Build on the momentum of this weekend’s massive protests by calling your members of congress with a blunt message: Trump’s behavior in the first several days of his presidency — from his belligerent inauguration speech to his petty and dishonest squabbling about crowd sizes — indicate that he is dangerously unfit and temperamentally unsuited to be president.
His plunging popularity and the massive size of the Women’s Marches against him represent a clear vote of no confidence in him from the general public.
We need to treat Trump like the failed president he will inevitably be. And we need to convince our elected representatives to do the same.
Tailor your message depending on which party each of your elected representatives belong to.
If they are Democrats (or independents who caucus with Democrats):
Find out if they boycotted the inauguration. (Here’s what I think is a fairly complete list of congresspeople who boycotted; no Senators joined in, AFAIK.) Thank them if they did; express your disappointment if they didn’t.
Urge them to stop treating Trump like a legitimate president, and to block every single thing he puts forward from this point onward. Urge them to vote no on every single one of Trump’s cabinet picks.
If they are Republicans:
Tell them that you think Trump is too dangerous and erratic a person to run the country — and have their hands on the nuclear codes. Note that Trump’s popularity is crumbling and his inauguration weekend was a disaster. The sooner they break with Trump, the less Trump-stink will cling to them once his presidency inevitably implodes.
Tell them to start by voting against Trump’s cabinet picks. (You might mention one or two picks you find especially unfit and/or reprehensible. See my #ResistTrump posts about his various picks for more info.)
Obviously, tailor your message however you want; these are just suggestions that I think will help carry the message of the Women’s March into the world of practical politics.
You can find the name and contact info for your representative here, and for your senators here.
See my posts here and here for information and advice on how to make your calls and emails effective. If making these sorts of calls is tough for you, here’s some advice on calling politicians if you have social anxiety.
We’ve got the momentum on our side. Let’s not lose it!
It’s not government spending; Mexico will pay it some day.
In terms of deaths per terawatt/hour the most dangerous form of energy production is hydro electric. That figure is skewed though because of a few major dam collapses, including one in China that killed around 170,000 people.
When you take into account factors such as environmental impact and deaths caused by pollution etc, then coal is the most dangerous. Biomass burning, despite its ecological reputation, is also a big pollutant in countries that don’t have strong environmental regulation.
Wind and solar are the safest. A few people are killed falling off turbines or roofs but that’s about it.
Nuclear is moderately safe terms of construction. There’s the usual construction industry deaths building and maintaining the plants. Assessing deaths from pollution though is quite hard as the effects of accidents/leaks can take years to become apparent and proving causation is difficult.
Speaking of energy, Trump is apparently going to sign an executive order giving a go-ahead to DAPL/Keystone.
I’m going to do a ResistTrump post on it. Does anyone know of the best groups and or actions that would be most useful to point people to?
I would ask Rebecca Solnit but she’s evidently on a weeklong internet break.
@Weatherwax
Reacher Gilt. With his parrot.
My problem with nuclear power isn’t the method itself, it can be relatively safe and clean, and it’s better than coal for sure. I’ve really got two issues with it. First one is that the Republicans have been eviscerating regulations on private industry for decades now – at this point there are chemical plants literally leaking raw chemicals into city water supplies and the response has been a slap and a shrug – while the leaks continue. Introducing new sources of radioactive waste into this environment sounds like the stupidest thing to do.
Second problem is that, as far as I know, we really don’t have enough accessible Uranium to do it. Oxford did some studies on this, and if we start introducing nuclear power plants on a significant scale, we’ll very, very quickly hit “Peak Uranium” – like, in a matter of years. We will very be quickly forced to mine Uranium like we now mine Copper. This involves grinding down literal mountains from the peaks to the roots, turning them into huge pits, to scavenge the tiny parts-per-million fractions of uranium in the rock. The amount of oil this mining operation would take would make the whole enterprise worthless – we’d be better off just burning the oil for power.
(I could very easily be wrong about all of this. It’s just how I understand the situation now)
So, yeah, I think it’s a dead end that’d do not much more than give us a bunch of radioactive waste in poorly-monitored tanks across the United States. But it looks good, and feels modern and science’y, and would let the Republicans crow about makin’ jobs and solvin’ the energy crisis. In a decade they’d be mostly shut down and responsible for leaving permanent scars across the landscape. Not my idea of sustainability.
Also: finally, something I can do myself. David, I have no resources to give you right now, but – as a Canadian and Albertan, I do have influence on the Keystone problem. I hope your article on DAPL and Keystone urges us Canadians to contact our Members of Parliament and convince them to vote no on allowing it to proceed. Federal MP contacts are here:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members
And Albertan MLAs are here:
https://www.assembly.ab.ca/net/index.aspx?p=mla_home
It’s gonna be our turn on the ice soon, guys!
During Trump’s *shudder* ascension I likened him to Reacher Gilt, but…no, it doesn’t work. For all his flaws Gilt was Competent. He got to where he was through his own guile and cunning. Trump is no Gilt…he’s Crispin Horsefry.
(Sorry for not making sense for anyone who hasn’t read Pratchett’s Going Postal.)
@Scildfreya
Don’t the Canadians have good uranium reserves? I don’t recall. There are other fuel cycles, but they require sufficient amounts of Actual Science before they become practical that I don’t imagine that the republicans would have anything to do with them.
Anyway, rather than destroy mountains to filter out tiny flecks of fuel, there’s always the plan B which is to reprocess spent reactor fuel. Only a tiny percentage of the fuel actually gets burned up at present, but undesirable reaction byproducts build up in fuel rods rendering them increasingly useless so they get thrown away. That isn’t entirely necessary.
It isn’t immediately clear how this is worse than the alternative, which is to boost coal-fired power generation capacity. Coal mining is also hugely destructive, and coal burning releases considerable amounts of radioactivity and produces huge amounts of fly ash which isn’t trivial to dispose of cleanly.
Lets hope work on more and better solar doesn’t get too badly shafted by the Trump administration, though they seem very keen to do just that out of sheer spite.
David:
You know Trump personally invested in at least two companies involved in DAPL, right?
@David
Caine at Affinity has been right there in the middle the DAPL protests. They have a large amount of info you can find if you search, and since they focus on native issues in general they have also covered Keystone.
@Alan Robertshaw
Probably more on the way. The Mosul dam is in a pretty sorry state and its collapse threatens more than a million people, I think. It’ll leave plenty more without power when it goes, too. I wonder if there is anything in Iraq that wasn’t totally ruined by the last couple of decades of the freedom and democracy we’ve given them.
EJ:
Oh yes, the old reliable “there can be only one” argument. We presently use a mix of energy sources. We do not need to replace all of them with a single technology.
The anti-renewable arguments invariably point out that solar only works during the day. It then concludes that solar is irrelevant.
The pro-renewables argument points out that solar works during the day, and that coincidentally most of the demand in most places is either during the day or can be shifted to be during the day. Then at night of course we have to rely on something else, but only for about half as much demand. So we’ve made a serious dent in the problem with solar power.
If that’s what it takes for a trump administration to get decarbonizing, I’ll take it. I don’t get why solar and wind projects can’t be corrupt, except they’re just a lot less expensive, so there’s less to steal.
Scildfreja: the number I recall is we have a 50-year supply of the useful uranium at current use rates and current proven reserves.
The US can double its nuclear power without causing much trouble. Mining is bad, but the nukes replace other mining so net it’s better than the business-as-usual alternative.
Another major problem is coolant: you need a lot of clean water to cool a thermal plant (coal, gas, biomass, nuclear — doesn’t matter). Particularly with climate change: you need to find a site for your plant that has water now and still will in 70 years after construction and 60 years of operation.
But anyway in 30 years we’ll have cheap and infinitely reliable fusion power they tell me. (Funny, when I was a kid they said that too. And my dad heard it when he was a kid. But this time they mean it.)
Grrr. I know it’s a relatively minor thing in Trump’s catalogue of evil, but one of the regulations he blocked on Monday was an amendment to the horse protection act. That would have finally prohibited the practice of horse-soring. That’s where you use chains or acid on a horse’s feet to make them hurt when they touch the ground. That forces the horse to walk with a high stepping gait that’s considered fashionable in certain circles.
Git.
Just saw an article saying Elizabeth Warren is prepared to vote for Ben Carson for HUD. What the hell? The leaders of the bro-resistance are constantly making me scratch my head in confusion, I gotta say.
Solar power can’t be stored? Like the electricity generated from the solar power, I mean.
@Alan,
that is fricking awful, but I’m not reallyh surprised Squatter BabyHands blocked. The only things that the orange turd cares about are money and himself. No room for caring about innocent animals.
Resist Trump. Force him out. All hail President Pence. Which is exactly what the Taliban wants.
http://img33.glitterfy.com/12117/glitterfy2193958T831D30.gif
Pretty sure the Taliban has gone on record saying that Trump is the one they’re happy to have around.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-militant-groups-isis-al-qaeda-1.3849486
Hello Steven Dutch.
“Protest is terrorism”
Constitution cries.
Steven came back for that? That was his return to trolling us?
PaganReader: solar power can be stored in many ways. Many are the same ways you’d store nuclear power (nuclear power is too steady; you can’t follow the intermittent demand — so it has a similar problem to what solar faces, of providing power at the wrong time).
You can store electricity:
You can store electricity in your electric car’s battery. Which you needed to fill up anyway while the car is parked when you’re at work. Maybe you don’t need to fill it up at night.
You can buy a home battery and fill it up.
You can charge your laptop, phone, bike light, etc during the day when there’s lots of solar power.
A utility can buy a big honking battery and fill it up.
You can store heat:
You can A/C your home to bloody cold during the sunny hours, so that there’s less cooling to do at night; or in winter, heat a lot during the day.
Your fridge and freezer can be set to be extra cold during the day.
You can set your hot water tank to very hot during the day, so that you don’t need to warm it much in the morning.
A utility can build a concentrated solar power plant. CSP produces power at night because it’s a thermal plant, and remains hot after dark.
You can store other things you’ll later convert to power:
A utility can reduce the flow of water through a dam during the day, then let it flow at night — or pump water uphill.
You can use solar power to crack water into hydrogen, or, more complicated but easier to store, water + CO2 into methane and carbon monoxide, which you can burn later. (You might want to burn the CO immediately.)
You can use electricity at a time when it’s plentiful relative to demand:
You can run your washer, dryer, and dishwasher during the day rather than at night. That’s not exactly energy storage, but the effect is the same.
You can set your crockpot to start at noon and have dinner ready for you when you get home, rather than cooking in the evening.
@PaganReader
Storing electricity on a small scale, like a household, is no problem. Trying to scale up power storage, on the other hand, that’s really, really hard.
Batteries are expensive, small, have a limited lifespan, and require huge amounts of special materials which are not necessarily available at the volumes (and costs) required.
The other practical alternatives we have right now are, uh, well. I can only think of pumped hydro, which has all the disadvantages of regular hydro schemes, in that there are many kinds of geography that aren’t at all suited to it and it has a significant environmental impact.
One day we might have organic flow batteries or subsea high pressure airbags or methanol or ammonia photosynthetic cells and stuff and well be able to run a nation on solar alone. But that day is quite a long way off.
@Steven Dutch
If you’re talking about the American Taliban, then yes, this is probably exactly what they want. Thing is though, Trump isn’t exactly going to be putting the brakes on Pence’s agenda, so there’s no advantage to leaving him in place, is there?
@ numerobis et al
I went on a tour of a power station once. It was pretty interesting. One thing that did intrigue me was that this particular power station had a net negative contribution to the national grid. They explained that when demand was low it was easier to just use their generators as engines to draw power from the grid so that the supply levelled out, rather than turn the generators in the main power stations on and off. This particular station had been built with future capacity in mind so, apart from some test runs, they’d never actually generated any power, just used it.
They also told me that there’s some hydro electric place in Wales that they use as a big ‘battery, by pumping the water back up to the top at night.
I love stuff like that.