any actual breakthroughs or real investment. Maybe better power electronics for inverters and things? Batteries are a real issue but storage could have been totally ignored for a while.
So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.
But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.
Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!
Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains.
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
In 2008 McCain openly talked about greenhouse gas cap and trade. I think the driving force behind it was fear of peak oil. Secure your energy supply. With fracking supply concerns went away.
In the mid-2000s there might've been individual Republicans concerned about climate change, but it was the Bush administration who opposed the Kyoto Protocol and pushed for adaptation to climate change on the basis of protecting the economy.
No actually. There's no real "resource" justification here.
This is directly caused by technology. Morons have helped the worst possible people build surveillance and coordination and propaganda networks and are all confused pikachu about that going exactly the way you should have expected it to go.
Technology was also bypassing the "resource" problem at warp speed. Solar panels are the energy future, and thanks to China being actually good at strategic planning, solar can be deployed and utilized far faster than any other energy innovation. With the sheer abundance possible through bulk solar, water scarcity is an engineering issue, about manufacturing enough plumbing and membranes to desalinate whatever you need.
We are fighting an 80s oil war because people voted for an 80s TV personality to run our country after he was known to rape kids, brag about Mein Kampf (even though everyone knows he doesn't read for fun), and attempt to invalidate the 2020 election.
Israel saw a clear opening to wildly advance their imperialist ambitions and because Donald Trump is so damn stupid we have jumped in to this absurdist situation because Donald Trump wanted to be seen shooting first, because he thinks that looks "Strong".
Dems had Trump dead to rights for insurrection. They had everything in the Epstein files and didn't drop it. They told you they were working tirelessly for a ceasefire - while unilaterally vetoing 4 of them at the UN.
Genocide. They armed genocide. Which we could all see on our phones.
They loved arming it so much, they decided they'd rather keep arming it than gain millions of votes in swing states vs Trump.
Trump is worse. Yes. But when both parties in the two party system are pro-genocide, pro-torture, pro-ICE, pro-Epstein etc etc etc, you can't blame the whole problem on just half the people involved.
Americans are under the delusion that Democrats are the second coming of Christ, even after it enabled and took part in genocide. To anyone outside of the West, the differences between the two parties are inexistent.
The memoryholing of all Democrats' failures, corruption, and horror is painful to watch. But they do it with a different kind of posturing, and this seems to be sufficient to most.
Yeah that's the really painful bit alright. The pretence isn't even good.
But they'll get so mad at you for pointing out the obvious.
It's been this way for a long time - MLK pointed all this out 6 decades ago. It's gotten worse since, to the point where over 98% of US voters in 2024 didn't hold enabling live-streamed genocide as a red line for their vote.
I'll keep talking about it, and USians will probably keep getting mad at me for it. Ah well.
It was more nuanced than that and importantly, "Anti-masker" as a derogatory statement was about "This person is literally unwilling to do anything at all that doesn't pay off for them personally" because a goddamn mask is such a simple thing to do, and they just couldn't handle it, because it was someone else telling them to do something and some people just cannot function when that happens.
People lost their damn minds because "Hey could you maybe take a single small step to ensure you don't sneeze on produce" was protest worthy.
I do not believe someone saying "Masks made out of T-Shirts don't work well" or "Surgical masks aren't as effective as real N95 masks" are an "Anti-masker".
It was about vice-signalling. All the people who get pissy about masks do plenty of things for their "health" that have zero science behind them.
These people often did other things like hiding or downplaying any symptoms, and choosing to go to events while sick, and were often basically superspreaders.
This was all well understood like 25 years ago when WoW did that blood plague thing and people put effort into spreading it as much as possible. We've seen this with other diseases including ones that have no real controversy or political angle. Some people are just that insistent about doing everything they can to make the world a worse place.
Torpedo boats didn't make Battleships obsolete. Aircraft carriers did. Because they could do the same role but better.
AntiTank rifles didn't make tanks obsolete. Neither did anti-tank mines. Nor anti-tank rocket launchers, nor anti-tank artillery, nor really freaking good anti-tank missiles, nor anti-tank helicopters etc etc. Turns out, putting a box of steel around soldiers is pretty much always better. IFVs are even less survivable than a tank in all cases and they have only become more important and prominent because what capability they provide is what matters.
Artillery and Air power did not make the army obsolete. Air power did not make Artillery obsolete though the USA wanted that reality.
Submarines didn't make any boat obsolete.
SAM systems did not make planes obsolete. Hell, America decided the solution to missiles aimed at your planes was fly planes at the missile launcher! And it works because war is stupid.
"Cheap drones" only work against things that haven't yet adapted to cheap drones in the exact same way that Navy had to adapt to anti-ship missiles. With EW, those "cheap" drones get less cheap. With any sort of advancement in protection, those drones get less cheap. War is about achieving physical control, and you can't really do that with cheap drones. There's always back and forth in weapons systems. We still use bayonets in the right circumstances!
Cheap drones cannot establish air superiority, and certainly not air supremacy. Actual air combat drones are far more expensive, involved, and in development than quadcopters.
The primary power drones bring is ISR, making the entire battlefield utterly transparent, including at nighttime. That's insane, and really really bad for any of us who might be forced to fight in the future, as lethality to the average soldier is likely to go up.
Because Google does not build a platform that is beneficial to the creators who make actually good and productive and positive content.
I don't want give Google money for building a Mr Beast platform. I want the stuff Nebula does.
So I pay for Nebula.
Paying an advertising company to not show you ads doesn't make that company not an advertising company, and the problem is being an advertising company. It's corrosive to society and people.
I also pay for Nebula. I wish more content creators moved to that platform. It's so annoying to deal with YouTube's homepage to find the videos of the creators that are not in Nebula
So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago.
But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons.
Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop!
Oh.
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