161–170 of 298 posts
I have to 'pick a lane' very soon re: having kids or not. This stuff really weighs on my mind all the time. People with young kids what are your feelings about this?
One of the issues of plunging headlong into solar and wind (and bio-fuels) is that those sources require huge land-areas around mining of rare metals, deployment, and finally waste. As our global population and energy needs grow, this problem gets bigger and bigger and therefore place stress on existing, and already stressed, ecosystems. On the other end, nuclear is energy dense, and requires tiny amount of land for…
I was surprised that ESGV (Vanguard Index for responsible environmental friendly investing) does not include nuclear power there. I wonder what's the stigma bout nuclear?
The insane project duration and nonsense cost overruns for nuclear construction are their own problem.
And you get a lot of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the safety aspect.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/comed-bribery-s...
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Sorry I must be communicating really badly. I'll try to put it more clearly. 1. We don't really understand how these systems work. (The evidence for that is basically a lack of evidence and the type of thing we are still working on...) 2. Certain outcomes in the system could be very very very bad. 3. We are changing part of the system massively. 4. Because of (1) we don't know what (3) will do. I'm not alluding to an…
I'm sure you can see why "many of us are more concerned than we can publish" could be read as alluding to secret knowledge. The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-f…
> The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.
I can't think of any comparible examples where human activity is known to be causing massive problems... Various forms of pollution maybe? But I would argue for action there too.
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Not sure why you're getting downvoted, my guess is the reference to COVID. The earth is currently overpopulated for the system we have in-place to feed it. We are very inefficient in resource usage and waste over 1/2 the food we produce each year. COVID isn't the answer to this problem, but your point is valid.
It's definitively the reference to COVID. Telling people to die from a preventable cause is conflicting with the rest of the message.
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I've had this book on my shelf for a couple of years. I was put off it because I finally saw the film (and the remake) and didn't like them. Especially the remake, fell asleep trying to get through that film on three seperate occasions before giving up on it. But I need to give the book a chance if it's quite different to the film.
I think instead of "remake" you meant sequel, because there is no remake. If it's any consolation: I'm an absolute fan of Blade Runner but hated the sequel. In my opinion, it fails to capture the neo-noir feel of the original, has no interesting characters, Jared Leto's acting is distracting, and the villains/antiheroes... compare Roy Batty's "tears in rain" dying speech with Luv's "I'm the best!". It makes me cringe…
I thought the first half was magnificent. The scene with Ryan Gosling having the intimate moment with the hologram made me weep, it was so sad because that’s all he could get.
The movie became terrible once Harrison Ford was introduced and kept diving. Everything about it was horrible. The scene in the water looked like a sound stage. Absolutely terrible.
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Modern solar panels and their batteries do not require any "rare" metals. A lot of wind turbines use neodymium however it accounts for a very small amount of total usage. Edit: clarified.
>Modern solar panels and their batteries do not require any really "rare" metals. The salient point was that manufacturing millions (billions?) of panels and turbines has a huge toll on the ecosystem - regardless if rare metals are used - and they are used in components of solar panels and wind turbines.
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Once the animals are gone, we won't last much longer. It is extremely naive to think we can engineer ourselves a new biome that can sustain anything even close to what we have now.
Don't people engineer new biomes pretty frequently? It seems pretty defeatist to look at a world where we regularly transform dirt fields into grassy plains into food and think that we'll never be able to sustain ourselves if the climate changes.
What do you do when seasonal heat makes Pakistan and India uninhabitable for large parts of the year? We're not prepared for that kind of migration, we didn't even deal with Syria well.
Farming and other activities often require decades to truly show a profit. When rainfall patterns are changing on short timescales, you will not be able to plan for food production given the underlying churn in fertile locations.
Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.
No I remember the opposite. I'm over 50 and when I was young in the 70's the water in ditches and canals was so polluted that nothing lived in it anymore but algae. In Amsterdam, where I moved to after leaving home, you had to be suicidal to be willing to take a swim in the canals. Nowadays fish are back everywhere, even in the canals in Amsterdam. There seem to be salmons swimming in the big rivers, this was unthink…
There has been lots of progress.
I have to 'pick a lane' very soon re: having kids or not. This stuff really weighs on my mind all the time. People with young kids what are your feelings about this?
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It's a complete lie that industrial agriculture is the only effective way of feeding everyone. It seems to be that it produces the most yield of a crop, but therein lies the problem: The only metric that we look at is crop yield. Sure it yields a lot, but it's completely destroying the land in the process. If we continue to use industrial agriculture practices (which are completely dependent on oil) humanity will col…
I agree, it reminds of Nassim Taleb's idea of anti-fragility in that because our monoculture and reliance in chemicals to sustain it, it would only take a certain devastating thing to endanger the national food supply. Do you have examples of or references to regenerative farming practices? I ask because I'm curious about them to see if they scale like modern Ag which for all of its problems (many you pointed out), h…
I think looking for any solution to scale the way industrial agriculture does is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. The scaling of industrial agriculture is the problem. I don't think any one alternative is "the" solution, but rather that many alternative methods need to be applied where appropriate and at smaller scales. Smaller farms but lots more of them. Food needs to be grown in places that we currently don't think of as farmland: mass lawn conversion, urban farming, etc.
Okay, onto some references of techniques that I can think of off the top of my head:
Silvopasture is a way of combining tree crops with livestock grazing that sequesters carbon from the atomosphere. https://www.fs.usda.gov/nac/practices/silvopasture.php
Riparian buffers separate rivers from farmland. They filter runoff from the fields, guard against floods because healthy soil and vegetation act like a sponge, and, if many land owners participate, they create uninterrupted habitat for wildlife. This sacrifices some field area, but it means that a "100 year flood" that now happen more frequently due to climate change won't destroy a family's source of income by washing away all the soil away. https://www.extension.iastate.edu/smallfarms/what-riparian-b...
"No till" or "no dig" cultivation. Tilling breaks networks of fungi and bacteria, causing a short-term burst of available nutrients for plants, but done year after year reduces soil health (in other words: diminishing returns.) Sowing or transplanting with minimal soil disturbance and top-dressing with compost builds soil life over time and is less labor intensive. https://charlesdowding.co.uk/faqs/
Swales reduce pressure on irrigation systems on sloped land by storing water in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swale_(landform)
Cover cropping means that the field isn't left bare. There's always something growing on it to keep the soil from eroding or blowing away in the wind. Cover crops act as a living mulch, and then as a regular mulch when they are slashed down when it comes time to plant the cash crop. Legumes are often used as cover crops because they are a natural fertilizer due to a symbiotic relationship they form with a special kind of bacteria that takes nitrogen from the air and deposits it in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_crop
A book on the subject of carbon farming: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-carbon-farming-solu...
A book (more philosophical than technical) about a Japanese rice farmer who successfully rejected western agriculture and pioneered natural farming practices: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-one-straw-revolution?varia...