191–200 of 222 posts
> For most of history, people thought: “The world is bad and, usually, it’s getting worse.” In other words, no longer did humans see themselves as mere pawns for the gods. What? Citation needed. A negative view of individual sin is certainly part of the Christian worldview, but gods are not, nor is an overall negative outlook. The whole point is that God loves his people enough to save them, the Church will expand, a…
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Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever. Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406
Solar energy is the cheapest form of energy we have. Storage is a bit more expensive, but judging from the amount of metals the video proposes they want to go all-in on battery storage, whereas most experts I heard from propose to use hydrogen (or methane) as a storage medium, precisely because the amount of resources it needs are much smaller.
What experts? Power to gas has been really energy inefficient with little sign of improving from what I know. It can't really compete with pumped hydro even where pumped hydro makes less to no sense it seems.
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Gas is at risk of cut off this winter. Electric heating will be the primary source if that happens. > In late June, after Russia reduced supplies by 60%, Berlin triggered the second stage of its national gas emergency plan — one step away from gas rationing. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/07/18/a...
Electrical heating is impossible. There is neither sufficient generation, nor sufficient grid capacity, so matter how many of the nuclear plants we had we keep running. Even in a mostly-nuclear grid like France's you just don't have the spare capacity lying around to replace fossil fuels for heating in a year.
One day a beautiful lady from a nearby mountain comes into his shop and needs new hinges for her daddy's barn door. The little blacksmith thinks she's attractive even though she's well over 6 feet tall, and he eagerly agrees to do an outstanding job. She's quite agreeable herself and he asks her if she's married, and she is not.
So he asks if he can come and call on her in the future and she said that would be alright and she bent down and kissed him right on the cheek. He hopped right up on his anvil and kissed her back and she said good-by until the next day when she will pick up the hinges.
On the next day she came back and before she was going to leave he invited her to take a look around his part of the mountain a little bit, they went to where he had a wonderful garden, the birds were singing, it was so romantic.
He looked up into her eyes and sincerely told her how much he was thinking of another kiss.
She was a little too bashful right then and told him to wait until the weekend when he could be her date at the barn dance.
He understood, and couldn't complain, so he said "well if there's not going to be any more kissin' today, I think I'll put this anvil down."
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But we do know that plenty of other current human activities, primarily around extracting stuff from deep underground and pumping it into the atmosphere, are going to cause huge issues for even just our kid's generation, with no realistic technology likely to be developed quickly enough to solve it(*). If we hypothetically needed to use up the earth's remaining helium to fix that I'd support doing so. Running out of…
I’m really not sure what point you’re making. Where has anyone proposed a climate solution by using all of the world’s helium? What we do use helium for today are things like MRI machines that are medically invaluable, and we do so wastefully potentially denying future generations this technology. Even if we eventually find alternatives, it may be inferior or we may otherwise deny them technological advantages of sim…
Apparently there's plenty on the moon...
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You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise. The people doing the deal with you accepted your promise to repay. They don't do that for the fun of it. Debt is just a way of spending things without selling them first. You can either borrow against your car to spend it, or you can sell the car to spend it. Either way if you consume rather than b…
> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise This simply isn't true. On small scales, people lose their businesses and families declare bankruptcy. That's why I said this isn't a hypothetical. And on a large scale it causes financial collapses if many people go bankrupt at once.
We have system autostabilisers that rebalance the ship when the private sector has a blow up.
Bankruptcy is the reset mechanism. It's a mechanism that actually works, unlike the debtors' prisons we had previously.
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> If there hypothetically was a magical source of near infinite renewable energy that could be harnessed without negative side effects, would you be ok with 2600+ sqft homes and air conditioning? Yes. In a world with zero negative externalities for massive resource consumption, then by all means, give everyone a mansion and a yacht. > What number of humans can the Earth ideally sustain in your estimation? If it's sub…
Before climate change was a thing, Malthus was making the same claims about society hitting a brick wall in the late 18th century. You then had scientists in the 19th century predicting the downfall of society because we would run out of places to store horse manure as more people could afford a horse. In the 20th century intellectuals predicted that the world would run out of food. When that didn’t work, scientists…
The world didn't end in nuclear fire, for much the same reasons it didn't end in a civilisation-breaking IT meltdown at the start of the new millennium - because everyone put in a shit-ton of work to make sure it didn't happen in the first place. Calling those dangers a "boogeyman" is showing ignorance of titanic efforts that went into mitigating them.
The other issues that you described as "failed boogeymen" - it's great that we've been able to outrun them, but how long have we left to run, exactly? We don't have a silver-bullet solution for climate change, whether flawed or perfect. Nobody seems to be keen on doing the hard work, so I'm not bullish on making it to 2050 without damaging the ecosystems across the planet.
> this is why I don’t believe most of the arguments against big houses, cars, air conditioning, are honest or being made in good faith.
FWIW, I'm a white Western guy and I 100% believe that we should try to do without some luxuries, me included. Part of the problem of getting rid of such luxuries is that they may not be luxuries at all to some - urban planning can be often very car-centric (which makes not owning a car either impractical, or a huge waste of time), AC can be required because other ways of cooling down buildings haven't been put in place, etc. Holistic change AND a reduction in resource use across the board is what we need.
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Before climate change was a thing, Malthus was making the same claims about society hitting a brick wall in the late 18th century. You then had scientists in the 19th century predicting the downfall of society because we would run out of places to store horse manure as more people could afford a horse. In the 20th century intellectuals predicted that the world would run out of food. When that didn’t work, scientists…
I'm acutely aware that middle to upper class, mostly white, Americans are the worst offenders of overconsumption and that people who make overpopulation claims about the third world are being racist. Britain, and then America, led the charge of industrial imperialism that doomed us to this current timeline. And we colonized and brutalized people of color the world over to get there. I understand that, and I understan…
I wish some people would have this sentence printed and framed on a wall. Yes, equality-wise it's unfair that only we have energy-consuming QoL improvements. Environmentally speaking, it would be a massive disaster if everyone did it while we still rely on fossil fuels for our energy supply.
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Yes, thank god Russia doesn't have the worlds largest nuclear stock pile of weapons to threaten the world with and has to steal others countries nuclear power plants to threaten them with a dirty bomb. On their border. Less than 100km away from the nearest Russian city.
It does make sense because they will claim that the Ukrainians did it, which they’ve already started to lay the groundwork for. Also, nuclear plants can be a target for plenty of states or groups that don’t have nuclear weapons like terrorists.
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The financial crash would like to have a word with you. Many people gave 'resources' to people who couldn't afford the debt, because with many layers of obfuscation, and perverse incentives for mortgage providers, they made it look like many more people could afford it than actually could. Further...payday loans...loan sharks...people get money for things they can't afford, and can't realistically pay back, all the t…
And bankruptcy sorts all that out. That's why we have it as the reset mechanism. Capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy is like Catholicism without the threat of hellfire.
Bankruptcy works on a small scale, as an act of grace, because the bankrupt party can bootstrap themselves back into productivity using the functional economy around them.
When too many people go bankrupt at once, the economy crashes.
When the whole planet runs out of ecological credit, and we all go bankrupt at once, where are we going to find another civilization to bootstrap from?
All the easy energy is gone, forever. There will never be another coal- or oil-driven industrial revolution on planet Earth. If we reach bankruptcy on the scale of a planetary ecosystem, it will most likely be permanent, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned.