Familiar arc vis a vis climate change discussions with American conservatives

Anything involving government really. This is the decades old "starve the beast" [1] mindset. Let's make sure government is absolutely ineffective at every step of the way, and then later point out how ineffective the government is and propose an even more ineffective, under-resourced government. It's a vicious cycle, and a self-fulfilled prophecy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

The argument against hyper capitalism causing more and more derailments is credible if you look into 'precision scheduled railroading' practices, aka shaving expense by eliminating unnecessary costs and 'optimizing Assets'.

Sadly this has little to do with 'conservatives' or 'the left' and a lot more to do with our apolitical global oligarchy who own the politicians in power and many lobbying groups including 'climate change' and environmentalists who are strangely silent on this major disaster as they were when the Nord Stream pipeline was destroyed.

One thing on the ontology of capital: once enough capital (billions, trillions) is gathered in one single control point there is a phase transition: from a means towards an end (build X, destroy Y) it becomes a manner of escaping reality: with enough (crony or not) capital you can keep afloat a business no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous the products. Not that 'there is no skin in the game', but there is no skin, there is no game anymore.

Whereas with government, you can keep afloat a government no matter how bad it is, how badly run, how useless or how dangerous it is. Except, as opposed to a company, it can’t crash like Enron or be threatened by competition. It doesn’t even need to fight to stay afloat.

By control point you can understand a corporation or a government, no need for false dichotomies: in the age of capital there is no beyond.

Enron was a weak company, nowhere near the escape reality velocity: at peak, in 2000, they had a market capitalization of $60 billion, at the same time Microsoft was at $600 billion [1].

Also, any company worth their capital knows very well that "competition is for losers" [2] and dreams of the ultimate consolidation [3].

[1] The Largest Public Companies by Market Cap (2000–2022), https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/largest-companies-from-2...

[2] Competition Is for Losers, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k

[3] The Consolidation Curve, https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve

You can't. At some point disaster and dumb leadership conspire to push the people and elite to revolution. We're no where near that now, but don't be fooled that governments are untoppable. They aren't. Every ancien régime had its peak.

Climate Change & the war on CO2 has sucked the oxygen out of the room wrt pollution with dangerous chemicals. Many in the environmental community are optimizing a single metric, CO2 emissions, & not focusing on the myriad of chemicals that cause widespread ecological damage. That coupled with the ongoing doomsday hysteria over CO2, it is easy to lose focus on pressing issues & the complexities in dealing with these other environmental issues. The core tension here is should we narrow focus on a single metric or widen focus on the entire system? Also, Que bono for the different approaches?

Instead of focusing so much on CO2, it would benefit humanity to adopt a more well rounded approach that addresses all pollutants, prioritizing the safe handling of extremely toxic chemicals & reducing the amount of toxic waste emitted by industry. Also, it would be helpful to take the approach that novel substances should be proven safe instead of assuming these substances are safe until proven unsafe.

I'd be really interested in why climate change is a hysteria and not well-founded fear. Well founded studies say we are currently on track to reach 4°C higher average temperature by 2100, and a plausible rise in sea levels of that would be around 40 meters. Completely ignoring all other effects, this would be a catastrophe on a level we can hardly achieve otherwise. And 2100 isn't an end date, it would be kind of nice if the planet was usable a fair bit after that as well.

'Climate change' is a hysteria because there is so much money involved in green tech. anyone with an ounce of common sense is an environmentalist, but there have been so many predictions of impending doom (which is your fault, repent and atone for your sins) that the genuinely important issues tend to get buried in the tsunamai of doomy junk science that is drip fed to Guardian readers and anyone else who will listen.

There is a real danger of the $$ cult of climate change $$ undermining important environmental issues.

this is vile bullshit - we need to invest trillions to possibly arrest climate change, so yes there will be a lot of money in it for someone.

Apologies for offending your religious beliefs but there are an awful lot of now very rich snake oil salesmen out there who are doing a lot more for their cronies wallets than for the planet.

Be more mindful of where trillions of tax payer money is 'invested' would be my advice and try to see both sides of the religious divide.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11653723/How-Al-Gor...

To your point, where are the sanctimonious green agenda pushers, like Greta Thunberg & AOC, on this environmental disaster? The crickets are easy to hear. I thought they cared about the environment...

It's a range from 2.7° - 4°C, where four is the high end of where we'll likely end up at end of century, based on current trends.

> I'd be really interested in why climate change is a hysteria and not well-founded fear.

There are different types of criticism re: the claim of Anthropogenic Global Warming (which I'll refer to as APGW) & it's impacts. Mainly b/c APGW is a composition of claims, many of which are criticized to varying degrees.

My perspective is that throughout Earth's history, the climate has always been under a perpetual state of change, sometimes to far more drastic degrees than what we are witnessing today. About 200 years ago, we left a mini ice age (i.e. "the year without a summer"), which means that this point in the natural cycles is one of warming. I'm far more concerned about events coming from outer space or the Sun & pollution than APGW.

I'm not confident that the state of climate science accounts for all inputs into the cycle...looking at the Sun's cycles, our changing position within the cosmos, cycles external to our solar system and the impacts on Earth's climate. Climate models have a terrible track record with predicting future trends. This complex system, where all of the inputs are not yet properly modeled, is not modeled in a way which gives predictive value. The media & politicians tend to sensationalize the most extreme models (i.e. Al Gore stating that snow will be a thing of the past & the glaciers will all melt by 2020).

The natural cycles (there are many factors) are also not properly modeled, as we have only had precise measurements & can only date ice core samples, for a period that does not incorporate a single period for each of the cycles.

The oceans are also a large reservoir of CO2 & CO2 escapes a liquid as the temperature rises. Given we have geologically recently left an ice age, CO2 will naturally escape from the oceans. I wonder if a large portion of the rise of CO2 comes from global warming (with CO2 escaping the oceans) and not the other way around.

There have been experiments that show that CO2 does increase the temperature of a system to some extent, but the warming has upper-bound limits & it is not a runaway phenomenon. I confirmed this by doing a PV=nRT & CO2 delta calculation on Venus & found that if CO2 is a runaway phenomenon, the temperature on Venus would be significantly higher than it is now.

That being said, experiments show that an increase of CO2 does increase the temperature of a system, but not in a runaway hockey stick graph sense, but in a logrithmic upper-bound sense.

My experience with many people is that they want to simplify their understanding of complex systems in a lossy manner. I feel like many of the fears around APGW is a lossy simplification that attracts people to make sense of nature's complexities. It is psychologically difficult to admit & consciously regard there is much that we don't yet know & are not accounting for..even more difficult to admit that Earth has had numerous widespread natural catastrophes that we would not be able to control. We want to be able to predict the future with our models, the simpler the model the better. The problem is sometimes the system being modeled is very complex & we have not yet recorded all of the cycles involved or accounted for all of the inputs.

You really don't see there being a very distinct difference between the beliefs of the left and right wings of American politics on this?

You think "global oligarchy" is "apolitical", at a time when the right wing is pushing harder and harder for the very wealthy to, essentially, be able to do anything they want, while the left wing (such as it is in this country) is pushing to restrict their power and tax their wealthy?

Two wings of the same party. At this point because the DNC are currently so powerful they are parochially dominant (and extremely corrupt), the pendulum will swing soon and the power will shift to the RNC (who will no doubt also be extremely corrupt).

The unelected bureaucrats actually run everything in the US and at a state level. In California where I live we currently have a supermajority Dem state government, but regardless of this a handful of unelected bureaucrats from the Gray Davis era run everything in Sacramento behind the scenes.

The idea the DNC 'left wing' is pushing to restrict the local elite's power and tax them is laughable. They just have a few noisy straw men to placate voters and fill their air waves. (I'm a registered Dem FWIW. I loathe the party these days).

We need a big parochial political shake up!

> Two wings of the same party.

It is so hopelessly obvious that this is not the case at this point that I think it is fair to treat it as malicious.

One party is actively tolerating and promoting neo-Nazis. It has made its explicit goal the defeat of the other party at the expense of governing the country. It supported an armed coup attempt in order to try to overturn the legitimate election results.

The other is still often frustratingly bogged down in process and captured, in some ways by industry, but is clearly at least trying to govern the country and make things better for people.

Nonsense.

While I agree that there are, in general, significant differences in positions on these things, this seems like a bad example to choose: after all, US rail workers went on strike over the safety, long hours, and being expected to work injured or sick, and President Biden signed off on laws making their strikes illegal.

Unfortunately, at least in the English-speaking world, many nominal workers' parties have largely bought into worker-hostile policies under Blair, Starmer, Clinton, Albanese, and so on.

Exactly.

Honestly, I agree with you on this; however, the grandparent didn't say "Democratic or Republican politicians," which is very much the source of the problem you describe. Their wording was "conservatives or the left", which I think it is fair to say includes the people who identify with those political orientations—and I think you'd have a hard time seriously arguing that "the left" in America, to the extent that it even exists, is not strongly in favor of labour unions and worker protections.

I think the grandparent was really referring to extremities at the tips of the two wings - the cargo culting 'democratic socialist' movement the DNC pays lip service to, and the extremes of nationalist'USA first' 'patriots' the RNC pays lip service to and the DNC's coastal media corp friends love to endlessly frightened their viewers about.

By and large the wealthy in this country vote D and donate to left-wing causes and foundations and colleges. The working class (including union members, not necessarily union leaders) vote R.

The middle class and upper middle class vote D.

The wealthy—y'know, people like Elon Musk?—vote R.

The fact of the matter is that we had a rule to prevent this that was rescinded by conservatives. Further implementation of safety rules will always and forever be hamstrung by conservatives due to their ideology concerning deregulation. There is no need to cast blame onto shadowy oligarchs to avoid attributing the disaster to conservative ideology for the past 60 years.

With an all-powerful government running things, you get Chernobyl.

With an all-powerful company running things, you get Bhopal.

That's a combination of an all-powerful company and a lax, easily bribed local government.

This isn't a fair or useful comparison. The USSR was a command and control political and economic system which creates a kind of capture in decision making that is meaningfully different from what we encounter in the U.S. To put it simply, they got Chernobyl and the U.S. got three mile island which is a very different kind of nuclear (and governmental) failure.

3 Mile Island wasn't remotely the disaster that Chernobyl was. There's no comparison.

Chernobyl is hardly the only environmental disaster in the USSR.

Seems to me that the power of government or lack thereof is far less a factor than the nature of that government (eg corruption or other self serving tendencies) when it comes to man made disasters.

There are enough examples of man made disasters in countries with weak governments, and powerful governments without a history of these kinds of disasters.

I don't believe that Biden or Obama did much better than the Republicans.

Legislation passed under President Obama required trains carrying hazardous flammable materials to have ECP brakes.

The law was rescinded in 2017 by the Trump administration.

Agreed.

1. Let's not pretend that this was a "crazy" Trump move. Any Republican would have done this.

2. Let's stop pretending both parties are the same. Yes, there are places where they overlap, but there are important places where there is NO overlap. Environmental action is the big area where there is little to no overlap.

And yet despite having a majority of the house and senate under Biden they've been unable to deliver almost anything except an unfair railroad contract.

So maybe, just maybe, the 2 sides are willing to shout about different things but at the end of the day are in fact the same.

Razor thin margin in the Senate and at least 2 of the "Democrats" are not really going to vote on anything controversial. They have been shills, so far, for business interests.

Are you saying there was no possible way to get railroad safety through?

But it was the Republicans' fault

well it seems Dems put the rule in place, Republicans removed it, and then the Dems didn't act fast enough to re-instate it.

if i where to point at who has the most fault it here would be the Republicans.

If someone puts up a tent and someone else purposely burns it down, is the first person partially at fault for not rebuilding it when everyone gets rained on?

no? its the 2nd person for burning it down. full stop.

I'm saying the situation Biden has been in since he took office is very tenuous. There was a virtual tie on paper, with the VP breaking the tie, but 2 of the people on the Dem side were not at all cooperative with the agenda that Biden wanted.

To say "the Dems could have done it if they wanted it" is not at all true.

Both parties primarily serve the interests of the 0.1%, hence the reduction in safety protections under Trump and the imposition of an unfair contract and the removal of the right to strike under Biden. Got to squeeze out every last fraction of a percent of profit to keep Berkshire Hathaway's stock price up.

Normally I'd agree with you, but not on this.

The Democrats had the option of doing nothing. The railroad workers would have had a strike for a variety of their issues (safety being high on the list), and the workers would have gotten a better deal than the one they got.

Unfortunately the strike would have to have lasted long enough and been painful enough for the train companies to accept that they had to negotiate with workers rather than trying to bargain with Congress. That's fundamentally why Congress caved - because THEY would be blamed for the economic disruption. But that doesn't change the fact that simply doing nothing would have been a better outcome for workers.

Have you ever considered that maybe the reason there’s always a Democrat or two willing to block progressive legislation is that the Democratic Party wants it that way? That way they can have their cake, by promising progressive reform, and eat it, by not delivering that reform and thus, not pissing off their donors. I’ve been hearing about these one or two non-compliant Democrats my whole voting life (remember Joe Lieberman?), and yet the party never invests resources in primarying them.

Just a thought.

It’s always a popular conspiracy theory that either side has certain “renegade” members that are there mostly to prevent popular with people but not with big money laws from getting through.

And Biden and Buttigieg didn’t make it a priority to re-implement the law while they had control of both houses, and instead shoved an unfair contract down railroad workers throats.

Fair point, but from what I've read the preliminary cause identified pertains to an axle (not braking) issue?

The idea is that you stop quicker, before the axle actually fails.

So the train initiated a stop, the axle broke, and they did not stop in time? Why did they initiate the stop?

First I've heard of this.

*Update - NTSB is saying it was bearing failure - https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230214.as...

ctrl+f for 'axle' or 'brake' from the NTSB statement - zero results

What do you think the bearing is containing?

That doesn't mean it was the brake. The bearing contains the brake. The axle contains the bearing. The train contains the axle.

Not enough information to determine what caused the bearing to fail, bearing failures account for 5.9% of all train derailments[1].

Though we can look at common train bearing failures to get a likelihood...

Most likely it was a simple lack of maintenance. It's possible to prevent this with more sensors[2] and tighter maintenance checks.

[1] https://www.wisnerbaum.com/blog/2016/september/the-most-comm...

[2] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/research/projects/...

No, you e got it backwards. The train contains the bogey which contains the bearing which contains the axle.

Err yes you're right on that.

My point though is the "bearing failing" is too generic to determine what on it failed.

Sometimes the brakes are fixed to the axle, are they not? In that case it couldn't be the brake.

I’m not waiting y the brake failed. It can take minutes for air brakes to respond on a long train. Once they become aware of the hot axle, if they could stop quicker, then the bearing doesn’t fail, which causes the axle to drop out, and thus the train to derail.

Think about pulling over as soon as you know you’ve taken a hit to a tire instead of continuing to drive until you’re on nothing but a rim and sparks.

Containing? Discs for braking are mounted and fixed to the axle. Bearings allow for rotation of the axle and are offset from the disc brake mount and constrained on other axes. I don't know what kind of train or brake system was used on this train, so I can't speak to whether brakes or Donald Trump ;) are to blame for this.

Sure, but it's a little more complicated than that. A 2015 act of Congress mandated that the Department of Transportation repeal the braking requirement if an analysis showed more costs than benefits. The act was mostly to address high profile oil tanker derailments, shipments which peaked around 2014. The Trump administration concluded, probably mistakenly, that an cost-benefit analysis justified it revocation. Of course there was much lobbying by the railroad and oil industries.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has no plans to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes.

The Biden administration has had every opportunity to reinstate the safety rule in the past two years.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2018/12/20/trump-ad...

https://jacobin.com/2023/02/department-of-transportation-tra...

To be fair, besides the primary initiative of keeping all the wealth in the hands of a few, the secondary purpose of a Republican administration is to undo anything done by a Democratic administration. There was no way for Trump to know whether the legislation was good or bad. It could have gone either way, really.

It's felt like any republican 'rolling back' dem-initiated legislation tends to have more negative consequences for more people than positive benefits for others. I don't have any specifics in mind - if I think of any I'll edit/add here. But perhaps others have counter examples to correct my gut feeling?

So republicans are just guilty until proven innocent?

You posted two duplicate comments in this thread only to claim that it was Trump's fault?

Would ECP brakes have stopped this, a serious question? I don't know if the severity of this warrants blame on a lack of ECP braking. There is a study done[1] that compared different pneumatic vs electronic signal brakes and ECP brakes could have potentially reduced the number of cars in a derailment but I don't know if it's a significant decrease in cars that are derailed, 50 cars derailed. It does not seem that way to me. But I could be wrong.

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017_casselton_BM...

No it would not have, as another posted, the NTSB has reported this was a bearing failure[1].

Bearing failures account for 5.9% of all train derailments[2].

It's possible to help prevent this (not fully as many things derail trains) with more sensors[3] and tighter maintenance checks.

This was most likely due to a lack of maintenance.

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230214.as...

[2] https://www.wisnerbaum.com/blog/2016/september/the-most-comm...

[3] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/research/projects/...

In another universe, ECP brakes would have saved the day. It sounds like the Trump administration still deserves criticism for decaying train safety.

> ECP brakes would have saved the day

Citation needed.

It sounds like all administrations (especially those currently in charge) deserve criticism for not focusing on the correct regulations for train safety.

Requiring something that isn't needed doesn't help... It can hurt as it takes resources away from actual necessities, like sensors, and tighter maintenance inspections.

Did you just ask for a citation from a hypothetical universe?

Well then, we’ll have to do with a hypothetical citation from a real universe.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that a train derailment near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in May 2015 was prevented from being a disaster thanks to the train’s Emergency Control Power (ECP) brakes. According to the NTSB report, the ECP brakes, which are activated when the engineer loses control of the train, stopped the train within 1.25 seconds of the engineer’s attempts to stop it, preventing it from derailing. The ECP brakes are the most efficient braking system available, allowing trains to stop within a very short amount of time. Without them, the tragic derailment of Amtrak Train No. 188 may have been much worse.

"U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. "Investigation Report: Derailment of Amtrak Train No. 188 Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 12, 2015." May 2016. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/....

easy! serial HNer contrarianism

Yeah how absurd of me to me to ask for their reasoning.

Not absurd at all to bring up another universe...

I ignored that silly part of their statement as you should have.

Read the link I posted above. It estimates breaking distance with EPC vs pneumatic along with reductions in cars that derail. It DOES reduce breaking time in emergency stops which has fewer cars derail but I don't know if it is enough of a reduction to be worthwhile. I don't think it would have dramatically reduced the number of cars that derailed in this accident. I am willing to be proven wrong.

Why does this sound really familiar? Because it's very close to the Narcissist's Prayer [1]

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.

https://www.thelifedoctor.org/the-narcissist-s-prayer