I did it just to piss you off. Looks like it worked.

Just one Great Man to another. You see, we “normals” need to just shut up and get out of the way of these great men. They’ll figure out what’s best for us all, like a caring father. They are superior to us, after all. They’re like Mr. Incredible, and we’re just some nameless civilian in need of rescue.

/s

One theory is that a global shift to cleaner shipping fuels in 2020 accelerated warming by reducing sulphur emissions that make clouds more mirror-like and reflective of sunlight.

Paradoxically, we might be accelerating warming by burning less sulphur emitting fuels. Clean the air, heat up faster. It’s still a matter of debate, however, now much the reduction in sulphur emissions is causing the current accelerated warming. It’s entirely possible there are other factors at play, as well. That’s not going to stop people from advocating for geoengineering, though. Pump more sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, cool the planet. I don’t know, I suppose.

Too much oil lowers prices and burns up profitability, even though it might make consumers happy. American shale firms are already pumping historic amounts of oil. And there’s a supply glut in the global market.

Exactly, and I’m betting that glut is a result of one of two factors (or a combination of the two): either oil producers thought there would be a higher demand than there actually is and/or they were incentivized to over produce, probably through government subsidies, of one kind or another.

Musk - who frequently champions his commitment to free speech - shared a post on X containing the comments, and stated: “they have broken the law”.

Yeah, he doesn’t give a rats ass about the law. Or, more specifically, he only cares about the laws that protect him, but he doesn’t give a rats ass about the laws that are meant to protect others, often from people like him.

A lot of Americans voted for Trump because they were hoping he would be able to bring prices down. Cheaper oil could help with that. Who doesn’t want to pay less at the pump? But, also, because petroleum based fuels and other products are ubiquitous along essentially every supply chain, it could help bring down other prices, as well. I don’t think it would help that much, though. It might bring down costs for producers a little (or maybe a lot, depending on the industry), but there’s no guarantee those cost savings are going to be passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices. Most producers would just pocket the savings. And why shouldn’t they? Businesses exist to make the highest possible profit for their owners.

To even get cheaper oil, though, oil producers would need to over produce. They’d need to drive down the price of their own product. Why would they do that? Why would oil producers choose to reduce their own profits? That doesn’t make any sense. Plus, as more and more oil is pumped out of the ground, what remains is harder and more costly to extract. So, it costs more to extract a barrel of oil than it used to, and that means that oil producers have to sell each barrel of oil for a higher price to cover the higher costs of extraction. Drop the price of a barrel of oil too much, and it no longer becomes cost effective for oil producers to extract oil from the ground. The price of oil has to stay over a certain threshold for continued oil extraction to even be financially viable.

For prices to come down, demand would have to come down, and that would likely lead to a recession. For prices to come down significantly, it would probably require a significant recession. That’s it, that’s how you bring prices down. So, pick your poison: higher prices or recession.

Yesterday my colleague Kate Riga noted a trap Senate Democrats keep falling into: in an effort to court Republican defectors they temper their criticism of the various Trump nominees. But since there are and will be no defectors they lose on both sides of the equation, gaining no defectors and making their critiques tepid and forgettable. This is unquestionably true. But we can go a step further still. Far from courting potential defectors, they should be attacking them.

If trying to court Republican defectors is a futile effort, who should the Democrats be trying to court? This article seems deliberately vague on that point. The article implies that the Democrats should make less tepid, less forgettable critiques of Trump nominees, that they should attack them, even, but for what reason? Seemingly, it’s to court people other than Republican defectors, but who would that be? Relatively moderate, neoliberal technocrats? Do any still exist?

Macron referred to expected changes in Washington’s foreign policy, citing the need to reduce reliance on the United States for security.

As an American, I also urge Europe to reduce its reliance on the US, for security or anything else. You’re going to want to insulate yourselves as much as possible from my unbelievably stupid, and potentially very dangerous country.

The title of the article is: ‘Jimmy Carter Wasn’t a Liberal,’ yet here they say,

It would be wrong to call Carter himself a conservative. He was instead a Southern liberal, which meant that from a national perspective he was a somewhat conservative Democrat.

So, which is it? Is he a liberal or not? They can’t seem to make up their mind.

Also, the article says that Carter helped usher in the Reagan era, which is true, but the political paradigm that reached its zenith in the 80s under Reagan was neoliberalism.

We here in the US really need to stop using “liberal” to mean left wing. It’s stupid. Let’s join the rest of the world and start using words correctly, maybe open a book that covers a part of the world other than the US.

Liberalism is not necessarily left wing. In fact, I would argue that liberalism is generally center to center-right. Some liberal ideologies are further left than others, for instance social liberalism, but that’s only one kind of liberalism. The dominant form of liberalism over the past forty to fifty years is neoliberalism, and it is definitely a center-right ideology.

So, yes, Jimmy Carter was a liberal, he just wasn’t a social liberal, he was a neoliberal, which is center-right.