All I taste is ashes.
President Trump said at his inauguration on Monday that he would sign a barrage of executive orders to grant his administration new powers to promote fossil fuels and to withdraw support for renewable energy, signaling that the United States government would no longer fight climate change.
Mr. Trump also intends to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on global warming, for a second time. He said that vast areas of public land and federal waters, including fragile wilderness in Alaska, would be thrown open for oil and mineral extraction. And he said he would repeal regulations aimed at promoting electric vehicles and stop new offshore wind farms from being built in federal waters.
Mr. Trump also said he planned to declare a national energy emergency. He would be the first president to do so, despite the fact that the United States is currently producing more oil and natural gas than any other country. That declaration could unlock authority to suspend some environmental regulations and speed permits for oil and gas drilling, as well as authority to keep coal-fired power plants running.
“We will drill, baby, drill,” Mr. Trump said in the Capitol after taking the oath of office.
Mr. Trump’s pivot to fossil fuels comes after the hottest year in recorded history and as scientists say the world is running out of time to keep global warming at relatively low levels. Last year, emissions from burning coal, oil and gas helped push average global temperatures past 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. Scientists have said that every fraction of a degree of warming above that level brings greater risks from deadly heat waves, wildfires, drought, storms and species extinction.
Twenty years of trying to make this country and world a better place and it has come to this.
Buckle up and ride, I guess.
Watching the German soldiers marching into Oslo, “I was irritated,” Gunnar Sønsteby later recalled. “And I wanted to do something…When your country is taken over by 100,000 Germans, you get angry.”
Like that.
I’m all for mitigating as much as we can, but climate change for the next 50+ years is baked-in, pun intended.
And, if Gen-X and Gen-Z are all for putting people in charge who will be cooking this planet as much as possible for profit, then actually mitigating things was never actually on the menu…to keep this pun/metaphor going.
Resilience for you, your family, and your community should be every decent person’s goal at this point. And again, the Second Amendment isn’t just a right, it’s a responsibility. Be a responsible decent person.
I am interested in learning more about how you envision responsible gun ownership at this point in history, as it is something my spouse and I have gone back and forth about over the past few years (neither of us has ever owned a gun, however, I have fired rifles and handguns in the past). Would you be able to have an offline phone call some weekend, so I could pick your brains? I am on pacific time. If you are, I can email you my phone number if you give me an address.
I was going to post a bunch of stuff, but there are people who are far more knowledgeable about becoming a new firearm owner. Reddit is a pretty solid source of information as the mainline subs are pretty much crowdsourced by upvotes.
Here’s a thread where you can start.
https://www.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/comments/jamii2/a_guide_for_new_liberal_gun_owners/?rdt=51035