Hawaii Decarbonization Settlement 2045

[HiloJulie]

HiloJulie - Maybe you being “slow on the uptake” does not allow you to see that.
While I may have missed you discussing your contributions outside of driving an EV & adding solar, much of what I've seen is you post is about flying to Honolulu to hang out with friends and excitement over the Boeing 787. As you aren't a climate change denier, I honesty have to ask how you can both acknowledge the damages from climate change and yet celebrate more and even larger fossil-fuel powered transportation? It would seem the cognitive dissonance would be overwhelming, so I am curious how you manage to reconcile those ideas and actions.

Well, I see you read a particular thing I have said in the past and conflated to mean something else. 

Yes, my husband and I flew to Honolulu for a long weekend to visit with very dear friends we had not seen in over 20 years. Maybe you can’t grasp what having dear friends means to you. Maybe it’s a lack of having any friends on your part, or you only just care about yourself and to hell with the rest. 

And yes, I extolled the virtues of the new 787. Despite all of Boeing’s internal failures and quality control problems etc., the 787 is a (even at 10 plus years old already) state of the art aircraft, that, in addition to being constructed with composite materials which significantly lowers its weight, it was designed with newer jet engines that are 25 to 30% more efficient than the 777 which is now going on 30 years old. 

Furthermore, my full time job prior to my semi retirement a little over a year ago, saw me (and my husband) in jets crossing gods green earth so many times that there were times I forgot what city I was in. My husband and I worked in copyright law. Specifically working with clients who wish to use a copyrighted musical work of another artist for their own profit as well as then generating a new copyright for the use of the original artist’s work. A good example is one of the first copyright case that I worked on back in 1986/87 involved a certain airline who wanted to use a certain song composed by a certain person, then already deceased and his estate represented by his brother. It’s a catchy little tune, from the big band and jazz era. Our client finally agreed to a $300,000 annual fee to use that song, and still does so today, even though the song is now past its 100 year old anniversary and now resides in the public domain. The last rather large copyright cases I worked on was for the FOX TV show “Glee.” In retrospect, having daily root canals would have been much easier and with significantly less pain. 

Unfortunately, that industry works on “in person” negotiations, with both the original artist and the using entity/artist. So, yes in my and my husband’s career, we both were carbon footprint pigs. But regardless, with or without my husband and myself in that line or work, nothing would have been done differently. 

Even with one client, who I represented back in 2015 and having won his copyright use case after almost 2 years of a prolonged needless litigation, but the losing clients attorneys demanding “wet” (original) signatures on a host of documents at the very last minute that were required to be filed by midnight of the last day of the year of 2015, with those attorneys knowing full well that I was in Hawaii. As such, I was required to fly to LAX from Kona to sign a dozen documents, which I did, never setting foot outside of LAX only to return to Kona hours later. (And then being accused of being a drug/money laundering suspect)

I did not set the rules, nor would my refusal of doing what I did have changed anything in the end. 

The issue that I have is you seem to expect that the burning of fossil fuels will change immediately overnight and life will go on as normal. But then, your normal seems to be much different than most people’s normal. 

The climate change debate gets muddled down into the abyss that it is with that logic. Just like the logic some use to deny climate change in the first place. It’s like expecting a newborn child to run the Boston Marathon the day after the child’s birth. 

But, as we know about child rearing, first the baby learns to roll over. Then crawl. Then slowly walk, falling more times than actually making a step. So on and so forth. 

The time wasted in climate denial as well as not seeing “baby” steps in energy production efficiency is mind boggling. 

For example, is LNG better than bunker oil? (By the way, the link provided about “methane slip” is about burning LNG in 4 cycle marine engines and not that of steam boilers used for power generation) And yes, there is a certain amount of methane slip when used for power generation, but through innovation, technology and regulation, can be significantly minimized. But, in the interim, it’s still better than burning bunker oil. And keeping the fingers crossed that there are no major spills or other disasters while transporting that bunker oil to the shores of Hawaii. 

At any event, climate change is not going to be solved by snapping your fingers and expecting immediate change. Maybe instead of criticizing every other person who does not think or act like you just might one day get you a near and dear friend whom you just might one day go fly to somewhere and see them!

I’d also point out that you are very well versed in imbedding links into your post which is nice and helpful. But that does show that you spend significant amounts of time on the internet. Are YOU on solar? And while you claim that you minimize trips and carpool etc., but you don’t state if you have a car or what kind of car you have if you have one. If you have an old pre 21st century vehicle, even if you use it once a month to go to town , you’re spewing more carbon into the air than I would if I drove my hybrid car to town 4 times a day for a month.

I also find your attempted dig on cognitive dissonance to be quite humorous. Maybe you should study “Psychological Projection”