561–570 of 884 posts
I live in the south of france, and I really need to move to a cooler region in france. Summer are very long, nights are hot, makes it hard to sleep well. I don't have enough money to install AC. Mobile AC is too noisy. I have been postponing for 4 years now. I am reading The Ministry Of The Future, it's a great book. India will be the first to suffer from this.
KSR is a good prose writer but I found The Ministry of the Future to be full of extremely unconvincing scenarios and I don't think you should let it inform your worldview. It's just a story written by someone who does not really know what they're talking about.
I never worried particularly much about climate change, but just to hedge my bets for my kids I moved to northern Europe. For the most part it's just equated to milder (= bearable) Winters and nicer summers up here. I guess we also spend a fair bit on moving to renewables up here - Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. If I were an ideologue in eit…
> Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. Energy means, well, energy. Finland still drives combustion vehicles (a lot of them, last I was there they drove some of the oldest cars in the EU on average due to high taxes for buying new ones) and probably mostly heat with energy not originating from the trio you mentioned. I think you meant electricity,…
It's taboo to say this, but people worldwide have had far too many children, and I believe that overpopulation is the root of the sustainability crisis, including climate change and pollution. And that taboo is probably rooted in evolutionary psychology, people have a genetically driven tendency to criticize those who advocate having less children? So could there be an instinctual drive behind it? https://www.flashpa…
> I believe that overpopulation is the root of the sustainability crisis This has been studied long time ago by scientists such as Alfred Sauvy [1], who concluded that overpopulation is not the cause of sustainability crisis, and that greenhouse gas is the major cause. In particular, limiting the growth of population has few impact on the production of greenhouse gas, whereas changing the means of energy production a…
Plainly sustainable without fossil fuels? From what I can gather, the majority of farming, construction and transportation (including of farmed goods) relies heavily on fossil fuels.
I no longer worry. I'm extremely pessimistic about the impending climate change. I believe Sabine isn't pessimistic enough about what to anticipate. Consider the tundra methane emissions and the explosive release of methane-hydrates from the oceans, along with water vapor, a potent greenhouse gas. The disaster looming over all ecosystems (a mass extinction event) that will happen in decades and the doom-phase could l…
1. How does this perspective affect you today? Is it debilitating? Depressing? Affect your wellbeing and productivity?
2. What do you believe is the probability of what you say here? Estimate with a percentage.
Does the unknown associated to the percentage in #2 make the perspective rational and helpful?
I got involved in climate advocacy in 2021. Since then I’ve successfully lobbied my local government to start an energy resources study, which will look at ways for my community to quickly transition to renewables. A small thing. But if we all do small things, it will add up!
Still though. My state, Arizona has really terrible people writing awful laws. This legislative session they’re proposing a 12.5% tax on purchasing solar if you’re not a utility, and a bunch of other regressive, anti-free market, pro-fossil fuel legislation [1]. We’re going to vote these people out of office this November and remove barriers to using our states abundant solar resources.
And since HN is a startup and technology forum, we need cheap utility scale energy storage as soon as we can get it. It exists, but solar+storage is just a bit too expensive for most regions of the country. If it does become cheaper than methane, that makes the move away from fossil fuels much easier. If you want to work on this, do it.
But also, citizens engagement is crucial. If you live in a regressive state like mine. It’s super important to get involved. If you live in a place that is going in the right direction, engage on the implementation details, there are so many ways good climate policy can get derailed in bureaucracies. There are a ton of groups that you can work with on this [2] [3] [4].
[1] https://legiscan.com/AZ/bill/HB2281/2024
[2] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
My personal take, witch I call a rational one: - I choose for MANY reasons, climate is one of them, not the topmost but still one of them, to leave a big city toward the mountains, choosing a place locally hydrogeologically stable (meaning no landslide can reach my home, no flood as well, nothing tall enough to fall onto it and so on); - I still IGNORE both the climate change and the climate "deniers" narrative becau…
>I still IGNORE both the climate change and the climate "deniers" narrative because I consider both PROPAGANDA. I choose to ignore the majority of experts in the field as well as the people on facebook equally! I'm so enlightened!
I no longer worry. I'm extremely pessimistic about the impending climate change. I believe Sabine isn't pessimistic enough about what to anticipate. Consider the tundra methane emissions and the explosive release of methane-hydrates from the oceans, along with water vapor, a potent greenhouse gas. The disaster looming over all ecosystems (a mass extinction event) that will happen in decades and the doom-phase could l…
Humanity is quite resilient. I’m confident that we’ll survive. However I’m much more pessimistic about technological civilization surviving.
Countries such as Pakistan and Pacific island countries that have contributed the least to climate change are among the most impacted, which is why two questions (among many others) have loomed climate politics over the past 30 years: "Where does the liability fall?" (Ex: loss and damage fund) and "How can I, as a country, be in a better position within a global crisis?" (Ex: disagreement over the global warming potential of non-CO2 emissions due to different chosen time horizons between countries; GWP100 vs. GWP*; this greatly affects carbon accounting in agricultural countries that rely on cattle for instance)
I used to worry but living through 30 years of catastrophic predictions not happening has made me question the messenger instead. Some examples(1): 1989: Rising seas to ‘obliterate’ nations by 2000 2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013 (1) https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca... Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s an area of concern. I’m actually a raging environmentalist but I jus…
>but living through 30 years of catastrophic predictions not happening has made me question the messenger instead. Have you seen what's been happening the last couple of years? There are catastrophic predictions actually happening, sure some of them were wrong but the planet is in a pretty fucked up state right now.
Can you be more specific?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Finland achieved energy self sufficiency last year thanks to a good combination of nuclear + solar + hydro. Energy means, well, energy. Finland still drives combustion vehicles (a lot of them, last I was there they drove some of the oldest cars in the EU on average due to high taxes for buying new ones) and probably mostly heat with energy not originating from the trio you mentioned. I think you meant electricity,…
Let’s also not forget another human activity, also a kind of energy consumption, but in a more direct way, aka eating. Livestock produces around 15% of global greenhouse emissions according to my quick Google search. And I am sure some Finns like to eat meat.