As long as you delivered the proper ordinance on the designated target, then the mission was accomplished whether you live or not. They have more planes and more pilots for the next mission.
I seriously long for a free transit solution in my city, Memphis. We already pay for 90% of the operating cost anyway via various taxes, and fareboxes frequently cost more than they bring in. If I am a citizen paying property taxes in the city, why charge me $1.75 to hop on a bus?
However- it shouldnt be simply "free".. it should be "free with a pass, which is free" and a pass is easy to get, tied to your ID, and easy to revoke. No pass? thats fine, pay the $3 to ride. bus driver yanked your pass because you were peeing on the seat or intimidating other riders? You can ride again, for $3. Concerned about security or privacy? No problem, Pay $3.
Before the majority of law abiding citizens and travelers, passes are easy and free to get.
I was hoping to see a comment like this. These sorts of “global collaborations” seem to always end with the US carry all the water, and the goal from the other countries perspective is to throttle the US. Like the Paris Accords.
Climate change isn't driven by human defined borders either. It's driven by total CO2 emissions. If a per-capita rate is non sensical then border based emissions are even more non sensical. Greenland only emits 0.001% of the total. Greenland is 12000x a better country than the US wow. This is exactly why per-capita is used.
Yeah and this is clearest when you consider federations. Imagine if you count the US as 50 separate countries, suddenly they are much more climate friendly! That's of course absurd.
And no policy is gonna willingly reduce energy consumption which is directly co-related with QOL when other countries have much higher per-capita consumption. Politically humans need fairness.
We know. There are many reasons why countries choose more polluting sources of energy. Part of which is costs. The world runs on incentives. Maybe rich countries like the US can subsidize clean energy for poorer countries like India. Because consumption is definitely not going to come down.
You say you know then directly contradict yourself by bringing up consumption again.
The United States already supports clean energy in India. India is not “poor”. It has a larger economy than the United Kingdom. 46.3% of India’s installed capacity is renewable and that mix is growing.
> You say you know then directly contradict yourself by bringing up consumption again.
It's not a contradiction. Increasing consumption today will mean increase of greenhouse emissions. Any increase of consumption today still involves some increase in fossil fuels for many reasons like grid stability.
> The United States already supports clean energy in India.
They work together on projects. AFAIK the US doesn't subsidise anything for India or other countries.
> India is not “poor”.
It is. Its per capita GDP is $2,878. The US is $85,809. Thats a 30x difference. It is an incredibly poor country.
> It has a larger economy than the United Kingdom.
Philippines and Norway have the same total GDP too. It's silly to consider them equally rich.
> 46.3% of India’s installed capacity is renewable and that mix is growing.
Hell yeah! Hopefully it keeps growing. It's kinda hilarious that India is one of the few countries who will meet the Paris accord commitments. The US is still stuck at 23% and isn't even close to meeting its commitments.
People in India are poor but that doesn’t mean the country is poor. The Indian government has resources to build out renewables as evidenced by them doing exactly that. The United States does not provide much direct funding but you are the only one suggesting that is necessary.
> People in India are poor but that doesn’t mean the country is poor.
Please stop. By your logic any country with a lot of people is rich. I already pointed out Norway vs Philippines for you. It is dirt poor by all numbers. Their extreme poverty rate just dropped recently. Their annual budget is 1/10th of the US with 5x more people. Energy needs per person will grow by over 10x in the next few decades to match the US. There is a long way to go.
> The Indian government has resources to build out renewables as evidenced by them doing exactly that.
I'm actually very impressed to see India sticking to the Paris accords. What exactly is the excuse of the worlds greatest superpower? Maybe a century of polluting the world isn't enough.
> The United States does not provide much direct funding but you are the only one suggesting that is necessary.
You're right. It needs to first fix itself lol. Maybe ask India for help :p Then again if you don't understand why the rich countries need to try and incentivise the world to move faster to renewables then you don't understand the urgency of the matter.
No voter would. Humans would rather die from climate change than try and work together. Our innate tribalism is what makes solutions to this problem hard.
That seems to be a very American perspective. Several European countries have or had Green Parties being part of the government. A German Land (state in US terminology) has a had Green prime minister for 10 years. One could debate whether they have made sufficient impact, but it's certainly very far from "no voter".
Why the dig at Americans? This is nothing more than tock’s misinformed personal opinion. The United States does work with India to develop green energy.
California is famous for green initiatives and my state of Washington trades clean energy with Canada. I’d be shocked if we are unique in that.
These agreements have been in place for generations. It’s obvious they have voter approval.
Solar energy is currently the cheapest form of energy, cheaper than coal, cheaper than natural gas. You know the conspiracy theories about how the oil companies are keeping perpetual motion machines hidden? Solar panels are literally that. With the caveat that they only work in sunlight. So they're not great when you need energy at night. But even if you triple your costs to account for only working 8 hours a day, they're cheaper than anything else.
For a lot of industrial processes, being limited to running during sunny periods would cause costs to go up by a lot more than a factor of three. The grid scale storage necessary to make solar power work for heavy industry remains extremely expensive and capacity limited. Costs are starting to come down but it will take decades.
Solar + battery is now the cheapest. Except in the USA, where natural gas is heavily subsidized. Happily, deploying new gas plants is constrained by supply of turbines. So solar + battery wins by default.
Batteries (plus all the other associated equipment and maintenance) are hardly cheap in the quantities needed to keep heavy industry running 24×7. Battery storage holds promise for the future but so far it's only been used on relatively small demonstration projects. And some of those have been plagued by fires and outages.
I don't have any objection, I'm just stating a reality: it's going to take decades to build out enough battery storage to make renewable energy practical for the base load required for heavy industry. This stuff doesn't scale up quickly regardless of costs or incentives. The places where battery storage is used today generally have high electricity prices and low industrial capacity. If we want to have cheap stuff then we need to have cheap electricity (and cheap industrial heat) available to make that stuff 24×7.
Solar is also the most democratic, as long as you can tolerate it not working at night. I encourage you to experiment with a small portable system. I did - a 30W panel, 9Ax12V SLA battery, off-the-shelf car inverter, packet of crimp connectors, spool of wire, crimp tool, the cheapest over-voltage shutoff controller I could find (just search for solar charge controller - although lead-acid chemistries are moderately tolerant to charging out of bounds, unlike lithium, which is why I suggest lead-acid).
I really think home battery power is going to be a standard feature in the near future. Like indoor plumbing and central HVAC.
My utility just adopted time of use billing and by my napkin math a battery system with one day of capacity will pay for itself in 5 years. And that’s without solar at all. The additional solar panel cost would pay off in under 3 years. And I have cheap electricity.
But the reason emissions happen is for per-inhabitant benefits. It's a very reasonable idea [0] to set a per-inhabitant goal and criticize countries exceeding that threshold (which the US would still fail at, but I'm arguing against the metric itself rather than US faults).
Take your position to something of an extreme -- the Vatican could open up 200 coal power plants for its holy Bitcoin operations and still be sufficiently less impactful to CO2 than the US that nobody would target them during climate talks. Rephrased from the other direction, each US citizen would blow their CO2 budget by buying a shirt per decade to get down to the Vatican's levels.
That's a common mental failure mode, analogous to the sorites paradox. Countries are made up of many small actors and decisions, and pretending otherwise is unlikely to help you achieve your goals.
[0] Mostly -- transitive effects like one country generating all the goods another country uses are harder to account for. Assuming we could measure perfectly though...
In context of the United States, there are a small number of actors that stand to lose billions to renewables.
I live in the Northeast. Solar reduced my grid demand by 40%. That translates to a full recoup of the investment in 60-65 months with subsidy, 100-110 without. The unsubsidized payback period is 1/3 of the projected useful life of the panels.
You know it’s a good idea because opponents big argument is safety of rooftop installers and future workers disposing of solar panels, topics that these folks DNGAF about in the least.
Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology.
Europe has a relatively high carbon footprint per unit of output for things like animal husbandry compared to the US, they just don't do enough of it for it to add up.
>Of course, Europe has relatively little carbon intensive industry. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, beef, and other things with an intrinsically high carbon footprint. The carbon intensity of industry is a byproduct of geography and geology.
This also works in reverse, eg. US importing goods from china and therefore not being on the hook for emissions generated by those goods. ourworldindata has another page that compares the difference between consumption based emissions and territorial emissions[1]. Looking at that page, consumption based emissions are 11% higher for the US vs 27% for the EU. That makes the US look better, but it's not enough to cancel out the fact that the US is 63% more carbon intensive than the EU.
You're kinda contradicting yourself. You're right that it's about absolute numbers. But then you use a percentage.
perhaps 12% for 5% of the global population is too high. But you dont want to relate it to population. Relating to number of countries is rather non-sensical. Some are big (by productivity, area, population, etc.), some are tiny.
Making it relative to countries is useful because that is the delination along which policy is made.
Making it relative to people, IMO, only serves to obscure the fact that the US/China/etc are by far the biggest producers of emissions.
Writing climate policy with them in mind makes more sense than pushing for somewhere like Monaco to reduce emissions, even if their emissions per person are high.
How is that fair when a lot of industrial production was shifted to one region of the globe specifically? It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports.
Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result.
Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end.
That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
>It would be impossible without a lot of guessing and estimations, producing questionable data, but you would have to include CO2 attributable to exports and imports.
>Which is just too hard, and too open to change assumptions to fit a desired result.
No, it's pretty straightforward. Count where a given good is consumed rather then where it's produced. It has to be estimated, but that's also the case for territorial emissions or other economic figures like GDP, but we don't throw our hands up and say "well it's too hard and too prone to fudging so we might as well not bother".
>Because in reality, much of the globe's economy is waaayyyyy too interconnected, and the arrows don't just point one way. Feedback loops without end.
What "feedback loops" are you talking about?
>That whole "this/that country..." just does not work, except to fill comment sections. The systems are global.
Ok but surely you must recognize that the US, where the average person drives a pickup/SUV to work is emitting more carbon than something like India where the average person gets around by walking or using motorbikes? That's the concept that conversations like "US emits more carbon per capita" are trying to capture. "The systems are global" sounds like an excuse to continue driving a F-150 to work because of some spurious arguments about how hard it's do to do carbon accounting 100% accurately.
A good thing from whose perspective? From the perspective of US it would always be a bad thing. Why would you ever want to concede something and limit yourself without proportional concessions.
Soft power isn't a thing. As people have recently pointed out with the USAID situation: helping someone and then stopping the help is far worse than not helping at all. Therefore, soft power isn't power, it's actually more like soft debt. Every time you do charity, you add on to your moral obligations. The less charity you do, the fewer the requirements on you.
Certainly, and in fact no soft power operation can be distinguished from something like this (because a front would deliberately be disguised as a soft-power operation) which renders soft-power operations useless to develop soft-power. And when it is removed, one can either reasonably conclude that the underlying operation is no longer necessary or one could react with how it's worse that they took away something they promised.
In no case will anyone ever say "Well, I am not happy it is gone but I am grateful for all the work they put in to help out of a desire to be good guys" so soft power isn't a thing.
To be clear, I have no quarrel with you on the belief that they're fronts. I only mean that they do not develop power of any sort.
Super weird that they don't factor in productivity at all. Don't take me the wrong way I hate the fact that the United States thinks the only way to do anything is to burn fossil fuels, but that doesn't change the fact that our output per capita has got to be 10x the countries we are being compared against in this article.
That perspective also helps to understand the position that any call for radical climate action must be a weaponization of competing economies to weaken the leader of the pack. So it is very bad framing. Do the work cheaper, better, and at scale. By doing it more efficiently you win. Oh, and of course you'll be more innovative too.
In some cases, I’d argue it might ironically be a worse metric. Case in point, a large AI adjacent firm like NVIDIA - or even OpenAI - that is both “creating gdp”, but also worsening stuff. I’d say a farmer farming in a sustainable way might have a near 0 gdp compared to Sama, but environmentally is much better.
Agree that not all gdp is equal or beneficial. However, I think most people would be remiss to the idea of giving up on science and technology and a return to the agricultural era.
Agree, to clarify, I’m specifically skeptical of the US GDP as much of it seems of a very bubble-like and speculative nature. Tesla (stock) pre NVIDIA was probably the poster boy for the longest of times.
GDP doesn't differentiate between good and bad things and for climate change it would be border line circular because natural disasters like floods and hurricanes are "good" for the GDP (reconstruction effort is a net positive, destruction itself is not subtracted).
> I was hoping to see a comment like this. These sorts of “global collaborations” seem to always end with the US carry all the water, and the goal from the other countries perspective is to throttle the US. Like the Paris Accords.
This is an example of US not carrying "all the water."
The second link shows that the EU+UK (countries + institutions) sent more food aid than the US.
The UK has roughly 1/5 the population of the US and sent more than 1/5 as much as the US. Or, the UK has roughly 1/8 the GDP of the US and sent far more than 1/8 as much as the US.
Also, the data is 2014-2018 when US food aid was managed by USAID. What is the US percentage now that USAID has been eliminated?
The us share of world gdp was between 22-27% and it was contributing 36%.
Secondly, this is only external aid, internally the US far outspend most countries with 100B towards SNAP. Most euro nations don't even have food stamp like programs.
So we’ve gone from “the U.S. carrying all of the water” to “the U.S. carrying 10 points more, in a way which heavily subsidized a key political group”? That seems like a pretty big shift in goalposts.
They asked for proof. You supplied evidence contradicting rather than proving the point. Now you’re trying to claim success by picking a statistical misrepresentation.
Try to support the original claim if you want credit for meeting the original goal.
Proof for his claim that this is how it seems to him? Isn't the proof self evident - he said it seems that way. Obviously this doesn't immediately make it true but asking for "proof" mischaracterizes the nature of his statement.
You know what the fun fact that everyone I hear complain about the US spending more than is fair on international projects ignores or appears ignorant of?
When you’re the one carrying the water, you get to decide where the water goes.
I actually prefer regimes like NATO where everyone is happy to leave the US in charge and doesn’t arm themselves. For all the projection of “strength” the current admin gives off, they are on their way towards reigning over a kingdom formed from the ashes of the republic's empire
I prefer multilateralism, but I do think there are challenges when every country that isn't the biggest smashes the 'defect' button as many times as they can.
And don't forget the tertiary effects as we displace millions with those bombs, only to take in a large number of "asylum seekers" from the countries we "aided".
IMO this is all by design, and there are a non-zero number of NGO operatives on this very site who are frustrated that anything is impeding that plan.
What about non-proliferation treaties which have prevented the vast majority of countries from bankrupting themselves in an existential sprint to nuclear weapons?
What point are you trying to make? I'm honestly not sure. Is it that China is polluting a lot? Or a little? That they are making environmental progress? Or none?
They they are exceeding their initial commitment. Talking about pollution in your tone is also a bit rich coming from the biggest net polluter in all of history.
Nobody can know and that's why it's interesting to you... arguing in bad faith. Take your unfalsifiable counterfactual challenge and go back to debate club.
Yes like the Ottawa Treaty banning Land Mines, in which 166 inconsiderate countries failed to consider the needs of big-time land-mine manufacturers like the US.
Eh, there are a bunch of these kinds of treaties the US won't sign because for most of the signatories they're inconsequential but they're a huge lever for other countries to take sovereignty from the US.
Sorry- yes there’s a used market, but the pricing is essentially handling and refurb cost. used panels are sold by the pallet for the price of a new single panel. Vastly different from a used car industry.
Seems like people confuse the old school "gas peakers" which are basically just simple generators burning gasoline or diesel designed to be used intermittently, and advanced combined cycle natural gas, which are incredibly efficient. Natural Gas is super cheap in many markets, and it appears to be common theory that markets with limited natural gas simply haven't been explored sufficiently due to other fuels being cheaper (coal).
ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.
It's a byproduct of a lot of oil production while also having its own reserves. My office used to look at an oil refinery that was miles away, and they were just burning the natural gas off in a huge plume, not worth trying to capture and combust for production.
The fracking is also in Arkansas and Texas and many other states. An amazing amount of gas continues to be discovered. I am not a geologist but assume that Australia could dedicate resources to explore fracking gas reserves and would come up with quite bit.
sidebar, but I just realized that Australia doesnt really have mountains to speak of. Tallest mountain is around the elevation of the typical Colorado Rockies valley towns. Australia may not have the 'cap traps' required to retain large amounts of gas in the various layers going down under ground.
Amazing that someone so acclaimed can write something so foolish. Buybacks can be good, buybacks can also be bad, like any other financial management decision. The same buyback can be good for some people, and less advantageous for others.
Instead of labeling it “Trump oligarchy shit” (?) just don’t own shares of whatever company you are upset about.
'Many' in the context of a claim of illegal detention, can and should be given a more precise number, otherwise it's fair to assume a narrative is being sold. ATF Atlanta claims 450 workers are 'unlawful aliens'. A counter claim should be specific or get tossed out. 10s? 100s? Vague damage control is never a good sign.
SK embassy and Hyundai itself have significant liability in admitting or even acknowledging employment of illegals.
The liars can say whatever they want, but if you want to counter them you have to be very specific. You’ve just constructed a trap that encourages lies.
In less than 24 hours ATF atlanta is confidant all 450 people arrested were working illegally? Not likely possible, so they just lied.
But if you want to refute that you have to have a specific number. So your options are go slow, take a week to validate the legal status of all 450 people, or lie also.
You assume ATF is lying at face value, thats fine. Remember that they also have access to paystub info, tax filings, etc, for workers at this plant. They already know who they are looking for. It's plain foolishness to think this was just a random checkpoint.
An appropriate response from the employer is, "We have thorough records on all our employment, we take employment laws very seriously, and we believe to the best of our knowledge that our employees are in proper legal standing in compliance with the laws of the state of Georgia." (update: from the article, they say are committed and cooperating)
Also, Biden-era Dept of Labor accused Hyundai of using child labor throughout its supply chain. UNDER THE AGE OF 14 in an auto factory. But sure, let's presume innocence and assume the feds are the illegal ones on this next turn.
>>“Our investigation found SL Alabama engaged in oppressive child labor by employing young workers under the minimum age of 14, and by employing minors under 16 in a manufacturing occupation,” said Wage and Hour Division District Director Kenneth Stripling in Birmingham, Alabama. “Employers are responsible for knowing who is working in their facilities, ensuring that those individuals are of legal working age, and that their employment complies with all federal, state and local labor laws.”
> You assume ATF is lying at face value, thats fine.
No I assume it because their track record shows they arrest many people who aren’t breaking any laws. By their own stats they let about 30% of the people they arrest go. Assuming this was an average arrest, that means 450 is actually 315, and the 135 people wrongly arrested won’t receive anything resembling an apology.
I also suspect the stat of innocent people arrested will go up if they are ever forced to process the people they’ve tossed into concentration camps without due process.
Hyundai has a known track record of circumventing the law in the US, but you’d rather assume innocence. Can’t help that you side with child labor trafficking.
The wrongful arrests aren’t a death sentence, it’s an inconvenience of getting caught up in a much larger willful breach of federal law. They’re probably back at work the next day. I’ve personally been detained by police wrongfully. Not a big deal.
South korea has made a deal to bring everybody arrested home. Because without the due process you or I would expect if arrested, their citizens could be locked up for months without legal recourse or end up “deported” to a for-profit prison in a different country (aka trafficked into slavery).
