It really shows how much power the fossil fuel industry has in this country. But we will break their death grip on us yet.

@Flyingsaucesir Unfortunately, no matter how they/we try there is only so much fossil fuel left. Either we do it slowly and replace it with other forms or cold turkey and crash.

@JackPedigo You're right that it's a finite resource. But there is still a hell of a lot of it left. If we burn a tenth of what is left we're toast.

@Flyingsaucesir Facts vary as to how much is left. Fracking did not create more but it simply was able to squeeze what was still there. Of course it had serious downsides.

@JackPedigo Facts vary? I think you mean estimates.

At current consumption levels, there is somewhere between 40 and 70 years worth of oil left in the ground. That is if we go by the unaudited field data from most of the oil-producing countries. (They do have an incentive to shade their estimates downward to keep prices higher.)

Right you are. And this is only possible because the elites have successfully controlled the national discourse, convincing many average citizens to vote against their own interests. The playbook is simple: find a convenient scapegoat or two (say, immigrants and welfare mothers; throw in some tree huggers for good measure), jump up and down while screaming about high taxes, defund the schools and water down school discipline so the level of discourse is set by the lowest common denominator, flood the country with guns so everyone is terrorized into keeping their heads down, flood social media with disinformation and wacko conspiracy theories, keep the Kardashians in the spotlight and cast aspersions on intellectuals, indoctrinate the youth in the fallacy that unregulated market capitalism is self-correcting and solves all problems, set up some think tanks to produce slick brochures full of specious arguments casting doubt on science, claim the moral high ground on hot-button cultural issues like abortion and gun rights, bribe some politicians, blackmail some others, pay lip service to the sanctimonious church pricks, get the Supreme Court to allow unlimited dark money in politics, and voila! The rich get richer and the average American is consigned to perpetual serfdom!

@Flyingsaucesir couldn’t have said it better. Thanks

My dear boy, I hope you won't take this personally, but you obviously know jack shit about climate science. (You also apparently have no idea how much money an ex-president can make on a book deal and/or a lecture tour.)

Here is a little primer on climate science history for you. Please endeavor to absorb it.

In 1822, Jean-Babtist Joseph Fourier calculated that Earth's atmosphere would be much colder than it is if the incoming radiation from the sun were the only warming effect. His idea that the Earth’s atmosphere acts like an insulator was the first formulation of what we now call the "greenhouse effect." Fourier, however, did not use that term.

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and prominent suffragette, for the first time tested the heat-trapping abilities of different gases.

In 1859, John Tyndall wrote, "...the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.”

In 1896, Svante Arhenius was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide will increase Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. These calculations led him to conclude that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to cause global warming.

Around 1899, Nils Gustaf Ekholm wrote,
"The atmosphere plays a very important part of a double character as to the temperature at the earth’s surface, of which the one was first pointed out by Fourier, the other by Tyndall. Firstly, the atmosphere may act like the glass of a green-house, letting through the light rays of the sun relatively easily, and absorbing a great part of the dark rays emitted from the ground, and it thereby may raise the mean temperature of the earth’s surface. Secondly, the atmosphere acts as a heat store placed between the relatively warm ground and the cold space, and thereby lessens in a high degree the annual, diurnal, and local variations of the temperature.”

In 1958, while working under the direction of Roger Revelle at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Charles Keeling began monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from a station on Mauna Loa, in Hawaii. Keeling's data, when plotted on a graph, showed not only the annual fluctuation of carbon dioxide due to seasonal changes in photosynthesis, but also continuous year-to-year increases in overall CO2 concentration that roughly matched the human emissions from burning fossil fuels. This graph, which came to be known as the "Keeling curve," shows that atmospheric CO2 is not only increasing, but that the increase has been accelerating. While Keeling collected his data, other scientists around the world were measuring atmospheric and ocean temperatures. Eventually it became clear that temperatures are rising at a rate consistent with an increased greenhouse effect due to the burning of fossil fuels. Thus Svante Arhenius' hypothesis of anthropomorphic climate change was confirmed.

Scientists have extended the Keeling curve back into prehistoric times. They accomplished this by measuring the CO2 concentrations in air bubbles trapped in ancient ice from the Antarctic ice cap. By drilling cores to the very bottom of the ice cap,
(which is up to 2 miles thick in places) the scientists have been able to piece together a continuous record of CO2 concentrations stretching back over 800,000 years. This record shows that at no time during that period was the CO2 level higher than it is today. In fact, the current level is about 25% higher than it ever was in almost a million years.

Our species, Homo sapiens, has only existed for about two hundred thousand years.

Scientists around the world have, for decades now, been measuring the effects of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. The effects are being seen everywhere. Ocean water and atmospheric air temperatures are rising. Glaciers and permafrost are melting. Sea level is rising. Storm intensities are increasing. Heat waves are hotter and more frequent. Some areas on land are experiencing unprecedented flooding, while others are seeing unprecedented drought. A mass extinction of plants and animals is under way as climate conditions in their habitats change faster than they can adapt. Where possible, animal ranges are moving uphill or toward the poles to compensate for higher temperatures. All of this is happening on a global scale.

Let me put it in a language you can understand.

To go on burning fossil fuels is to commit ourselves to a murder/suicide pact. The climate system has natural feedbacks that will exponentially amplify the warming we cause. We have very little time in which to stop burning fossil fuels before these feedbacks are running so strongly that we can no longer halt them.

One feedback that is relatively easy to visualize involves Arctic sea ice. Unlike the South Pole, which lies in the middle of a continent, the North Pole is situated in the middle of an ocean. Normally, the Arctic Ocean is covered year-round by a thick layer (about 20 feet) of sea ice. Until recently, this ice typically melted a little around the edges in the summer time, but most of it remained intact year-round. Due to its high reflectivity, Arctic sea ice has an important role in regulating global climate. During the Arctic summer, when Earth's North Pole is tilted toward the sun, the white ice cap reflects 90% of the solar radiation that hits it. The ocean beneath the ice stays cool. If that ice cap is taken away by melting, however, then what is left is a dark ocean that absorbs 90% of the radiation that hits it. The ocean then warms up. That heat is distributed all around the world by ocean and atmospheric currents. Over the last half century, the thickness of the Arctic Ocean ice pack has diminished by about 90%, and the area that it covers in summer has steadily shrunk. If current trends persist, the Arctic Ocean will be virtually ice-free by 2050.

Another natural feedback loop involves the permafrost. The land surrounding the Arctic Ocean is normally frozen to a depth of over 200 meters year round. This permafrost is composed mostly of wind-blown silt, frozen water, and the largely intact frozen remains of plants. There are also some animal remains (you have undoubtedly heard of woolly mammoths being discovered in the melting permafrost), as well as bacteria and fungi which, when thawed, come to life and continue doing what they were doing before they froze. Bacteria and fungi play an important role in the recycling of organic matter. They break down dead organisms and return their atoms back to the environment. This recycling usually takes the form of gas emissions, specifically CO2 and CH4 (methane). Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, about 60 times more efficient at trapping heat than CO2. The permafrost covers vast swathes of land in Alaska and Siberia, and the organic material it contains is sufficient, if totally thawed and converted to CO2 and methane, to instantly triple the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We are already seeing devastating warming effects resulting from an increase in CO2 concentration from about 300 ppm (parts per million) at the start of the Industrial Revolution to around 418 ppm today. Melting all the permafrost would bump the CO2 concentration up to around 1200 ppm.

There is evidence indicating that millions of years in the past, Earth's average atmospheric temperature has been as much as 15°C (27°F) hotter than it is today. That maximim temperature regime coincided with a mass extinction event that killed off 95% of the species then living on Earth.

@Flyingsaucesir

Sad that you are so ignorant of the science…and prefer to trot out climate denial tropes.

@Flyingsaucesir
You put far too much effort into nonsense.

@CourtJester Your surrender is accepted.

@Flyingsaucesir you’ve yet to prove a point though.

@CourtJester

The problem is that many Democrats are not progressive so we need to be careful in who we support, not like the speaker of the house who supports DINOs.

@Theresa_N that is why we are in th current position we are! F you don’t vote for a moderate Democrat you are handing the government to radical Republicans. They know that, that’s why moderate Republicans held their collective noses and voted for Trump. And they will do it again for assholes like Oz, MTG and Boebert. Because they consider any Republican scum sucker a better choice than an intelligent moderate Democrat.

@Barnie2years Terry, I’m a progressive Dem and you’re talking up moderate Dems? Go away.

No Barnie, people like you are the problem, sabotaging progressives, supporting anti-choice Democrats, like Pelosi does.

@Theresa_N you just keep not voting, at some point the Republicans will make sure you don’t even have the option. You can vote for progressives all you want in the Primaries. But come November, if you don’t vote for the Democratic candidate, you may as well vote Republican. Trump probably won thanks to you.

@Theresa_N
Speaker Pelosi is a pragmatist. The Democratic Party is a very diverse bunch. Getting them all to work as one is like trying to herd cats. Nancy works with what she's got. I doubt that anyone could have held the coalition together better.

@Barnie2years Terry, you wrote you jus keep not voting.

When progressives can win, are you so rigid that you won’t vote?

@yvilletom Do you actually read what is written? I vote Democrat at every election since I turned 18. I don't give a damn if they call themselves progressive or they were not even my fifth choice in the primary. I am progressive, but the Republican Party at this point is regressive. Just make sure you and @Theresa_N show up at the polls in November and do the same instead of pouting and staying home because your favorite candidate didn't make the cut.

@Barnie2years Do you intend the scolds you write?