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No, I haven't left yet...
11 years ago
"MORELS taste good in omelettes..."
Still thinking on that one. Most folks know me from here, and Weasyl, while awesome, is still building it's membership. So I've been re-reading some of the posts about the thing I'm sure other people are already tired of hearing about, but hey, I have this little problem called ethics that gets in the way of my just sweeping a certain situation under the rug. But, there is still the matter of most folks only knowing me from here, and most of my commission-base is from here. Sooooo--this sucks, but I'm probably staying.
Okay, enough of that. Now on to something a LOT more important. My hubby,
kanis writes little articles that he posts on the front pages of http://www.draconic.com the website he created back in the late nineties for dragons to come and hang out together. Still around and still going strong, but I think he's not getting enough of a readership for his writing, so I cross-post them when I can.
Here's his latest (if you go to the Draconic front page, you'll be able to access the links if they don't work here, and for those on Daily Kos, you can find him there under the name of GoldenDragon):
Tonight, California's U.S. senator Barbara Boxer will join 27 other senators, including Coons, Franken, Heinrich, Markey, Murray, Schatz, Udall, Whitehouse, and Wyden to talk all night, for at least 14 hours, about the urgency of taking meaningful action to fight climate change.
Thinkprogress gives a great overview of 28 reasons why these 28 senators have finally sounded the wake up call. From one of the worst droughts in California's recorded history to $621 million in taxpayer dollars spent cleaning up record flooding in Colorado, you and I are literally paying to clean up the damage being done by an oil industry that continues to make record profits. And where do those profits go while we pay for cleanup? To buy elections and create vast disinformation campaigns to convince people the science isn't settled. Campaigns run by the exact same people that tried to convince us that smoking wasn't dangerous and tobacco wasn't addictive.
It's well past time to wake up and smell the lies. Things have finally gotten bad enough that all the disinformation in the world is no longer convincing most people not to believe their own eyes. In response, our elected officials are finally making some noise. Join them.
Why is it so easy for some people to believe the lies? I think for some, the truth is too terrible to face and so they look for any vague opinion piece written by oil-industry shills that will just tell them that everything is actually fine. Telling them that all those thousands of scientists frantically trying to warn us are actually the liars, alarmists, part of some vast conspiracy to get government research grants, or whatever other crackpot distortion they can come up with.
To anyone afraid to face the terrible truth because they see no solution to the problem, I say there are already solutions. Cleantechnica discusses solutions every day. In the last five years, 30% of new energy generation in the US has come from new wind farms. 91 Illinois communities are already 100% powered by green electricity. That's a renewable transition on a scale not seen anywhere else in the USA, and it was all done by individual communities voting for where they wanted to get their electricity from. MASSIVE CHANGE DRIVEN QUIETLY BY 1.7 MILLION LOCAL RESIDENTS.
In Germany, RWE has lost €2.8 billion - it's first loss in 60 years - because it kept pushing fossil fuel energy plans over renewable ones. As with most revolutions, from PCs to smart phones, truly-good ideas spread exponentially faster than any industry analyst ever predicts they will.
So we don't need fossil fuels. Clean tech is already here. Climate change solutions are already here. Even all the gas-guzzlers that currently dominate the roads and the skies can be run on biofuel created with technologies that are already here and within a few years of commercial implementation if only they can be adopted against the wishes of our fossil-fuel overlords.
Solar has gone down in price so fast in the last few years that it jumped from 10% of new electricity in 2012 to 29% in 2013, almost a 300% increase IN A SINGLE YEAR. If you live in a house, right now, you can get FREE solar panels on your roof, installed for FREE, and only pay a monthly bill that's LESS THAN WHAT YOU ALREADY PAY TO THE ELECTRIC COMPANY. That's through SolarCity, a company founded by cousins of Elon Musk, the guy who created Tesla motors. That's here now. That's revolutionary.
The only thing slowing down the revolution... THE ONLY THING... is oil companies and their disinformation campaigns. And the only thing that will stop them... THE ONLY THING... is us.
* Join 350.org's campaign to pull investment dollars away from these greedy, lying oil companies that force us to pay for their product and pay to clean up their mess.
* Join 28 senators to demand our government take meaningful action.
* Put solar on your roof for free and pay a lower monthly bill. Or coax your parents to do it.
Wake up. The catastrophic effects of climate change are already here, and so are the solutions.
Okay, enough of that. Now on to something a LOT more important. My hubby,
kanis writes little articles that he posts on the front pages of http://www.draconic.com the website he created back in the late nineties for dragons to come and hang out together. Still around and still going strong, but I think he's not getting enough of a readership for his writing, so I cross-post them when I can.Here's his latest (if you go to the Draconic front page, you'll be able to access the links if they don't work here, and for those on Daily Kos, you can find him there under the name of GoldenDragon):
Tonight, California's U.S. senator Barbara Boxer will join 27 other senators, including Coons, Franken, Heinrich, Markey, Murray, Schatz, Udall, Whitehouse, and Wyden to talk all night, for at least 14 hours, about the urgency of taking meaningful action to fight climate change.
Thinkprogress gives a great overview of 28 reasons why these 28 senators have finally sounded the wake up call. From one of the worst droughts in California's recorded history to $621 million in taxpayer dollars spent cleaning up record flooding in Colorado, you and I are literally paying to clean up the damage being done by an oil industry that continues to make record profits. And where do those profits go while we pay for cleanup? To buy elections and create vast disinformation campaigns to convince people the science isn't settled. Campaigns run by the exact same people that tried to convince us that smoking wasn't dangerous and tobacco wasn't addictive.
It's well past time to wake up and smell the lies. Things have finally gotten bad enough that all the disinformation in the world is no longer convincing most people not to believe their own eyes. In response, our elected officials are finally making some noise. Join them.
Why is it so easy for some people to believe the lies? I think for some, the truth is too terrible to face and so they look for any vague opinion piece written by oil-industry shills that will just tell them that everything is actually fine. Telling them that all those thousands of scientists frantically trying to warn us are actually the liars, alarmists, part of some vast conspiracy to get government research grants, or whatever other crackpot distortion they can come up with.
To anyone afraid to face the terrible truth because they see no solution to the problem, I say there are already solutions. Cleantechnica discusses solutions every day. In the last five years, 30% of new energy generation in the US has come from new wind farms. 91 Illinois communities are already 100% powered by green electricity. That's a renewable transition on a scale not seen anywhere else in the USA, and it was all done by individual communities voting for where they wanted to get their electricity from. MASSIVE CHANGE DRIVEN QUIETLY BY 1.7 MILLION LOCAL RESIDENTS.
In Germany, RWE has lost €2.8 billion - it's first loss in 60 years - because it kept pushing fossil fuel energy plans over renewable ones. As with most revolutions, from PCs to smart phones, truly-good ideas spread exponentially faster than any industry analyst ever predicts they will.
So we don't need fossil fuels. Clean tech is already here. Climate change solutions are already here. Even all the gas-guzzlers that currently dominate the roads and the skies can be run on biofuel created with technologies that are already here and within a few years of commercial implementation if only they can be adopted against the wishes of our fossil-fuel overlords.
Solar has gone down in price so fast in the last few years that it jumped from 10% of new electricity in 2012 to 29% in 2013, almost a 300% increase IN A SINGLE YEAR. If you live in a house, right now, you can get FREE solar panels on your roof, installed for FREE, and only pay a monthly bill that's LESS THAN WHAT YOU ALREADY PAY TO THE ELECTRIC COMPANY. That's through SolarCity, a company founded by cousins of Elon Musk, the guy who created Tesla motors. That's here now. That's revolutionary.
The only thing slowing down the revolution... THE ONLY THING... is oil companies and their disinformation campaigns. And the only thing that will stop them... THE ONLY THING... is us.
* Join 350.org's campaign to pull investment dollars away from these greedy, lying oil companies that force us to pay for their product and pay to clean up their mess.
* Join 28 senators to demand our government take meaningful action.
* Put solar on your roof for free and pay a lower monthly bill. Or coax your parents to do it.
Wake up. The catastrophic effects of climate change are already here, and so are the solutions.
>https://www.weasyl.com/~murrahnithahniia
It's nice to see that you're still around. :>
Also, IMO, solar panels on the home are a scam, we should be concentrating on building large solar power plants that can take advantage of economies of scale.
From Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/a.....denial-effort/
From ThinkProgress (scroll down for a simple chart that details how much money is being spent as of 2010--it's increased in the subsequent years): http://thinkprogress.org/climate/20.....-climate-bil/#
About Mr. Brulle again, but from an outside the U.S point of view: http://www.theguardian.com/environm.....climate-change
From Greenpeace (review the sidebar that list EXACTLY who the Kochs--just one Big Money bunch-- are sending money to in order to 'debunk' Climate Change): http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/ca.....ch-industries/
As opposed to the amount of money being spent on clean-energy research and real-time projects (please note the the charts actually don't state who is actually putting money into the R&D--it appears to be all governmentally related. the last two charts are especially telling): http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs.....ergy-research/
From The Rolling Stone--this article is especially damning as regards what Big Oil is actually spending on renewables research: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic.....nergy-20130625
Even Forbes, the magazine written for rich people and people wanting to get rich and usually from an overwhelmingly Conservative viewpoint, makes mention of how low the R&D spending on renewables is vs the huge amounts of cheddar these guys are making. Admittedly, the article is ridiculously short and rather tepid, but when a conservative like Forbes points something like that out, it gets my attention.
As for the assertion that solar is a scam, I call bullshit. Period:
From BusinessWeek--this writer details his experience with installing solar panels on his house. Admittedly, his initial outlay was high, but costs have dropped by more than half in subsequent years: http://www.businessweek.com/article.....e-mostly-sunny
From the same time-frame as the previous article: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/04.....n-energy-cost/
This is not to say that there aren't solar scams out there, but they seem to be a variation on the standard contractor scam where a customer is overcharged for a faulty installation because being unfamiliar with the product and failing to do the research makes them easy marks:
http://www.bbb.org/blog/2012/06/don.....m-this-summer/
http://heliopower.com/residential-s.....ar/solar-scam/
I do happen to agree that large-scale arrays make more sense, but when you add together all of the houses in a state like say, Illinois, which has 92 towns using 100% renewables (http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/08/illi.....-clean-energy/), that "large array" you think can't be created with home solar is actually there. As more people install solar on their homes--and the rate is increasing by leaps and bounds--your "large array" systems will effectively be in place.
Hon, you REALLY need to stop drinking that Libertarian Kool-aid, because the level of misinformation that you're spouting is making me lose respect for you.
The leases don't eliminate your power bill, just reduce it, you just end up paying two bills
The new advancements in panels have not hit the market yet. Everyone right now is selling you what they have in stock. If you absolutely have to get panels, you should wait for the new advancements to hit the market and bring prices down more.
2) Join 28 senators to demand our government take meaningful action.
3) Put solar on your roof for free and pay a lower monthly bill. Or coax your parents to do it.
1: have
2: have
3: we've talked about it, problem is that our house is actually a really poor location. We've also talked geothermal. We almost switched back when our furnace broke and broke bad (as in the piece that broke was basically a big hunk of iron they don't make any more and our furnace repair guys didn't want to fix it and were trying to get us to get a new furnace). In the end the furnace guys repaired it (and at a discount) because if we replaced it, we'd have replaced it with geothermal and they would have lost business.