ReeferMadness

I wonder how long it is before the different groups start shooting at each other.

Ammon Bundy somehow swallowed his anti-government beliefs long enough to accept a $530,000 small business loan from the US government.

The group in Oregon is not from Oregon and doesn't have the support of the people they claim to represent. They're a bunch of hypocrites. They claim to want to reclaim the land for "the people" but in fact the only people they're trying to help are ranchers, loggers and miners. The ranchers are getting land leased to them at a fraction of fair market price and in fact, other countries should be imposing trade sanctions because the artificially low prices constitute subsidies. The whole thing is a joke. The Hammonds may have been treated unfairly by the American justice system but they're hardly the first and won't be the last.

If it doesn't come sooner, demand for self-driving cars will rocket in 10-15 years. That's when boomers will start hitting the period when they are losing their drivers licenses. Unlike their depression-era parents, boomers are not going to sit around and wait for their kids to drive them places. And those kids, who have been taught that their own needs come first, are not going to rearrange their lives to drive their parents around.

We don't need a mass cull of people, although we might get one anyway if we don't learn some humility. We need to learn how to live within the physical limits of the planet, using an accounting system that takes all factors into account. The Paris agreement is a joke. Just as the US and the USSR played chicken with nuclear weapons, the US and China are now playing chicken with CO2 emissions. The problem is that there is a huge lead time between when CO2 is released and when issues manifest themselves. It's sad to say but it might take cities being under water and massive drought to make people pay attention. But by then, we've already locked in several decades more warming.

Maybe he has real estate in Florida and he's hoping he can sell it before anyone notices it's going under.

This topic is predicated on how pipelines make climate change worse and it will hit Florida hard. I wonder why you are so eager to change the subject. It's not just Florida, either. New York. Louisiana. Boston. Philadelphia. Los Angeles. Vancouver. Unless climate change adaptation includes canoes or webbed feet, it probably involves moving.

At this point, a chunk of south Florida is screwed. However, the sooner we stop shifting the chemistry of the atmosphere, the sooner, we stop making it worse. Oh, yeah. Right up until one of those "slightly stronger" hurricanes scores a direct hit on a city that has "slightly more" people with a "slightly higher" sea level. It's a disaster in the making and people are just sticking their heads in the rapidly eroding Florida beach sand.

Freudian typo? lol

And yet, they're both part of the same planet. Sadly, climate change doesn't respect international boundaries. The sludge that is dug out of northern Alberta, diluted with toxic solvents, piped to the coast, shipped somewhere else for refining and then burned produces CO2 that causes the atmosphere to warm, resulting in increased ice melt in Greenland, the arctic and elsewhere. That water contributes to higher sea levels (though most of the sea level rise to date has been caused by thermal expansion) and those higher sea levels cause water to seep up through porous limestone into multi-million dollar estates in Miami Beach. Not really fair but there you have it.

<forehead-palm> If you bothered to read my post, you would know that South Florida is built on porous limestone. There are no known shoreline defenses that will protect it. The water will seep under the shoreline defenses and up through the storm drains (as it does today at high tides). Note to Moderators: Should there be a requirement that people actually read a post before they respond?? Cite? I've read there could be more or fewer hurricanes; and that the hurricanes that do occur could be more intense. Too soon to say.

Oh, yeah. Cuz the data goes all the way to 1981! :rolleyes:

Yup. It was built at a time when nobody thought that pipelines would spill massive amounts of oil, when nobody knew just how toxic the sludge was, before there was any such thing as dilbit. There's no reason for other provinces to accept the risk of toxic sludge being spilled into their environment. At today's price points, you can barely give away tar sands oil.

Actually, Miami Beach already has flooding problems during high tides. But if you're blissfully unaware of it, don't worry. Many of the residents are equally in the dark. As if the superintendent can control sea level rise. Florida is not so much in a state of denial as it is a state in denial. How bad will it get? Just to put that in perspective, here's a website that will allow you to see what 1-6 feet of sea level rise will do to South Florida. On average, Miami Dade County is only about 6 feet above sea level. At one foot, a significant chunk of the Florida everglades is gone. At 3 feet, the eastern portion of Miami Beach disappears. At 6 feet, much of South Florida will be under water. Can Miami be saved? Not with today's engineering. Yet, even as people claim it would cost too much to stop using fossil fuels, Bruce Mowry, Miami Beach's city engineer dreams up pie-in-the-sky solutions. This is madness. Lunacy. Straight out of Monty Python. The only way that fossil fuels have ANY ROI at all is when most of the costs are externalized like health care or kicked down the road, like climate change. If I were a religious man, I'd say God forgive us for what we are doing to our grandchildren. I'd like to say we're too stupid to know better but it's worse than that. We're too selfish to do anything about it.

Is there a problem here? Trudeau is paying whatever amount per night out of his pocket. And he is reimbursing the public at economy air fares (as his predecessor the right wing demigod did). And all of the right wingers now have a problem with that? They must be pissed they have nothing real on him.

They don't need it to make money on their oil - their production costs are among the lowest in the world. However, they do need it to balance their budget - they have precious little else to rely on.

The Saudis screwed themselves years ago. A massive welfare program for the thousands of members of the royal family, one of the world's largest military budgets, an economy built on a foundation of "guest workers", subsidized fuel for the country. All relying on a single volatile commodity. The very definition of an unsustainable state. They may get one last hurrah but one day the party will be over. And all that money will have disappeared like water into the sand.

Clearly, it cannot make "everyone" rich. However, if it swings the way it could, then yes, some people could make a lot of money. Just as some people have lost a lot through the price of oil dropping. If that is somehow controversial, I'm not clear how. I should just point out that timing the market is notoriously difficult. And there are other risks to price appreciation. If the world economy tanks or if the world actually gets its shit together and starts to aggressively tax fossil fuels according to the damage they cause, maybe the prices never come back. OK, I have no idea what the price of oil (which has wildly fluctuated in the past several times according to supply, demand and market manipulation), has to do with the price of Florida real estate.

So, what? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Communist takeover? Castro in Cuba? You seem to be a big proponent in "fixing" things with guns. I'm just curious as to where you think this has been working.

Armed economic redress.... Care to proffer an example from the last century where that has turned out well?

Canadian crude is already selling below $20. As for the world price, any number above zero is a possibility. Storage facilities are reaching capacity and heavily leveraged producers face a choice between selling oil and bankruptcy. Markets suck at predicting but they're great at correcting. "Correcting" is economist speak for people going bankrupt and losing everything . The Saudis are sitting back and chuckling. The longer prices stay low, the more production will be squeezed out of the markets and the higher prices will rebound on the other end. The number of active rigs in the US is now at the lowest point since 2010 but there will be a lag as fracked well production declines. The silver lining in all of this is that people will gradually come to the realization that they can get energy price stability without wrecking the biosphere from sources like solar, wind and geothermal.

Doubt it. There is already a trend among millennials towards less car ownership. One of the current reasons that people spend so much money on their cars right now is that by driving they feel personally connected to their car. Once the car begins to drive itself, that link weakens. Also, self-driving vehicles will make other possibilities, like car sharing, more convenient and attractive.

It can't wait for segregated roads - and it shouldn't. Human drivers will have to adapt in the meantime, though. Google's automated cars actually have a higher rate of accidents than human cars - because people don't follow the rules. Google cars drive defensively and follow all the rules. People don't and so there have been numerous cases of humans rear-ending automated cars.

There are issues with taxis besides cost (although that is a big one). There aren't enough taxis on the road so you have to wait (typically 10-30 minutes). Some people don't like or trust taxi drivers. Change the economics and you will change behaviour. Well, some people own jet planes so certainly some people will own cars. The question is how many. Yup. 1970's thinking. Good luck with that.

You're trying to bring morality into this discussion? You're way off topic. Who can fail to see the parallel between the LRA soldier who forces kids into combat because the bible said it was OK, the ISIS soldier who hacks apart an infidel because the Quran says it's OK and someone in this very thread who is saying the constitution and Texas law gives him the right to kill a kid who rings his doorbell? Right and wrong don't factor into extremist views - all that matters is that they can find some magical text that justifies whatever perverted action they want to take or (in the case of the first 2) are coerced into taking.