41–50 of 209 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Descend into a planet of billions of migrants, mass famine, ultra right wing governments, while the population drops by billions
>while the population drops by billions Easiest way to reduce GHG emissions right there.
> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil wa…
To put it another way, if you told people 100 years ago that we'd need to build 63,000 gas stations and 4 million miles[1] of highway in the US, they'd think you're crazy. It would seem logistically impossible. AND no one would want to pay for it. Yet tell those same people 100 years of "it's for the economy" and you end up where we are.[2]
[1] That is only a conservative estimate of all the infrastructure that was built to subsidize the auto/oil industry. It's a lot more.
[2] This is not me disagreeing with the article. Greening is absolutely a swindle to make money.
> But this fallacy has been repeatedly exposed. For one, the organisations that are supposed to certify that indeed enough tree-planting has taken place do not have the tools to verify that the declared emissions will definitely be absorbed. Another problem is that many offsetting activities do not actually offset anything. > A recent investigation into the world’s largest carbon standard found that 94 percent of its…
> I can't think of many other markets where this dynamic exists.
Recycling market is the same - UK government pays you to recycle plastic, £60 per tonne. You find someone in a 3rd world country that will take it off your hands for £30 per tonne, and pocket the difference. They give you a document saying the plastic was 'recycled' and dump it in the ocean.
The sums may be wrong, but you get the gist
"Fossil Future" is an interesting book on this topic that argues we need to use more fossil fuels instead of less. And it makes me kind of agree with the author, since I learnt that solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured. I totally vote for nuclear, and I hope that it picks up, but we'll need fossil fuels for multiple industries anyway…
IIRC, PV panels become (on average) carbon neutral after three years of operation. Given the lifespan, this suggests that there are very few locations you can put them where they won't more than pay back the carbon emitted in their production.
I'm a former nuclear fan. In anything like its current form it is a dead end, and it is past time we move on.
It's worth keeping in mind that Al Jazeera (as the state-funded news outlet of an extremely wealthy state that is built entirely and existentially on the sales of oil) may not be unbiased on this particular analysis.
Greening and green-washing are causing a lot of harm. Good on Al Jazeera publishing this article and Kolinjivadi for writing it. More Western publications need to follow suit!
"Fossil Future" is an interesting book on this topic that argues we need to use more fossil fuels instead of less. And it makes me kind of agree with the author, since I learnt that solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured. I totally vote for nuclear, and I hope that it picks up, but we'll need fossil fuels for multiple industries anyway…
> solar and wind only makes sense to use where it can offset the carbon footprint that it created when it was manufactured IIRC, PV panels become (on average) carbon neutral after three years of operation. Given the lifespan, this suggests that there are very few locations you can put them where they won't more than pay back the carbon emitted in their production. I'm a former nuclear fan. In anything like its curren…
Could you further elaborate on this take? I'm not interested in challenging you or anything, but the anti-nuclear position is often out of fear of catastophe, so it's refreshing to hear an opinion that it's a dead end.
I’m okay with all greening as long as it allows me to continue my lifestyle.
> the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones As opposed to what, replacing cars with public transit? It takes a serious amount of hubris to look at the world and think that we can just wave a magic wand and make public transit work in places that largely rely on cars (even in Europe, which is much denser and more friendly to public transit, there are a lot of personal cars). We will run out of oil wa…
Just a reminder that all this car infrastructure is max ~100 years old, and most non-North-American cities are older than 100 years. Human civilization just might last more than 100 years, so anything done in 100 years can be undone. To put it another way, if you told people 100 years ago that we'd need to build 63,000 gas stations and 4 million miles[1] of highway in the US, they'd think you're crazy. It would seem…
100 years ago we had one third the population we have today. Undoing that kind of development in another 100 years is plausible, but I suspect the oil problem will have resolved itself around that time anyway.
And installing the same size network of public transit is far more expensive than paving that many miles of roads. Vastly, incredibly, insurmountably more expensive. The real ask is for changing population patterns to become more dense, and this is a decades-long evolution.