While I appreciate that you are well schooled by NPR, you lack a firm grasp of the facts, like so many of your compatriots on the left in America today.

This is a characteristic of the Democratic Party, which is so out of touch that it denies basic biology.

Book banning is done by both sides, but it is stronger on the left. Many publishing firms have publicly stated that right wing books should never be published - at the same time that they are publishing far left tripe. Public libraries refuse to carry conservative books, or carry far fewer copies, even of best sellers - and that's not just from my reading of conservative sources, it is from my family's personal experienbce.

It isn't Republicans who went after Rowling, a lesbian, for criticizing some aspects of the transgender advocacy, but not transgender people. That was the left, and is typical of the totalitarian nature of their goals and behavior.

You need to widen the scope of your news sources so you will discover this fact. BTW, I rarely watch Fox News.

Conservatives often have to go to smaller specialty publishers to get published, because the big houses simply ban some kinds of content, and also *require* other content to be represented in their fictional offerings.

The Republicans did not seek to toss out the election. A small number of people did that, and they were defeated by... Republicans in the Senate. Furthermore, Trump handed over power peacefully on Jan20th. Authoritarians wouldn't do that.

A true attempt to toss out in an authoritarian manner would have involved heavy firepower, when in fact the only firepower used at the Capitol was to kill one unarmed rioter. That does *not* justify the attack on the Capitol, and almost all on the right agree with that position. You are doing the typical leftist thing: stereotyping us.

I cannot speak for Trump himself, but I can tell you that Republicans, even the far right, seek *less* authority in government, not authoritarianism. That has been true since Barry Goldwater's time.

We are not the ones who want to centralize power - that's the Democrats. We are not the ones who want to turn the Supreme Court into a political circus through court packing - that's the Democrats. We are not the ones who are against parental rights in education and in medical treatment - that's the Democrats. We are not the ones who seek to use the government to control how people speak. We are not the ones pulling down statues, and rewriting history. We are not the ones who believe that it is intolerant to be able to choose what to say, even on issues of sexuality - that's the Democrats - at least the woke ones. We are not the ones who seek to impose a state secular religion on the people, through control of schools, media and the government - that's the Democrats.

It's the Democrats who seem to think Orwell's 1984 is a platform to be adopted, rather than the warning Orwell meant it to be. And by the way, he was warning of left wing authoritarianism, after having experienced it as a soldier for the left in the Spanish Civil War.

....

As one who has taken courses in weather and climate modeling,, I am hardly ignorant of the concern, but I also know that "the science is settled" is utter tripe, not to mention a pretty unscientific statement given the uncertainties in such a complex, chaotic system. Furthermore, as one who knows many practitioners in the field, I have seen that the field of climate change climatology is so heavily politicized and corrupted as to not constitute science at all (not that there aren't lots of good scientists doing good work in the area - it's the predictions that are bunk, and most working in the field are far from that part of the "science."). When the only people who dare to speak against the "consensus" are retired or so senior that they cannot be fired or defunded, you know that the field is corrupt - scientific inquiry requires skepticism, including skepticism that is wrong - but skepticism is outlawed in that field. When the only papers that get publishes are those showing CO2 as a danger, you know it isn't science. When every field has to include "climate change" in order to make its papers more attractive, and its studies more likely to get funded, you know it's not science.

And by the way, science does not run on consensus. It runs on careful experimentation or observation, tempered by attempts to falsify the hypotheses (Karl Hopper). Climate change science rejects any attempt to falsify the politically important hypothesis that the CO2 sensitivity of the atmosphere is catastrophically high.

As for saving the species from extinction - that's just silly. It belays are serious lack of understanding of the impact of climate change - even that produced by the highest IPCC estimates. There is good work in economics that shows that adaptation is both less expensive and less dangerous than the kinds of CO2 reduction nostrums pushed by the left, in the name of "global warming." rebranded as "climate change." rebranded as "climate crisis." rebranded as "climate catastrophe." rebranded as species "climate extinction".

There is no way mankind will go extinct due to climate change. Back when we had no technology at all, we survived the change from the ice age to the modern temperature regime. So "extinction" is a silly joke.

But let's assume that the goal is correct - a carbon neutral civilization. The first thing we have to do is be willing to accept continued poverty and death of those most vulnerable - the poor in 3rd and 4th world countries. Current approaches, since they will require extra money to enact, remove funds that, either through economic activity or aid, will harp those people. And, the bans on aid for CO2 producing new power sources simply continues their energy impoverishment.

But OK, let's consider achieving the CO2 neutral goal. You have two choices:

1) Continue with replacing reliable power generation with wind and solar, and adding in vast amounts of expensive energy storage,

Or,

2) Let natural gas replace coal for now, greatly reducing CO2 (but requiring fracking, considered a sin in the leftist religion); while, building lots of nuclear plants, which provide high reliable power. That replacement as a natural result of the market is why the US reduced its carbon emissions even as the Kyoto Countries did not, in spite of their treaty.

Few on the left will even allow the second approach, much less advocate for it. Some environmentalists are coming around, but the politicians are not.

And if you think I'm smoking MAGA weed to arrive at this, I'll give you a link that's a example of the sort of real information, by a real expert, that's out there. As an engineer who has studied the power grid, I've learned a lot from this engineer, who has designed power grids.

Here he gives a case study of one grid, ERCOT (Texas), and the comparison of "renewables" and nuclear:

https://judithcurry.com/2022/10/31/ercot-renewable-energy-reality-check/#more-29277

Good luck hearing this perspective on NPR or ABC or wherever you get your left wing news.

I'll add a bit for the non-engineer. Modern civilization requires a reliable supply of electricity. We have developed a very reliable, very mature set of technologies to do that, based on Tesla's 3 phase AC power. We have a vast array of generators, all synchronized at 60Hz by the basic "synchro" nature of three phase motors/generators. We have a complex, robust system of transmission to move that power, and a robust system of distribution to deliver it to a vast number of locations.

That system is not very dependent on weather or climate (other than hydropower). It is on when you need it, no matter what day or time.

The popular "renewables" are wind and solar. These are highly dependent on weather (see the link above). This means that the grid needs additional resources in order to provide needed power when the renewables are not delivering enough.

Nobody has come up how to do that without vast expense (except in the few areas where pumped hydro is practical). Vast sums have gone into this problem, and also into more reliable renewables such as geothermal, but we don't have anywhere close to a low enough cost for this to work without massive economic dislocation (and the trickle down costs hurting the poor the most).

Batteries have gotten better, but that was by picking the low hanging fruit solutions. Nobody has a battery solution that is close to being low enough cost. Hyped news article that pop up about weekly about new battery technologies have yet to make much different.

Meanwhile, unreliable energy producers (wind and solar) are not paying their share of the grid cost to compensate for their unreliability. To a power grid operator, their energy is the lowest quality available. But because, *when it is producing*, it has a very low *marginal* cost, it is driving reliable producers out of business, including the highly efficient, low CO2 emitting combined cycle [natural] gas turbine plants.