Saturday Open Thread
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via JoNova
January 13, 2023 at 08:44PM
Month: January 2023
Essay by Eric Worrall
Microsoft founder Bill Gates wants us all to eat fake vegetable meat and embrace nuclear power, to avert the climate crisis.
Bill Gates: We will overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, nuclear can be ‘super safe’ and fake meat will eventually be ‘very good’
PUBLISHED FRI, JAN 13 20234:02 PM EST
Catherine Clifford@IN/CATCLIFFORD/@CATCLIFFORD
- The world will not be able to avoid overshooting the goal established in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to limit global warming to, ideally, 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-Industrial levels, Bill Gates told Reddit users on Wednesday.
- While it’s “great” if people want to be vegan, Gates doesn’t think most people will do that and thinks that alternative meat products will “eventually” be “very good.”
- Individuals who want to contribute to climate change mitigation can do thinks like vote, buy an electric car and stay optimistic.
The world will not be able to avoid overshooting the goal established in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-Industrial levels, according to Bill Gates.
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“The pace of innovation is really picking up even though we won’t make the current timelines or avoid going over 1.5,” Gates wrote in response to a question about how well the world is responding to climate change.
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The advanced nuclear reactors TerraPower are building use liquid sodium as the coolant and uranium as a fuel source.
“We are making excellent progress,” Gates said, while also acknowledging that the Ukraine war has thrown a wrench in TerraPower’s plans because the reactors planned to operate with fuel coming from Russia and that relationship is no longer viable.
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Gates has backed several companies working to make meatless meat products, including Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, he told Reddit users. And he’s also backed Memphis Meats (which has since rebranded under the name Upside Foods), Gates said, and which takes cells from an actual animals and grows the products in laboratory environments.
“I think eventually these products will be very good even though their share is small today,” Gates told Reddit. It’s important to innovate alternative ways to produce meat alternatives and climate conscious ways because, “for people who want to go Vegan that is great but I don’t think most people will do that,” Gates said.
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“We need support on climate from both parties in the US and in all countries,” Gates said. Also, “staying hopeful is a good thing!”
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Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/13/bill-gates-we-will-overshoot-1point5-degrees-of-global-warming.html
Impossible Foods, one of the companies Bill Gates invested in, laid off staff last October, but claims sales are growing rapidly.
Vegan Meat Leader Impossible Foods Lays Off 6% of Staff Despite Steady Growth. What’s Next?
ALT PROTEINFUTURE FOODSVEGAN
By Jill Ettinger Last updated Oct 12, 2022Impossible Foods, the Bay Area vegan meat brand behind Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, says it recently laid off six percent of its workforce. Is it a sign of more cuts or more growth ahead?
According to Impossible Foods’ CEO Peter McGuinness, the recent spate of layoffs come as part of the company’s restructuring, following his appointment as CEO in April. McGuiness said in a memo to employees that the layoffs involve “roles that have become redundant to others in the organization or that are no longer aligned with our core business priorities.”
Plant-based meat sales on the decline
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An Impossible Foods spokesperson told Green Queen that “contrary to reports about the performance of the plant-based meat category and a number of companies within it, we’re seeing hyper growth, with over 60% year-over-year sales growth in retail alone. Earlier this week we proactively made some organizational changes that strengthen our company and establish clear supply and demand functions to position us for our next phase of expansion. As a result, some roles were eliminated, but we’re continuing to actively recruit for key positions that will enable our continued growth.”
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Read more: https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/impossible-foods-lays-off-staff-despite-steady-growth/
I’m OK with nuclear power, but in my opinion this fake meat push is going to kill people.
I’ve lost over 10Kg in three months since I switched to a mostly meat diet, on the advice of medical specialists. Some people’s metabolisms simply cannot tolerate a carb and vegetable rich diet. I believe banning meat, having to eat fake meat, would be a death sentence for me and people like me.
I’ll leave it to your imagination what I think Bill Gates can do with his climate friendly fake meat.
via Watts Up With That?
January 13, 2023 at 08:14PM
By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot
Excerpt:
Three tons of CO2 per year per capita
If one were to apply a fundamental principle of justice, each person would have around three tons of CO2 a year at their disposal by the middle of the century, explains climate researcher Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). However, people in Germany are a long way from that.
Currently, each individual in this country causes about ten tons of CO2 per year. People with higher incomes emit significantly larger amounts of greenhouse gases. According to data from the Paris “World Inequality Lab”, many millionaires in Germany emit more than 100 tons of CO2 per person per year. Worldwide, several hundred thousand super-rich cause even more than 2000 tons of CO2 per capita annually.
Anyone who causes more emissions would have to buy rights
Schellnhuber therefore demands in an interview with the ARD magazine Panoramato introduce an individual CO2 limit and at the same time to enable private trading in CO2 rights. “Everyone gets three tons of CO2 per year, but if you need more, you just have to buy it,” explains the climate scientist – from others who consume less.
According to Schellnhuber, this would mean respecting the three tons as a “planetary guard rail” within the framework of a free society, but at the same time accepting the leeway that a market could provide. Because here two property rights are opposed to each other: the right to spend one’s money on something that is associated with high CO2 emissions and, on the other hand, the property right of all people, which consists in the fact that “we have an environment worth living in”. And there the common good must be higher, demands Schellnhuber.
In order to achieve an average of three tons of CO2 emissions per year, nobody would have to comply with this limit immediately. However, individual emissions would have to fall quickly from now on – initially to three tons by around 2030 and then further to zero by the middle of the century.
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From the point of view of climate researcher Schellnhuber, there must be radical clarity about what is necessary to stabilize the climate. This also means that it must be clear what each individual has to contribute. If you really take the climate crisis seriously and want to stop global warming below two degrees, then every citizen of the world would have three tons of CO2 at their disposal every year by the middle of the century.
The idea itself is not new
In principle, the idea of private emissions trading is not new. The British government already discussed introducing individual CO2 certificates in the early 2000s, but then rejected the proposal. Climate researcher Schellnhuber was already working on the concept back then.
In 2009 he proposed the idea as chairman of what was then the “Scientific Advisory Council on Global Change” to the federal government under Chancellor Merkel – without success. “It was a missed opportunity,” says Schellnhuber today.
It is now time to re-examine this idea, wrote scientists from several renowned institutes in Great Britain, Sweden and Israel in an article in the journal “Nature” in 2021. They argue that such a system would provide incentives for behavioral change. A visible price for emissions influences purchasing decisions and energy consumption. In addition, he could raise awareness of the problem.
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Related:
‘We should eliminate Schellnhuber et al. away from any influence on the Earth to prevent the civilization from repeating similar things that Germany ignited in the 1930s and 1940s’ — Denounces worry over ‘future generations’: ‘Countries can’t be controlled by people whose existence and interests are just speculations’
Czech Physicist Decries in 2009: ‘What Schellnhuber’s has just said is just breathtaking and it helps me to understand how crazy political movements such as the Nazis or communists could have so easily taken over a nation that is as sensible as Germany’
‘In the vast majority of stations we did not see indications for a global warming of the atmosphere…Most of the continental stations where we observed significant trends are large cities where probably the fast urban growth in the last century gave rise to temperature increases.’
via Watts Up With That?
January 13, 2023 at 04:42PM
Covid Buzzwords 2020
Ramesh Thakur writes of his journey since 2019 in his Spectator Australia article A Covid vocabulary. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Words I learned, and learned to hate
When the novel coronavirus began to dominate world news in 2020 (the virus may already have been in circulation in 2019), a modest existing knowledge on pandemic policy, based in a background in global governance, indicated that governments were departing radically from the existing scientific and policy consensus. Several well-credentialled experts tried to say so but were dismissed as has-beens or fringe-dwellers suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome. This was troubling. Being retired, I had immunity against being fired. With time to do my own policy-oriented research, I began digging deeper into Covid pandemic management as a policy challenge. And this meant familiarising myself with the language of health experts and a resulting expansion of my vocabulary.
What follows is a description of the key new words I learnt over the last three years,
but also words I’ve learnt to hate. With each step on the journey,
confidence and trust in the public health clerisy fell further.
We began with the distinctions between (a) infection and case fatality rates and (b) pharmaceutical interventions like vaccines and drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions like enhanced surveillance, testing and contact tracing; social distancing (a euphemism for anti-social behaviour like physical distancing); workplace and school closures; working from home; sanitisers and surface cleaning.
This led to ‘lockdowns’, another euphemism for shutting down all economic and social activity and locking up entire populations in their homes because the health experts said so despite the previous consensus against it. As part of the public discourse on justification for the unprecedented lockdowns and possible timing for lifting the restrictions, officials and commentators fussed over the ‘R’ number (how many more people on average will one sick person infect?) or the rate at which the virus was reproducing in order to assess if it was still growing or contracting. By 2022 the world had lost interest in this 2020 obsession. As the debate between lockdown enthusiasts and sceptics heated up, the language deteriorated into name calling and ‘Covidian’ and ‘Covidiot’ were deployed as reciprocal insults.
With masks we tried to understand the difference between and relative merits of facecloths, surgical masks and N95 respirators; healthcare, outdoor and indoor settings; and why the medical consensus did an instant (that is, without any additional data or scientific studies) 180-degree turn on masks from being pointless to an extremely critical individual and community protection measure. The existing standard metric in 2020 for allocating finite health resources, a cost-benefit analysis using quality adjusted life years for measuring health outcomes, was similarly abandoned without explanation.
In 2021 we turned our attention to vaccines and the importance of numbers: absolute risk reduction, relative risk reduction, and (a) the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one additional infection or death in a specified group (ie elderly, young, children, industry or setting-specific employees) and (b) the number of ‘serious adverse events’ that would constitute a critical ‘safety signal’ within a target cohort. We also had to grasp the distinction between vaccine efficacy in controlled clinical trials and vaccine effectiveness in the real world. The equations just didn’t compute. Despite the famed 95 per cent efficacy claimed in trials, people in NSW who had been vaccinated at least once made up 77 per cent of those infected and 85 per cent of those who died of or with Covid from 22 May-31 December 2022 (the period in which data was separated by vaccination status, as the practice has been discontinued in 2023).
Finally, in response to the increasingly esoteric (and desperate) justifications for the vaccination drives despite the empirical outcomes showing their poor performance, we began looking at all-cause ‘excess’ mortality that is less susceptible to statistical and linguistic manipulation. For example, in an instructive analysis in The Spectator Australia online’s Flat White (6 January 2023), Jason Strecker goes through the Australian statistics on excess deaths to comprehensively demolish the self-serving claims made by federal and state politicians of how many lives they saved with their lockdown policies. You’ve gotta love this sub-heading from the New York Times subscriber-only newsletter (4 January): ‘Mass vaccination, though miraculously effective, didn’t usher in a lower overall death toll’. Which leads me to Merriam-Webster’s word of the year concept of ‘gaslighting’, by the mainstream media as much as by governments.
Moving to words I learnt to hate:
‘Follow The Science’ was the dishonest slogan used to shut down legitimate scientific inquiry even while implementing many unscientific and even some anti-scientific policies.
‘Staying Apart to Stay Together’ was a too-clever-by-half effort to camouflage an oxymoron.
‘Three weeks to flatten the curve’? Yeah, right. Three years later, it’s our lives, spirits and economies that have been flattened.
‘Protect the health service’? No, it’s the mission of the health service to protect us. Sure enough, as the winter pressures return on the broken, dysfunctional yet sacralised National Health Service in the UK that has in recent times spent massive amounts of money recruiting DIE (diversity, inclusion and equity) bureaucrats while firing frontline staff who refused the jab, the Daily Mail reported on 4 January that the government is drawing up plans to reintroduce Covid-era measures ‘to save the NHS’. An online poll showed 65 per cent of over 13,000 readers oppose any measure being brought back but, surprisingly, 22 per cent support the return of face masks. Another pet peeve was,
‘We are all in this together’ and equivalent phrases like the virus doesn’t discriminate, it’s out hunting whoever it can find, etc. No, not really, not by risks, benefits nor burdens are we all in this together.
Finally, the concept currently in vogue: ‘abundance of caution’, used to impose a negative test requirement for Chinese arrivals from 5 January 2023 despite medical advice to the contrary. This substitutes a slogan for a policy and confirms the trigger-happy authoritarian instincts of the government to reimpose curbs on people’s freedoms on the minister’s whim, with no justification advanced in the form of a cost-benefit analysis. It speaks to the undying conceit of politicians that they can control viruses. And it highlights their complete abandonment of caution on the harms of government interventions.
Despite three years of worldwide evidence that the rise and fall of the virus curve
has been policy-invariant, while the damage from the ill-conceived interventions
has been severe and will be long lasting.
via Science Matters
January 13, 2023 at 03:24PM
