101–110 of 356 posts
One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan, after completion of its construction. So every time you hear about a new pipeline, drilling project, or refinery being built you know that the people sitting in the rooms authorizing billions of dollars being allocated to the project all believe it will safely be operating and prod…
How many of those can be repurposed to refine or carry natural gas?
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Best reading recommendation would be to look at climate change projections from NOAA or similar organizations for where you live or want to live, assume those will be true within some +-, and then base your decisions off of that. There doesn't seem to be a substantial downside to getting it wrong if bad scenarios don't occur but if they do occur you'll want to have gotten it right. > People will always say "just use…
Right, but, to a large extent, Americans love the burbs and you are not going to be able to get them to vote for their demise, no matter how many benefits you can see .
Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing. We need to make living sustainable for a variety of different type of living arrangements because nothing in America is ever this clear cut and dry or uniform. You can exercise positive patterns of behavior and living/lifestyle choices where ever you are. Besides, 99.9% of human existence was the village model: clusters of independent and self-sufficient communities. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's what we've evolved with.
Most pressing issue in our futures
I mean personally it hits me in the wallet for groceries and having to make adjustments to my house (built for a cooler climate) to keep it comfortable, but that's probably a luxury position to be in compared to droughts, famines and forced relocation that millions of people are having.
Does anyone have recommendations for good reading on this subject? What this means for combustion engines as a whole? I am trying to imagine where the push for clean energy will lead. I am fully on team green but I think the switch happened too late. I feel like there is a future where you have a large percent of the population (at least in the US) where EVs are too expensive to afford the monthly payment/up front pa…
The discussion here mirrors many of the themes in the game, and presumably the book.
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This is where I’m at too. At least as far as I understand it today (leaving this comment in the hope that folks can help me expand my understanding) Life on earth is not stable. We are in the final death throes of this planet. Roughly 75% of life on earth is behind us. Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left[1] until our carbon cycles grind to a halt due to the earth moving outside of the habitab…
It seems to me to be incredibly arrogant to be reasoning starting from humanity as saviors of life in 500 million years. And to say that that somehow means that the eco-movements (many of which are focused on the keeping us alive for the next few thousand years) are flawed seems wrong. The focus put on silly Greenpeace actions and fights about nuclear in the media is part of a somewhat intentional strategy to paint a…
I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet.
We don’t necessarily deserve this role.
I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely necessary. We can’t do anything on a 500m year timeline if our species is wiped out in 1000 years.
But, I’d disagree with many of the seemingly “at all costs” approaches I’ve seen advocated for in my social circles (outside of the media). I’ve seen my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
If we save all life on earth in the next 1000 years by ridding the planet of human civilization, we doom it to death in 500m years. Unless another species stumbles into another approach for leaving this planet, everything dies. If we are going to step down, we absolutely need to acknowledge that.
If you want to save life on earth, your plan needs to save life on earth. If you aren’t solving for these expected extinction events on these timelines, what are you solving for?
To put that another way: if you save life on earth over the next 1000 years by collapsing human civilization, you haven’t saved life on earth. You’ve doomed it to a slow death unless lightning strikes twice and cephalopods figure out how to build rockets.
I don’t think we deserve this role, we’ve lucked into it. But now that we wield the capacity to get life off of this rock, stepping down from that role on moral grounds seems… immoral. We do this because it’s what our ecosystem demands of us, not because of anything special about us but because there is no other species that can do it. The ball is in our court regardless of whether we like it or deserve it.
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Carbon sequestration is promising, but still years away. We need to start looking at stop gap solutions that buy us more time.
Carbon sequestration is trivial: we rewild destroyed ecosystems. We don't need to die waiting for Elon. I await my downvotes.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/ecosystems/coastal-blue-carbon...
One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan, after completion of its construction. So every time you hear about a new pipeline, drilling project, or refinery being built you know that the people sitting in the rooms authorizing billions of dollars being allocated to the project all believe it will safely be operating and prod…
And where are those being built? Overwhelmingly in Asia and Africa
Does anyone have recommendations for good reading on this subject? What this means for combustion engines as a whole? I am trying to imagine where the push for clean energy will lead. I am fully on team green but I think the switch happened too late. I feel like there is a future where you have a large percent of the population (at least in the US) where EVs are too expensive to afford the monthly payment/up front pa…
https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/single-post/the-physics-of-c...
Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for in terms of potential solutions, but it's an honest and sobering account of where we're at without any undue sensationalization.
One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan, after completion of its construction. So every time you hear about a new pipeline, drilling project, or refinery being built you know that the people sitting in the rooms authorizing billions of dollars being allocated to the project all believe it will safely be operating and prod…
And where are those being built? Overwhelmingly in Asia and Africa
Since that's a bit of trouble, I've clipped this incredible chart for you here: https://i.imgur.com/OlMAKVd.png
This single chart completely inverted how I think about this problem and the leadership of western countries in world affairs generally.
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Our kids, who will shoulder far more of the effects of this than us, didn't get to choose this. This is their inheritance, generations of neglect for the environment and rampant profiteering culminating in a climate catastrophe.
We have a solution to this problem, it's build more nuclear plants and electrify everything with nuclear and renewables. Unfortunately, we are shutting these plants down instead of building more of them.
