No one criticizing the Green New Deal — not a single person — has an alternative plan for transitioning the American energy economy in the timeframe climatologists say we must. Nobody. If you don't think it's realistic, put out something else. What should be done instead?

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) February 8, 2019

Exactly. All anyone else has is Obama-style worthless hopey-changey bullshit. Opposition to the GND evinces a huge misunderstanding of the calamity we’re about to find ourselves in. I support the plan 100%. In fact, I don’t think it goes nearly far enough and I would roughly double it in size and scope.

More on that later, if I feel like writing it.

The Green New Deal is expensive and pie in the sky?

Amount spent in Iraq: $3 trillion.

Amount spent in Afghanistan: $1 trillion.

Amount spent in past 20 years on “defense,” separate of that: $15 trillion

Now that’s expensive. Yeah, the GND would not be cheap. The alternative is far worse. How anyone with any children particularly would fail to support it or something similar is a mystery to me as you’re basically condemning them to a hellish existence.

Anyway, the GND is not realistic. It’s not designed to be! It’s supposed to shift the conversation, and it’s doing that. Are you talking about it?

Then here’s a clue: it’s working.

And then realize it’s not expensive at all:

It's funny how a politician proposes a plan which would cause a massive economic boom for a decade and people are "nawww, we can't do that." https://t.co/231DEkQtOS

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) February 7, 2019

“Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.”

-Jean Baudrillard

It’s weird to me how often JFK’s “let’s put a man on the Moon” idea is cited as a success story — it cost tons of money, was driven by Cold War hysteria, and turned out to be useless to the point that it’s been decades now since anyone’s bothered to go.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 8, 2019

This is utterly fucking moronic and so wrong it’s like this guy is evolving into a whole new type of moron. This is what I hate this dumb motherfucker so much that I sputter.

I do love how the commenters utterly eviscerate this flaming dipshit in the tweets that follow.

To summarize some of my own objections as well as some of those found in the tweets:

1) Not everything worth doing is worth doing again.

2) Instrumentality is a poor guide to cultural and societal achievements. Was the Hagia Sophia or the Pyramids really needed? Practical?

3) Even ignoring all the direct R&D implications of the space program, much money was thus funneled into other programs related, creating even more spin-off tech than is recognized by direct accounting. This absolutely would not have occurred without a story to tell. No story == no money. Look at now for examples….

4) Going to the moon, no matter the reasons, is one of the most significant events in human history. It’s likely that after nearly everything is forgotten from our era, humanity will remember that we did that.

5) China is likely to send a crewed craft to the moon soon.

6) Going to the moon changed our whole sense of ourselves. Hell, one single photo from an early exploratory trip is likely more responsible for more environmental concern and action than anything except Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

7) Fuck Matt Yglesias. That he has a platform of any kind is a travesty because there are so many better people.

I think this dude’s schtick is the usual Ivy League doofus play, most of whom have no original ideas, and that is to do as contrarian a take as they can think of to generate noise and attention. It worked, I guess. What a cretin.

A year ago today, Elon Musk launched his car into space, to test a rocket for his personal Mars colony.

Never forget the power of out-of-touch billionaires to go to great lengths to secure their own well-being in the face of planetary catastrophe of their own making.

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) February 6, 2019

If you’re going to lie, at least do better.

Yes, Musk launched a car into space. It could’ve been any load. This was better for free advertising (people are still talking about it so it worked).

The test load as mentioned could’ve been any comparable bit of weight. Usually, it’s concrete. The true purpose of the mission was to test deep space insertion capability for sales to customers like NASA, European and/or Asian space programs, and any other parties with $100 million in hard cash who want to go past the moon reliably for any deep space missions.

Sure, the rocket and associated technology might one day be used for a Martian colony but is that its primary purpose? No. See above for the right answer that doesn’t make you look like a damn fool.

Most liberal types are de facto global warming deniers because they don’t have that much better an understanding of science than the real deniers.

They think that things will continue mostly like usual, but perhaps a little worse. But that’s not likely. Not likely at all. What’s most likely is things continue as normal, get really bad for a while, then when everything is relatively salubrious again, all goes to hell and never returns to any version of normal.

Anyone under 30 or so is going to have quite a terrible life, if they aren’t just killed outright by the inevitable wars, famines, and resource contention.