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What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

newhumanist.org.uk

141–150 of 183 posts

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elect people who are willing to take science-supported reality in consideration when creating policy.

Votes only count if the people you vote for can be counted on. Those people are often very thin on the ground, hard to identify (it could be a political masquerade) or are unelectable because the voting majority don't like them.

Then, at least don't vote for candidate who makes a campaign point out of mocking science and promoting quacks in key public positions. That's something that most people could do.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#142
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers use a lot of power. Make data centers more efficient, for example by improving GCC or the Linux Kernel, and you can save a chunk. Don't write your billion-user apps in Python, use a more efficient language like Rust or Go. Don't make 10MB webpages where 100kb would also suffice. But I think useful change can only be made using political means. Write your representatives and tell them how you feel. Vote f…

Data centers are about 1-2% of emissions. Animal agriculture is comparable to all transit, while heating/cooling/electricity is heavily at the top. If I were profiling I'd optimize the highest bottleneck first.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/02/27/517531611/wha...

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#143
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consume less. Don't buy useless things. Don't drive a car. Don't fly. Buy your electricity from a sustainable source. Eat less meat. Try to get other people to do the same. I find it's hard to do most of these things, and I don't really have much hope that people will change their habits. Most people don't even realise that they live in an illusion of reality where "everything is possible, you just have try hard enou…

Sure, I try to do that, and then I realise that just one US state is burning off millions of dollars worth of natural gas per day[0] , purely because it's too cheap to make it worth capturing. Or I go back to my home country and see people burning rubbish and mud coal and realise I can't breathe in winter and the snow is black/grayish. So you know, at some point you think to yourself - why would I stop driving my Eur…

I agree, it's not easy to justify.

"Would you like to breathe some unfiltered exhaust on the side of the road, completely unprotected from the heavy vehicles that pass by at high speeds? Bicycling! Health benefits!"

But seriously, if there is no infrastructure, its quite hard to sell something that depends on it.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we'd need significantly more land/pasture to feed livestock that way.

in a 1:1 substitution case. but locally, sustainably (yeah, maybe not the right word ... organically?) produced meat is more expensive, which should lead people to eat less meat, but if they eat meat to consume meat produced locally with a smaller environmental footprint (if that's the case, I'm not an expert in that field). maybe that's just wishful thinking though.

Alcohol is ridiculously expensive in Australia. We don't drink less of it.

If the cost of meat were a driving factor in reducing consumption, consider that it's maybe 4x less expensive (a guesstimate based on my own experience) to eat whole plant based proteins than meat.

It is inherently more efficient and sustainable to eat the plant proteins we grow than to feed them to animals. 1kg of meat also requires 100x the amount of water per kg of protein [1].

[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I used the wrong word, "government" ? I mean, joining forces to fix or improve the place we live in is the root of ideal politics/government.

Maybe, yes, but "politics"/"government" in this aspect is already a recusrive phenomenon - people self-organize on national scale, city scale, block-of-flats scale, etc. Still, I don't think we need to try and make another body that would tell people what to do. Instead, I'm thinking of helping people who want to help by telling them where that help would have biggest impact, and as a secondary effect, creating a hig…

Pretty nice. A catalyst in a way.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#146
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consume less. Don't buy useless things. Don't drive a car. Don't fly. Buy your electricity from a sustainable source. Eat less meat. Try to get other people to do the same. I find it's hard to do most of these things, and I don't really have much hope that people will change their habits. Most people don't even realise that they live in an illusion of reality where "everything is possible, you just have try hard enou…

CONSUME LESS! I feel like that really is the key- A holistic approach is best- trying to be aware of the impact you have across the board. Eg. It's not much good being vegetarian if you're also drinking a few bottles of water from plastic bottles everyday. Preaching to others is not that effective, so leading by example is the only way in my opinion!

Sadly the people who hold the most visible positions in our society lead by an example of unchecked hedonistic consumption.

I don't think there is much hope for real change if the systematic problems are not addressed.

And of course, showing a good example is still a worthy cause.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#147
"A member of the world’s longest-living vertebrate species, she was born a few centuries before the end of the Holocene"

Sorry, I'm not native English speaker, but what was meant with "she"?

a) One shark, identified as female, which lived 400 years (!!)

b) Millennial way to try to be gender agnostic?

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#148
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This is not a problem that is tractable on an individual level. Sure, if everyone became a vegetarian and cycled to work and only partook of goods and services that were part of a circular economy, then the world would be a place. But that's not going to happen, because in many places, food choices (and food culture ) is terrible; cities are designed in cycling/pedestrian-hostile ways; the circular economy ju…

Thanks for the detailed response. That's exactly the kind of things I was looking for. Of course none of those points are something a single individual can tackle, but what I'm thinking about is to: - identify broad areas in which changes / development could meaningfully help with the problem (like you started doing with this list) - rank them on impact potential - subdivide them into smaller areas - use that as a re…

In reverse order:

Thanks for asking about Podaris! Yes, there are a handful of planners using it. We soft-launched a little over a year ago, and since then have been working with a small group of planners from my personal network. They've done some good things with it, and it's gratifying to seen them now spending several hours every day in the software, so we're clearly addressing some kind of need. However up until now it hasn't been ready to be pushed out to the wider industry, so we don't really have a compelling traction story to tell. That push will start later this month, however -- so hopefully that will happen soon!

It's a slow-moving industry, so I'm not expecting Snapchat-like growth curves, but am still quite optimistic.

Re: making a list -- there are some serious attempts to do that, for example McKinsey's work on carbon abatement cost curves: https://everythingischanging.wordpress.com/tag/abatement-cos...

However, such an endeavour can be problematic in that it's much easier to capture incremental innovation as opposed to disruptive innovation, and component innovation rather than systems innovation.

If you look at the cost curve they came up with in 2009, for example, you'll see that "hybrid vehicles" are on the list but "all-electric vehicles" aren't. This is because all-electric vehicles were thought to be a pipe dream, unrealistic without some kind of radical change in the cost and capabilities of batteries.

That change is actually happening, however. Considered in isolation, radically cheaper and better batteries have no environmental impact per se, but their knock-on effects are fantastically impactful. This is how disruptive innovation generally works -- modest low-level innovation which enables the development of radically new capabilities. Capacitive touchscreens enable smartphones; elevators enable skyscrapers, etc. Those low-level innovations are really important, but hard to value in isolation.

Systems innovation is another area that's hard to compartmentalise. You can see "better insulation in houses" on that McKinsey list, but you don't see "build dense multifamily housing in city centres where people can walk to work and shopping", even though the latter is comprehensively more impactful, more than just about any item on their list. There are ways to value the latter, but it requires evaluating a complex scenario that includes not just housing efficiency, but also transportation, public policy, etc. This can only ever be indicative: it will never be as deterministic as saying that "replacing X insulation with Y insulation will save Z amount of energy". Doesn't mean that it's not worth doing, however!

So what I'm saying is: be careful in subdividing things: it's possible to lose track of a lot of value in the process. But better ways of monitoring and evaluation would of course be a good thing! What you really need is a way of doing M&E for complex systems innovations...

...oh, wait, I started another company (https://www.futurescaper.com/) which does that, among other things. Forgot to put that on the list, since it was a bit meta, but yes, could be valuable. Hasn't changed the world yet, but we're working on it!

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#149
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people mentioning things like "become a vegetarian" or "bike to work", but those are easy and neglible-impact things. Sure, they'd have a huge effect if half of the population suddenly adopted them, but that's not going to happen - so just going vegetarian yourself and calling it a day is not really helping anything. What I'd love to see is a list of high-impact work one could use their skills to help with. May…

I would say those are hard and seemingly-neglible-impact things, and that's why the general populace don't do those sorts of things. I see a parallel with being afraid of flying but not driving; people are not very rational or good at assessing impact. There's no reason not to change our habits, further, there's a positive feedback loop for vegetarianism: more consumer, more products, more consumers. If you want to a…

This probably doesn't belong here...

I thought I read/heard that we became smart because our brains grew a lot due to eating meat. I realize this sort of change probably took hundreds/thousands of years not over the course of someone's life. Also can't argue the salt/red meat stuff either. I'm just curious if it made our brains grow/possibly lead us to today. Moderation I suppose. I don't want to stroke out at 55.

Re: What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

#150
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people mentioning things like "become a vegetarian" or "bike to work", but those are easy and neglible-impact things. Sure, they'd have a huge effect if half of the population suddenly adopted them, but that's not going to happen - so just going vegetarian yourself and calling it a day is not really helping anything. What I'd love to see is a list of high-impact work one could use their skills to help with. May…

Data centers use a lot of power. Make data centers more efficient, for example by improving GCC or the Linux Kernel, and you can save a chunk. Don't write your billion-user apps in Python, use a more efficient language like Rust or Go. Don't make 10MB webpages where 100kb would also suffice. But I think useful change can only be made using political means. Write your representatives and tell them how you feel. Vote f…

I was walking one night and I noticed streetlights are always on. Why aren't they proximity detecting/linked to each other so they'd anticipate you moving to the next one. Also same with stop/go lights. I realize infrastructure.

Edit: I was thinking about lights, I don't know far away sensors maybe? Not helpful if the lights are always being used (lots of cars).

Liquid salt thorium reactor haha

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