The Trump administration is basically following Kodak's strategy from the early 00s.
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[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025/exe...
[2] https://www.eco-business.com/news/iea-renewables-will-be-wor...
Eastman Kodak (the spun-off film business) in the 2020s has been more or less stable. They even brought a discontinued film (E100) back. Production and pricing are now in line with the limited demand from film studios and hobbyists.
Oh, wait.
Perhaps they should write "wide", "100%" or "unquestionable" concensus. I feel not using proper adjectives is undermining this consensus!
You can't make this shit up.
The US is just choosing to make a huge mistake and not participate in growth markets like clean energy, etc.
Honestly I think this stuff goes very under-reported. The world has become so used to anti-intellectualism that simple ignorance in the highest office(s) is now excusable, and criticising it is implicitly cast as political. Which is a state of affairs that can be weaponised.
(Lest people think I am sniping at the USA from the UK, I'd observe that we as a nation were bounced into a monumental decision by a series of politicians who flatly refused to make their numbers add up when challenged)
"Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April"
Many things make me think Elon Musk uniquely benefits from Gell-Mann amnesia but the idea that anyone should have listened to him about anything other than rockets or cars should have been jettisoned right then and there. Because what he was saying was unsupportable by evidence right at the moment he said it.
Instead, here we are.
Clearly his money employs a lot of smart people, some of whom are not actively doing evil.
Edited for LOLs...
Feynman
In this case, nature will not just not be fooled, it will extract retribution, unfortunately also on those that weren't fooled in the first place.
It is not a crises of nature, it is a crises of habitat for us as species, and a bunch of other like us.
-- George Carlin
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- human health, pollution
- preservation of natural resources useful for humans
- preservation of biodiversity, nature in its original state
- concern for animal suffering
- aesthetic concern for human habitat
These things typically overlap, but sometimes they even contradict.
Because exactly what you're suggesting happened, a meteor strike, and it was not the end of the world because the planet is still here, and so is life, well, maybe not dinosaurs, screw them anyways.
But the point is, it is very unlikely that humans will change the environment more than the various glaciation events alone, meteor strikes, major volcanoes turning oceans into acid, and so on.
But then again, the tendency to think "we are it" is a hard one to reason with, and in a funny way a variation of "I am it" which creates climate change denialism for ones personal benefits. So go on, be mad.
From another angle, it's taken a really long time for evolution to get to this point, what can be experienced from the myriad life forms is quite wide and widening, it would be a shame to return to only the level of a microbe.
Must we take everything else down with us?
All this nonsense you see going on is ultimately a result of cognitive biased thinking, especially confirmation bias. The fact that we differ so deeply from these biases was not our decision, it was thrust upon us by nature and it helped us survive in an environment very different from the one we found ourselves in now.
With a little help from foreign friends, of course.
I mean, Trump is so blatantly destroying american influence that it would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. When you think about the alternative, that is, a "regular" american elite saying that climate action is important with their regular hypocrisy, pretending to be doing anything at all, but in fact going the other way, then things don't look so bad in the medium term. Sure, a bit of short term pain, but otherwise, might end up being better off.
I mean, try to put yourself in the shoes of one of those oligarchs a few years ago and ask yourself how you'd actually solve the climate problem, given current cultures around the world. Maybe you'd come up with the "let's prop up Trump".
That being said, it's just a pet theory. I actually have doubts that such smart oligarchs exist.
It says something when we act against that.
That said, nothing about this has been inevitable. So many accidents along the way. There are many other results that have been possible. Our social/political setting may be related with technology but it's wholly unclear how deterministic each step has been.
Carbon emissions can only be reduced by engineering and manufacturing advances
Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.
Everything else is just bookkeeping and icing on the cake.
Exactly! It can’t be reduced or increased by edits to federal PDF files that nobody reads
Commercial efforts are the only solution, and will happen because new energy is cheaper and better. Photovoltaic and battery improvements are our best path forward. Industrial policy can help but we’ve never really had that in the US
I thought we were past that. I thought that it was now about questioning whether it was human caused, or the size of the impact.
Apparently we really are going back, and revisiting basic arithmetic.
A.1 It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.
The previous report (from 2013) only said (and much further in)
Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.
The equivalent statement from AR4 (2007) was
The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, ...
You could argue there is more of a question about what to do about it (e.g. try and mitigate climate change or just pay for the damanges). There is pretty good evidence at this point that mitigating the change through reducing CO2 emissions is a lot cheaper and comes with a host of other benefits (energy security, improved public health), but I can see wherer there might be arguments to have about this.
If you are sophisticated then they have quite elaborate, yet factually incorrect, justifications about not hurting the global poor etc. that they'll use.
But if they can get some traction with blaming the Jews for orchestrating an elaborate conspiracy or a Chinese hoax or just blatant denial of reality and recorded fact they'll keep doing that too.
Whatever works. They have the money and the political power to get away with it.
I thought we were past the question of whether the Earth was round or flat. Yet here we are.
Honest people are past that.
We are.
Before we had disagreements in the scientific community by respectable agents.
Now these are not a return to old debates, it's just that the current administration is abusing its authority to control information.
It's just a manifestation of the post truth.
This administration is abusing its authority to subvert instruments intended for specific uses in order to apply them to the trumpist agenda. The censorship of universities, sacking of govt agents that disagree with the administration, deportation of students, civilians being sent to El Salvador, the wrongful application of the Magnitsky law...
You don't need to take these threats at face value in order to stand agains them.
Conserving the environment and taking steps to reduce our impact on the planet is a good thing. To that end, I’m ok with believing in global warming. I believe some of the narrative is used for selfish ends (green energy companies are looking to make a profit, too) and abused, but on the whole it’s a noble cause.
The replies here that are more or less “wow, can you believe these people don’t trust the word of the priests?” are extremely tiring. “Science” in this division is little different from belief. None of us (experts included) have the data nor intellect to holistically evaluate a system as complex as our planet. Our current understanding is likely wrong in some way.
There are plenty of good reasons to preserve the planet. We don’t have to resort to heretic burning and tribal shaming. It’s short sighted and intellectually lazy.
Actively rejecting the work of scientists based solely on ideology, that is religion, in the worst sense of the word. They're not heretics. They're just liars.
Rejecting or accepting based on ideology is wrong. And given we lack the technical ability to fully understand global warming, there is no objective truth here.
But, as good as that opportunity is, I'm afraid the 3 years this administration has left wouldn't be enough to fully disassemble the US advantage. :)
— Confucius
I understand how it happens, but I'd hope people understood that Trump's USA is not the world. Just like people in general know not to extrapolate what Putin's administration is doing in Russia, they need to be able to do the same for the USA. At the moment, in my opinion, both administrations are lost causes, and you can just choose to follow, support and advocate many other positive signals around the world.
A lot of people in countries that are making positive steps are losing hope unnecessarily because of this.
The U.S. is 25% of the world economy and declining.
Growing economies are ripe for growing with more climate friendly policies, not just because of the environmental impact (both from an AGW and local environmental perspective) but because of energy security and sovereignty perspectives, but also to reduce dependence on the petro-dollar.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china#what-sources...
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/india#what-sources...
China is decreasing the percentage of fossil fuels in its total mix over the last 15 years (while still growing total energy generation).
India... less so.
One is in a box and can't really reach anything else without nukes. The other has his nukes in everybody's backyard, and the entire world economy depends on the world order that has him at the top.
Even in the US the vast majority of new power generation is clean energy. EVs and Hybrids are about 20% of new car sales and climbing. Even if there’s a short term road bump with oBBB, battery innovation and costs continue to drive cost down.
The US economy will suffer by not trying to compete in these markets, and will need to depend on other economies more and more.
With rewritten histories and a fictional past
- "Master Race", New Model Army, 19861. There has always been town-destroying wildfires every summer. It's always been like that.
2. It has always been the case that AC units were necessary for a human to survive an american summer. I mean, look at native americans, they always had AC units!
3. Los Angeles always flash flooded 10 feet up across every summer.
4. America has always been at war with Canada.
5. Wildfire smoke across the sky for the whole damn summer? Always been thus. What do you mean, blue?
…US really is going all in on detaching from reality
One of the problems honest people have understanding habitual liars is that they think liars are always incentivised to try to keep their lies plausible within a world of shared truth -- that they will always ultimately be caught out.
Hence the idea that the coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone thinks the domino run of implausible claims ends with the liar being caught out when one lie does not move things on for the liar.
But in systems of power, in fact, there comes a point where it doesn't really matter whether something you're saying is true, it just matters that you say enough things that people get caught up trying to make them make sense and are distracted from what you are doing.
The dominos just keep falling forever.
This isn't new at all: one of the most influential men in Russian politics, Vladislav Surkov, absolutely learned to weaponise theatrical untruth in this way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov
And there have long been fears that Surkov's techniques were infecting the West (through Hungary, Turkey etc.)
The problem is people simply don't want to believe, at any deep level, that these people lie for the sake of it, when in fact they clearly do. And they get caught up on the idea that since decent people think being caught lying is shameful, liars will always feel shame when caught out.
Once you understand that they do not, you can understand that any given lie may not be told to hide a specific misdeed; it may simply be told to add to the haze of untruth that allows the liar to go about their business.
But the insurance companies are in the know. House insurance rates are raising a lot in many at risk states and areas. Just heard Texas joined that fun.
So seems capitalists involved with insurance and finance know the real facts.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-07/DOE_Criti...
It is really just a collection of 'skeptic' arguments form the last 20 years or so. Science magazie had an article about it
https://www.science.org/content/article/contrarian-climate-a...
“U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.”
When asked about the Indian Removal Act, President Andrew Jackson stated that if he had not taken the action, the native peoples would have been wiped out. Effectively he was saving them from genocide.
"According to historian H. W. Brands, Jackson sincerely believed that his population transfer was a "wise and humane policy" that would save the Native Americans from "utter annihilation". Jackson portrayed the removal as a paternalistic act of mercy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/15/nx-s1-5298683/jd-vance-afd-ge...
A coordinated response is being prepared by climate researchers debunking the whole thing, but the news story has already passed so I don’t know whether it will matter.
(It’s mostly a sad statement now about US ceding a huge growth area for its industrial base here.)
Our energy and automobile companies will suffer longer term by being able to hold onto old, not economically viable ways of doing things until the bitter end.
They need to be right about fraud in climate change research only once and the climate change research needs to be right %100 of the time and they need to have had communicated that correctly %100 of the time. They will have some worst case scenarios or oversimplifications and predictions that did not come to be true in obviously demonstrable way. It will be tough.
Regardless, this wouldn't mean much for EU, China, Japan and other fossil energy importing countries as with the Russian invasion of Ukraine this has become a matter of national security and not just some hippie ideal. It doesn't make sense anymore to drop clean and renewable energy even if the Trump administration proves that releasing smoke is the healthiest thing ever and helps with increasing the penis size.
So they are going to re-write history to fuel some ideology, as the fossils were to be extracted anyway.
EU is also somewhat pushing with more aggressive carbon pricing.
There's no ideology, you have it reversed, it's always about money.
The oil industry is a huge donor of funds and spend 8-10x more on lobbying conservative politicians. The ideology is tacked on top of the money to justify the donations, and for their voters to gobble it up and repeat the lines as if rolling coal would be an ode to freedom.
lol
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
Because they don't edit the data to make a new objective truth that survives scrutiny, they edit the data to demonstrate their power over data.
People referring to the archived data will simply be denied access to the conversation moving forward; "our opponents keep fighting old battles when the world has moved on".
It works. And it will continue to work shockingly well even when the underlying phenomenon asserts itself in ways that are predicted by the archive data. Look at how Florida is torn between climate change denial and the actual reality of sea-level rises affecting the Keys.
verisimi•2h ago
jasonjayr•2h ago
What is the basis of these revisions?
raphaelj•2h ago
Ideology
cluckindan•2h ago
mlhamel•2h ago
WillAdams•2h ago
https://www.science.org/content/article/world-1-3%C2%B0c-or-...
Apparently the Japanese continued using wooden buckets longer than other navies, resulting in Pacific data being skewed.
defrost•1h ago
What is discussed there is part of all data interpretation, the transfer functions between raw measures of <something> and the inferred values of <interest>.
WillAdams•1h ago
sligor•2h ago
wccrawford•1h ago
They can be reinterpreted, but we must never edit or delete the original records.
wizzwizz4•1h ago
> Historical records, especially pre-record keeping are revised
Here "historical records" means "the best-known interpretation of historical evidence": it's not talking about modifying records made pre-record keeping. Of course we still have access to previous interpretations: people have gone to pains to ensure they're preserved (despite certain former stewards trying to erase them), and those people are building more resilient systems to avoid this happening again.
exe34•1h ago