301–310 of 366 posts
Counter argument from Matt Ridley: Why the flames of Britain's wildfires have been fanned by the Green agenda as much as the weather https://www.dailymail.com/debate/article-16017973/Britains-w...
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
And what is the responsibility of the Greens in the acidification of the oceans?
Etc, etc, etc.
"Being better at fighting fires, though, is not enough." Yeah, it's nowhere near enough. We need to seriously revamp how we manage forests. They must be regularly cleaned, huge fire breaks between fenced areas and roads must be created and maintained. Prescribed burns on a regular schedule. Houses cannot be too close to the trees, no matter how pretty it looks. A huge clean radius must be maintained between houses an…
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/2026/article/secher...
Making your forests "fireproof" isn't going to save you from desertification.
bah, all is not lost. Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt. Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it). It's going to get worse before it gets bet…
stop drinking the tech kool aid and start with degrowth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> carbon negative energy consumption There is no carbon negative energy consumtion.
CO2 capture can be carbon negative, even if it consumes energy.
There are some experimental methods of capturing CO2 (or rather just carbon in CO2), but I replied to a proposed negative tax on economic activities that are carbon negative as energy consumtion. There are none. There's only experimental carbon capture with no products and no services generated as an output of this "economic activity" that consumes energy and CO2 as inputs. And it costs money - a lot more money than what CO2-positive economic activities could generate if all their CO2 were to be captured.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CO2 capture can be carbon negative, even if it consumes energy.
CO2 capture is carbon negative by definition. That's not what I said. There are some experimental methods of capturing CO2 (or rather just carbon in CO2), but I replied to a proposed negative tax on economic activities that are carbon negative as energy consumtion. There are none. There's only experimental carbon capture with no products and no services generated as an output of this "economic activity" that consumes…
Really? It's certainly not in actual practice - the largest actual carbon capture and sequestration projects on the globe to date are, by definition, carbon release reduction programs that are intended to store back a small percentage of what will be released as part of large natural gas extraction projects.
(eg: proposed Browse Basin (~400 km (250 mi) off NW coast of W.Australia) expansion)
(also: Chevron’s Gorgon project, the biggest CCS operation: https://australia.chevron.com/what-we-do/gorgon-project/carb... -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Carbon_Dioxide_Injectio... -- https://ieefa.org/resources/gorgon-ccs-underperformance-hits... -- https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12... )
It's a simple (albeit technically complex) proposition - puncture a gas basin, release large amount of CO2, grab some of that and stuff it back in the hole. Overall a net positive amount of CO2 is released, before addressing any further release as a by product of consuming the LNG, etc. But it's called CCS (carbon capture and storage) because carbon is captured and stored.
There are no larger programs at scale on the planet, they are net CO2 release programs, and less CO2 would be in the atmosphere if no LNG was extracted at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if we stopped emissions today, Earth will keep warming up for a couple of decades. We’re not at equilibrium temperature for the current CO2 levels.
I wonder what would happen if there was one of those large volcanic eruptions. There’s been a few over the last few hundred years. If there’s dust and haze it might be a respite, apart from famines due to poor harvests. I guess we’ll find out should it happen. We’re in a more precarious state, and these random natural events could be very tricky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason Germany gets singled out is because it was a massive policy misstep and highlights the shortsightedness of the environmental movement. It seems that they have changed their tune about it nuclear - but their entrenched efforts (and concerns in the 80s) killed the last 40 years of nuclear power - arguably inflaming our current CO2 crises by opening the doors wide open for Oil and Gas to fill the void. In Ger…
Unlike the states, Germany is densely populated and does not have vast uninhabited areas. Where do you suggest should they store their nuclear waste? Germany has been looking for an appropriate place for the last 50(!) years and does not expect to come to a conclusion any time soon: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-scrap-deadline-... In the mean time, they're keeping they're using the sites of their forme…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Best would be to capture CO2, and then solidify the carbon to a compact stable stable state by taking away the oxygen. Then we have a highly concentrated pure carbon form that we can just bury underground. Or add some hydrogen and get this liquid state that we can pump back into those empty underground reservoirs. But maybe we should stop taking it out in the first place...
You are talking about trees...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned. We're talking about using more energy than the one we got from the fossil fuels we burned, right? So that means that on top of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, we would need to more than double it in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This, in itself, is impossible. Already we won't be able to replace fossil fuels e…
So the neat thing is that this isn't at all true. The total annual CO2 budget of the earth is tremendous; less than 5% of CO2 emissions each year into the atmosphere are from humans. Volcanism, photosynthesis, and other natural sources outweigh humans by far. In numbers, ballpark 730gigatons from natural sources and about 30gt from humans. If you look at the amount the CO2 levels increase each year in the atmosphere,…
Then goes ahead explaining something completely different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems to have very low chances of success.
If it were true there is no point trying to avert climate change. It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset. Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.
Is it?
The economy is what we produce and consume. The economy grows when we produce and consume more, it shrinks when we produce and consume less. How do we produce stuff nowadays? With fossil fuels. There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point.
Economy "does well" when we have easy access to fossil fuels, it doesn't when we don't. We can observe the impact on countries where fossil fuels get harder to get. An example would be Europe, where fossil fuels have been harder and harder to get since 2007 (which corresponds to the global peak of conventional oil). Since then, Europe has been slowing down if you look at physical indicators (like which surface is built or what weight is transported by trucks). GDP is artificial, it's arbitrarily modified to "compensate" for inflation.
People in the US love to say that Europe is slowing down because of regulations and laziness and all the smart people moving to the US, but the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels.
To stop destroying the climate, we need to stop using fossil fuels, and therefore we need to redefine what we expect from "the economy", because without fossil fuels there is no way we keep producing and consuming more.
But that's not all! Even if there was a way (!), it would not resolve the problem of biodiversity loss. We are currently, measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. If we don't get food problems because of climate change, chances are that we will because of the mass extinction. Climate change is just one existential problem we are facing.
In Europe, we have lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, and that has NOTHING to do with climate change. Just loss of habitat, which is a consequence of our economy growing (and humans doing what humans do, like tourism and parking lots and cutting trees and overfishing). Climate change will just make that worse, it's just starting.
> It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
This is a certainty if we don't do anything. Now the more we do, the more we preserve. It will still be bad, make no mistake. But there is no such thing as "it's too late to act". The less we do, the worse it gets.