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Comment by finid | Hacker News Reader

That's the voice of Science.

And we (in the USA) just elected a leader who doesn't believe that humans have anything to do with climate change.

Indeed. And two countries most emboldened by a Trump presidency? Russia and China. China, US, Russia are the 3 top contributors to global warming by a significant margin.

China has 60% more CO2 emissions than the United States, but Trump's promise to wage war on clean energy while investing heavily in coal and oil, there's a good chance US will be back to #1.

So I guess the question is will civilization ultimately perish from climate change or nuclear war? With Trump at the helm, it's hard to say which happens first, but we can conclude that we're all fucked.

Guess who will likely be his nominee for Interior Secretary?

Hint: Drill, baby, drill!

For people outside the USA who may naively conflate "elected" with "the majority of the voters voted for", I feel the need to point out that this is not what happened.

Clinton did not get the majority by that much. A very significant portion of the public voted for this leader and the party espousing similar anti-science position all the way down the ticket.

Agreed, but in democracies a special status is conferred upon the majority. The majority of voters did not vote for this idiot. It's a really important point.

A majority of voters did not vote for Clinton, either.

Plurality, then.

Finally tally isn't in, CNN still has Trump as the projected winner of the popular vote.

This is slightly off topic, but the fact that Trump got as many votes as he did, or that Hillary did not get way more votes that a person running against Trump should have, shows how bad of a candidate she was.

She was not even very popular with women. Democrats screwed themselves.

>She was not even very popular with women.

4% lower than Obama. Pathetic.

You'll find that in many countries the leader was not voted by a majority, in parliamentary republics which are based on coalitions or with various voting methods the leader can effectively be someone who did not get anywhere near the majority of the vote.

Similar things are possible in most countries, especially parliamentary democracies.

doesn't believe... No, doesn't care, he may or may not believe.

It really doesn't matter

Trump is old, he knows he'll be dead before the shit hits the fan. Guess he doesn't love his kids that much though.

Yeah, seriously. However you feel about Obama, he not only advocated for climate change efforts, but spoke intelligently about AI and it's risks.

Can you imagine Trump doing that?

Edit: Hell, I can hardly even imagine Hillary doing that.

"clean coal"

Enough said.

This, of all things, is actually only mostly bullshit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage

Carbon sequestration is expensive. It might just be much more cheaper and cleaner to build 4th gen nuclear power plants. Or geothermal for that matter.

Yeah, and its not only about the carbon dioxide that must be captured safely, when its emitted. Its also about the dirty and energy consuming business of getting the coal out of the earth crust in the first place. The term "clean coal" is just ... I would laugh if it weren't so sad.

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