This is a topic that has a lot of noise but there are two relatively easy to explain things to tell people (I am discounting the usual 27% of the population who will never be interested):
1. There is a policy that is simple to explain and has some bipartisan appeal: Fee and Dividend (also known as the Clean Energy Dividend). It puts an increasing price on carbon per ton at the source (e.g., oil well, port of entry, etc.) and distributes 100% of the proceeds to the people. That's it. No tricks, no back-door subsidies. And because it is redistributed it's also not a tax in the usual sense, which helps win over those who are open to climate policy but anti-tax.
2. Things are indeed more dire than even most climate aware folks realize. Watch climate scientist Kevin Anderson break down the numbers -- it's sobering how disconnected our climate discourse is from reality:
There are studies that have found that the net carbon impact of such desert solar arrays can actually be detrimental -- that is, installing the solar arrays in the desert causes an imbalance in desert soil ecology causing a release of soil carbon that exceeds the carbon benefit of the solar array. Here's one article on it, but I'm sure you can find others:
* Sure, seeds germinate with water and warmth. But that's true today. In the words of an Australian farmer quoted in a research paper a few years ago: "Mate, we don't need a chip to tell us the soil's dry."
* There are other paradigms of agriculture that are actually sustainable. Agroecology is a good example of an alternative scientific paradigm for agriculture, one that thinks of agriculture in ecological terms.
Hmm. I think I'd agree only to the second half of that. Just considering Kennedy's examples alone there are many things that cannot be bought at any price: consider the joy of a child's play or the integrity of public officials.
> Everything that is desired takes resources to get
Kennedy made the good point (as others have, less eloquently) that there are many things that are desired that neither take resources to get nor are measured by conventional metrics.
In my view that's a misconception, one that's quite common in the tech world (and also to a certain extent in the broader culture). Robert Kennedy commented on this (in a different context) in a speech in 1968:
> And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
> It's a moving metaphor but of course cells within us have the same genome whereas different humans have different genomes. So it's hard to consider them part of one living system, unless one accepts the Gaia Hypothesis.
Except recent studies have found that even our own cells often have different DNA from each other (not just due to mutation), and that what makes us function is a careful dance of countless microbes.
I remember someone saying here that a key shift in framing in Germany was to call them voting computers rather than voting machines (since the broader public understands that computers can be hacked). I think we might adopt that as well.
I was expecting that response. The only solution, then, is to ban all mail in ballots. Right now California, for example, has optional mail-in voting. Wouldn't you expect that anyone who can be coerced to vote some way could be coerced whether the mail-in voting is optional or mandatory?
Agreed. And to add to it, we should switch to a system in which we have:
* 100% mail-in paper ballots, like Oregon -- no long lines, no games about which districts get which machines, no polling place intimidation
* Mandatory random-sample hand recounts (this has been shown to only need to be on the order of thousands of ballots out of millions for most races, given the statistical confidence you get with it)
"The anti-use would be in any sort of cryptographic implementation, since any "entropy" you'd be gaining by using this data as a source of randomness is completely counteracted by the fact that the source is known. Randomness becomes deterministic once the source of the randomness is disclosed and broadcast ... "
In this design, that's true. But Rabin's hyper-encryption is an example of how a strongly secure encryption system can be built using a very high-bandwidth source of public randomness.
Organic food raised like industrial food will often take more land. But organic food raised in polyculture can sometimes take dramatically less space. Look up Land Equivalent Ratio and intercropping.
1. There is a policy that is simple to explain and has some bipartisan appeal: Fee and Dividend (also known as the Clean Energy Dividend). It puts an increasing price on carbon per ton at the source (e.g., oil well, port of entry, etc.) and distributes 100% of the proceeds to the people. That's it. No tricks, no back-door subsidies. And because it is redistributed it's also not a tax in the usual sense, which helps win over those who are open to climate policy but anti-tax.
2. Things are indeed more dire than even most climate aware folks realize. Watch climate scientist Kevin Anderson break down the numbers -- it's sobering how disconnected our climate discourse is from reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX1r8OAmz9I