Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters • Hacker News Board

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#91

Post by BurningFrog » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

parasubvert wrote: post #71

jerf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment." You do. Everybody wants clean air, clean water, etc. The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. The problem is people who see a short-term gain of their own, standing against the environmental problems they cause. They may not even believe t…

A major segment of the US populace is supporting policy to remove all polluting regulations , dismantle the EPA, and would scream murder over a Carbon tax the same way “conservatives” in Canada are over Federal plans. They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If…

A carbon tax is actually the conservative solution to climate change.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#92

Post by jeffbax » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #91

parasubvert wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major segment of the US populace is supporting policy to remove all polluting regulations , dismantle the EPA, and would scream murder over a Carbon tax the same way “conservatives” in Canada are over Federal plans. They’re not evil overlords cackling, but rather they’re in mass denial over a zero sum scientific equation, and have created a cult around their disbelief that’s as strong as any environmental group. If…

A carbon tax is actually the conservative solution to climate change.

A carbon tax is really the only immediately workable and impactful solution to climate change. We can't flip a switch and have the change activists want overnight. That both parties have abandoned a revenue-neutral carbon tax (sell it to the people as a replacement for other taxes, like payroll, rather than a new tax) is of the worst policy realities we have found ourselves in.

"Green New Deal" is a bunch of hysterics going nowhere fast, and the counter point are a bunch of idiots that think a snowstorm is proof global warming doesn't exist.

We've lost the boring middle ground solution that works, just like so many other areas of policy.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#93

Post by stevenwoo » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

tqi wrote: post #84

AshleyGrant wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. And yet we have idiots in diesel trucks modded to "roll coal" cackling as they "own the libs" when they spew out soot.

Have you or anyone you know actually seen someone rolling coal?

Drive SF to San Diego a few times a year and there are a few all along the route when going off the main freeway, more in rural areas, but present. See a few while bicycling through Santa Cruz mountains to west of San Jose, there's one house I regularly pass in Pescadero that has two - it only takes a few miles of driving outside of downtown Los Gatos to get to more rural areas.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#94

Post by mfoy_ » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

oyster wrote: post #68

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "natural" process is that e.g. oysters grab the co2 and bad stuff from the water, die, sink to the bottom and get covered in sediment. That's where major carbon sinks ended up anyway, to be turned into oil/coal/gas over millions of years.

Somehow, I think the pollutants originating from human activity will really be very much quite different from what used to become sequestered in sedimentary rock. Smoke detector radiological sources, teflon pans, noble gases and refridgerants, cadmium paints and pigments, dioxins, kepone, BPA, hydrazine, sulfur mustards, medication, depleted uranium. The list goes on.

Nice try, Oyster. Back to the NY harbour with you.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#95

Post by ams6110 » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

tqi wrote: post #84

AshleyGrant wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. And yet we have idiots in diesel trucks modded to "roll coal" cackling as they "own the libs" when they spew out soot.

Have you or anyone you know actually seen someone rolling coal?

Not uncommon in most rural areas, from my observation. I see it weekly, more or less.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#96

Post by ams6110 » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

jeffbax wrote: post #92

BurningFrog wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A carbon tax is actually the conservative solution to climate change.

A carbon tax is really the only immediately workable and impactful solution to climate change. We can't flip a switch and have the change activists want overnight. That both parties have abandoned a revenue-neutral carbon tax (sell it to the people as a replacement for other taxes, like payroll, rather than a new tax) is of the worst policy realities we have found ourselves in. "Green New Deal" is a bunch of hysteric…

One problem is that the public "sales pitch" for a new tax is almost always a lie when compared to what the money is actually spent on and loopholes and exemptions that are never disclosed up front. Nobody believes that a carbon tax will achieve or change anything other than taking more of their money.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#97

Post by ams6110 » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

ericdykstra wrote: post #16

ako wrote: post #5

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...

Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.

Those are ridiculously extreme alternatives.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#98

Post by pxeboot » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:47 PM UTC

tqi wrote: post #84

AshleyGrant wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Captain-Planet-Villain model of somebody literally cackling about how much pollution they're going to release into the world today is nonsense. And yet we have idiots in diesel trucks modded to "roll coal" cackling as they "own the libs" when they spew out soot.

Have you or anyone you know actually seen someone rolling coal?

I see people rolling coal several times a week here in Texas.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#99

Post by eseehausen » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:47 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #39

ericdykstra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.

> a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated That's probably the way we'll have it, but there will be artificial-natural habitat , eg. "reservations", that could grow to even be country-sized or half-continent-sized if we manage resources right. (Though probably they'll be smaller since we're going to have to some pretty large scale heavily-engineered-and-very-unnatural-agriculture to prevent fam…

If the only thing stopping the structural changes necessary to prevent ecological collapse was a fear of aliens, then I think we'd be doing better.

Also, the kind of technological delay you're talking about there would be a couple of decades at most, when it looks like you're talking about thinking in terms of centuries. If anything, we're slowing down necessary technological advances to maintain the status quo long past the point where it's tenable.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#100

Post by ThomPete » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

ako wrote: post #53

ThomPete wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freaking out is the opposite of what we need. I am not worried about the consequences being so severe we cant handle them, there are other quite scarier scenarios. Freaking out gives us the opposite of solutions,just a lot of noise and premature solutions such as focusing on inferior solutions such as solar. This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.

The biggest problem is that people don’t see the problem, because they can’t see it in historical context.

See what problem? That's the question here.

Climate change is not a problem, it is a phenomena which have consequences. Some of them we see today some are 100 years into the future.

We don't know what the right solution for the consequences in the future is as we don't even know what the consequences are and we don't even know what the problems are going to be.

We can speculate but we can be wrong and so its much better to solve the problems we have today in ways we know how to solve and then invest in R&D to develop better solutions than to chase a future that might or might not be here.

Alternatively I fear the current scenario were people have panicked and spend more time arguing on the internet than actually doing anything constructive about the problems right in front of them.