What the government can do is give the 10 largest coal companies, solar contracts to each install a large solar plant in Nevada. Thus, they will have a revenue stream as they transition from uneconomic coal into solar. The government could then force grid neutral policies. Thus consumers in Maine can buy solar in Nevada.

Why the coal companies?

They should just build some solar in WV/KY/WY and train and hire some coal miners.

They should hire me instead of the coal companies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfURrlpsbIo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnwNlOXNThE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGhDLqY1IvQ

If Time Warner can change so can the coal companies.








Solar panels should be in the desert and on homes.

Maybe Trump is right, what is coal? Basically old plants. No one has a problem burning ethanol or straw.

:facepalm:

Cool news/good news:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...-cloud-studies

CERN has been testing cloud seeding, and found it is much easier than previously assumed. Climate models assume that clouds will be an amplifier of warming rather than a dampener, but this research suggests the opposite could be the case. If this true, the Earth will warm much slower.

Ya but a lukewarm toilet is still a toilet. Can we make earth a sink instead please?

:facepalm:

?

http://images.lmgtfy.com/?q=islands+of+trash

That's not how I read that story.

I read it as:

Climate models assume clouds cause cooling by reflecting light.

Climate models have assumed that there is more cloud cover in the post industrial world because of Sulfur Dioxide.

Climate scientists have assumed that this increasing cloud cover would lower temperatures, so when they find rising temperatures they attribute not only the warming to CO2, but the extra warming to overcome the cloud cooling.

So, the fact that there are maybe not more clouds now than before means they only have to attribute the actual warming to CO2 and not add in the extra expected to overcome extra cloud cooling.

Hence, less sensitivity to CO2.

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

Barrow is already ice free and the picture above shows ice at record lows for this date by a wide margin. IMHO, there is a chance the north pole goes ice free this year (still be ice elsewhere in Arctic). There is a lot of open water and all that sunlight energy is going into it.

They already tax imports of solar panels 35%. Would it not be wiser to tax imports of oil 35%?

The thing that can save the planet, they tax 35%.

Norway is might ban all gas, diesel, and all fossil fuel cars by 2025. Maybe it is time for Southern California to ban these cars. They are slow and dirty. They say the smog costs more lives than the accidents but I wonder if those numbers are doctored. Norway btw is a big producer of oil.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...-a7065616.html

Pretty cool: http://gizmodo.com/los-angeles-has-a...ter-1781411407

If you'd have had your subscription to the LA Times you'd know that stuff. They did a a series on water in LA a while back. They are already starting this, but it's going to take a while. The whole system was designed to get water out and prevent flooding. Now we need to capture as much as possible.

Why doesn't California just desalinate water? Is it too expensive? At a certain point its going to become mandatory anyway.

It has been too expensive, but there are projects underway. There was one built on the drought in the 70's in Santa Barbara that's being updated, one I think near San Diego, and perhaps more.

Toilet to tap is probably the lower hanging fruit though and that is already done in many places as well.

How much good would it do if everyone had cisterns to capture their rainwater, and used that for irrigation and showering? We did that in the Virgin Islands. Is the LA rainy season just not enough to be worth it?

You can get a $300 rebate if you install a cistern or tank over 300 gallons. There have been water collection projects since the 1970s. It usually takes a drought. The big Tujunga has a big settling basin. The Santa Clara river has a big settling basin and probably led to the disappearance of the steelheed trout in that river. Then there is the Sepulveda basin with a wastewater plant that flows into Lake Balboa. This results in the LA river having good flow year round.

But unlike the Potomac river which is reused like 10 times, the water flows through a cement channel to the ocean.

However, this is southern California and have applied to several of these rebates and usually they never reply unless you call back like 5 times.

But all this water is a very small than what is used for farming.

But for the cistern idea it would be worth it if there were several large ones scattered thoughout the city.

http://heytanksla.com/bushman-rain-t...bate-available

If they wanted to save water they should put a piping system in and pump it to a large lake like Diamond Valley or Castaic then they could pump not only stormwater but treated sewage water too and these lakes would become eutropic. Most rain falls in the mountains and a quite a few reservoirs already collect it (for flood control) Big Tujunga, San Gabriel, Big Bear Lake, Piru, and Pyramid, Pacoima and Castaic.

Santa Barbara is not connected to aqueduct system and gets it water mainly from Lake Cachuma and Santa Ynez river.

Let the market decide what the best path forward is. How happy are you that the predictions about global warming from 30 years ago didn't happen? If you took a boat a to the great barrier reef and it looked just as beautiful as the a decade ago how happy would you be?

Why are you showing me pictures of trash?

This market doesn't exist.

The market will decide whether it exists or not.

Let the market decide what it wants to do with trash. If it decides it's best to just toss it in the ocean, then obviously that's the best way forward.