311–320 of 439 posts
This is just so unbelievably sad. How should one react to their powerlessness as an individual in the face of this looming catastrophe?
Our power grid is naturally getting more energy efficient and the human population will hopefully start to decline soon.
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I think some time in the next decade there will be a “perfect storm” heat wave combined with a power failure, and millions will die in days. This will jerk the Overton window and popular sentiment in an unpredictable direction, and no one knows what the world will look like on the other side of that.
Where in the world would this event take place? In the hottest parts of the US the temperature gets to 46ºC regularly during the summer and people have lived there for hundreds of years. Do people die of heat stoke? Sure, at a rate of hundreds per year. Elsewhere in the world there are places where people love in the same heat with less means of cooking and less access to water. Millions of people may have to adapt.…
This is just so unbelievably sad. How should one react to their powerlessness as an individual in the face of this looming catastrophe?
Our power grid is naturally getting more energy efficient and the human population will hopefully start to decline soon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t believe it’s possible to avoid anything anymore, Merely the scale will be determined at best. It’s not just going to be 800 million refugees. I suspect it’s going to be actual deaths in that range. And with no real intervention as is the case now, likely in the billions. Given how the whole world handled the pandemic I have no confidence it’ll unfurl any other way. A sobering thought that keeps me awake for a…
I think some time in the next decade there will be a “perfect storm” heat wave combined with a power failure, and millions will die in days. This will jerk the Overton window and popular sentiment in an unpredictable direction, and no one knows what the world will look like on the other side of that.
> Two main factors are at play in driving temperatures to such extremes: their inexorable increase from burning fossil fuels and an El Niño event that is shaping up to be a strong one. It would be quite educational to attribute in more detail the impact of these two factors. The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known, and if its strength is not related with global warming in complicated and unknown ways it…
The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…
Sure, we could just stop using fossil fuels. But something like 50% of the global population would then be starving.
The cure that so often is prescribed is worse than the disease. And people don't seem to realize.
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What you're describing is the path to inevitable collapse. If people will never be able to give up convenience or growth then we really are doomed, tech advantages only slow down that runaway train. I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly…
WW2 only lasted 4-7 years depending on which country you were in. There was direct, visible progress along the way. As soon as the war was over, everything could go back to "normal" (at least for the winners). What you're asking for is a permanent reduction in standards of living. While that might be the right thing to do, it's going to be difficult to convince average people to vote for that. Many of them are barely…
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The vast majority of people disagree with your subjective opinion. Most people dont want to sit in front of their computer their entire lives.
They can go and take a stroll in a park. There is more beauty in that than jostling in a crowd of tourists in front of the Mona Lisa.
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Because communist countries don’t pollute?
It’s not an observation about communism-vs-capitalism (or at least that’s not how I understand it): it’s about how we’re collectively as a society so fixated upon the inevitability of property rights and capitalism and return on investment and the primacy of profit that we cannot contemplate that we may need to abandon all these precepts in order to avert climatic disaster (or some other existential threat).
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>Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.". And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do. It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2…
> And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do. We're still far better off decarbonising because (rest of the world CO2 + China CO2) > China CO2.
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Energy capex is fungible, and nuclear energy is the most expensive. It is also carries the highest risk of cost overruns and underestimation of decommissioning costs. Why spend a penny on fission nuclear when renewables are cheaper, have shorter lead times by decades, and are vastly less financially risky?
Demand too much minerals including, because they’re so much more diffuse metals like copper High soil occupancy in competition with food crops and human activities Cannot provide guaranteed baseline of supply without storage (more minerals)