This was the more telling text I thought. The number he will agree to will be smaller than $3.5, but that’s not the real issue. He wants all the climate provisions gone and a pro fossil fuels bill. Deliver that and most of the rest of the bill probably gets a stamp of approval, his agenda and priorities are pretty clear.
Not that it would solve whatever the Sinema issue is, who knows what the hell that is, but seems pretty clear to me that the climate provisions are Manchins real issue.
Lol he makes $500k a year from coal, just literally put a “give Joe Manchin $100 million” provision in the bill. Maybe “give everyone who votes yes $100 million.” That costs $10 billion max and maybe we give the planet an extra decade, pretty good deal.
Who that matters want to actually do this? We play this game here where we come up with great strategies for the Dems and they are all fantasy. Coping mechanisms really. Enough Democrats think and believe like Republicans or their corporate overlords that nothing meaningfully good will ever happen. It doesn’t really matter if they got comfortable and want to protect that or maybe they lived in a blue state so had to say some lefty things to get power. Their handlers will never let them address any of the issues that really matter. Climate change won’t be addressed, affordable access to medical care for poor and the middle class won’t happen, the rich won’t pay taxes, nothing significantly good will ever happen here. It’s over.
Absent actual revolution there is no mechanism to change this dynamic and we all know it. Very few of us here are willing to give our lives to the cause. Who will be? No one myself included. Our only hope is the slide into the abyss isn’t too bad.
i thought coal is a little more complicated than that. like there’s two grades of coal used in energy production and steel production. and steel prod grade coal somehow has keep coming before there’s an alternative. and coal energy contracts are basically at the state level, so dem feds could not terminate them without facing a lawsuit from a gop state government and eventually paying compensation.
Good point on the coal for steel. Also I read somewhere is that certain electricity grids are still highly dependent.
As someone that works tangentially in alternative energy (specifically some alternative fuels including ethanol), I feel fairly confident in saying that we aren’t there yet in terms of total replacement AND that some alternatives are oversold at this point. I have a lot of confidence we are getting there, just don’t be surprised if some claims turn out to be overly optimistic in the short and medium term.
Transportation fuel is a concern. Yields of hydrocarbons from renewable agriculture are quite low and much more expensive that pumping and cracking oil to get gasoline. The technology is just not there for cellulosics yet. On top of that the volumes aren’t available. There is a lot of hype in the industry.
For anybody into chemistry, paying a bunch of money to strip O from carbohydrates only to combust back to CO2 does not make good thermodynamic sense. Better to use the carbohydrate sources to make certain chemicals and polymers that are traditionally made from petro sources.
Solar to Split water for H2, biodiesel, and certain jet fuels may make sense for renewable fuels (and of course electricity from solar/wind/water/…).
I’m hoping that in my lifetime solar takes some more big leaps in efficiency. I don’t know what to make of fusion. Fission seems dead for the future.
I’m also hopeful for CO2 capture that would make nat gas a much more appealing play (aside from fracking aspect).
8 billion people require a lot of energy. No quick fixes sadly.
You make good points. For sure for it to work we’d need a pretty united democratic front. If we have that, I don’t think manchin will be willing to go up against that plus tank the economy. Maybe not the full 3.5 trillion. Maybe drop to like 2.5 or 3 so he can save face.
Democrats need to be willing to gamble big though. Once they lose the house without getting any voting rights bill done they’re going to be majorly fucked. Defaulting won’t do a quarter of the damage a decade of republican control will do.
So Twitter tells me that Politico has confirmed the Hunter Biden laptop and emails were in fact real, after twitter et al removed news stories about it from their platforms last year.
Edit: read the politico blurb, looks like it’s only confirming the emails are genuine, and that’s on the word of several people who claim to have had independent access to his emails. Doesn’t confirm the laptop repair guy part of the story at all AFAICT
It’s been obvious for some time - like since the election campaign itself - that 1) the emails supposedly recovered from the laptop were genuine and 2) the claimed laptop source was almost certainly not the actual means by which they were obtained. I think the press did a good job in ignoring the story in a context in which they were obviously being manipulated. Here I am in Oct 2020, in fact:
The content of the emails was suggestive of Hunter wanting to peddle his father’s influence, but it was far from conclusive that his father was willing to go along with this, which is the ingredient required to make it a genuinely big story.
I mean, even reliable Republican voters don’t care about this crap. Their guy spent 4 years auctioning off foreign policy, you have to be Lin Wood levels of crazy to give a shit in that context.
Sure, but a) they love their whatabouts, and this is just an easily accessible “whatabout Hunder Biden, huh!!!” and b) liberals STILL (!!!) insist on treating all of these “concerns” like good faith arguments from the other side deserving of attention and debunking.
“Hunter smokes crack!” reliably gets the chiefsplanet regs all atwitter, but I don’t see anyone who doesn’t listen to AM radio caring at all. Biden giving his son a cushy oil job seems like the kind of garden variety corruption you expect from any establishment politico. There’s some meat on the bone there for sure, but if that’s the worst dirt they have on someone who’s been in Washington for 500 years, I’m actually impressed.
It doesn’t help that they’ve made the scandal so byzantine that no one can understand it without tuning into Hannity on the reg. I can’t even remember wtf the laptop was supposed to be all about and I follow politics as a hobby. If they just framed it as “Joe greased the wheels and got his failson a plumb job” it’d be a lot easier for normal people to follow.
Agreed, although the real psychological dynamic at play is that this stuff lets them FeelThink* "Liberals are just as bad as we know we are!" They know what is in their miserable black hearts, and they just desperately want to believe that liberals are faking all the “caring about anyone else” stuff.
IIRC the closing argument for Trump’s 2016 campaign was Giuliani shouting “HUNTER LAPTOP EMAIL BURISMA CRACK!” outside the Four Seasons and everyone just moved on after having a good laugh. They did an ass job framing the scandal and the NYT wasn’t doing much to help like they were with the Hillary email scandal.
Nah, no one cares about consistency and “whataboutism” plays pretty well. Republicans could certainly dunk on Joe for giving out a cushy exec job to his son even after Trump put his failson-in-law in charge of the Middle East Peace Process. I think they could have landed a solid blow with this scandal if they weren’t so caught up in their own Hannity extended derpoverse.