551–560 of 693 posts
Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.
What if we found ourselves on a planet that didn't have fossil fuels?
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They had enough power to close down all the nuclear power plants in Germany.
Ah yes, the famously environmentalist CDU. Obviously the center-right conservative party consists 100% of environmentalists, that's why they fight so hard to push back the ICE ban, prop up the oil & gas industry (just look up Katharina Reiche if you want to feel sick for a bit), and why they run smear campaigns against the Greens.
The 2024 plans under Green minister Robert Habeck called for 25 GW of capacity of new gas power plants (which should be in future fueled with green hydrogen. But until enough hydrogen is available at good price, the new gas powerplants will burn natural gas. Some skeptics say that the cost of green hydrogen will be higher than natural gas for a very long time). The estimated construction costs for the new gas powerplants was in 2024 around 40 billion EUR. Most of this costs will be covered by the German state.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/kraftwerksstra...
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Western democracies at this point can't do anything at that even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population. Any 5% at that. We are stuck in local maximum even if it slowly and surely slides into the shitter
> even hints at minimally inconveniencing 5% of the population 5%? No. That's a lot of people. At least in the USA, the one and only thing that matters is what benefits the top 0.0002% richest (approximate percentage of billionares in the US). Nobody else matters anymore.
Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).
Solar energy is the fastest growing source of energy in the US. That's because it's also the cheapest source of energy. So markets are working. https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti... "Solar and storage provided 90% of all new power added in the U.S." is mind blowing. How about we give the US credit for this? Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage. Given th…
Meanwhile governments are electing to either do nothing or actively make the problem worse (particularly in the case of the US — expanding fossil fuel extraction, pushing data center build out and attacking renewables like wind).
Solar energy is the fastest growing source of energy in the US. That's because it's also the cheapest source of energy. So markets are working. https://abcnews.com/US/solar-generates-energy-coal-us-1st-ti... "Solar and storage provided 90% of all new power added in the U.S." is mind blowing. How about we give the US credit for this? Fossil fuel extraction is not the problem. The problem is fossil fuel usage. Given th…
Markets do not care about externalities. That’s the whole issue. Markets by themselves cannot work for the benefit of humans, you need to regulate them, otherwise we would have child labor and slaves to trade. You need to force the participants to have to deal with their externalities and consider more than the next 2 quarters. Markets are a tool you have to use correctly, it’s not a magical thing that solves all humanity problems by itself
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Solar + wind were 99% of new generation capacity last year. Fossil fuel usage dropped for one of the first times ever. Renewables generated more than coal. Solar installation is huge and the increase continues to accelerate. Every year has seen a record amount of installed solar. Solar started at zero two decades ago and is already curbing other sources.
The trouble is that we’re adding renewables to add capacity, not as a way to bring significant amounts of fossil fuel capacity offline.
Despite rising electricity demand, so much solar has already been installed that fossil fuel generation decreased last year. Renewables now generate more total energy than coal. This will only continue as more solar + batteries come online. Thanks to Iran, renewable projects are getting fast tracked globally to reduce the dependence on foreign energy.
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I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
Encouraging a desirable behavior is a better way to elicit more of that behavior than labeling someone as the worst no matter what. At that point, why wouldn’t they lean into the villain role?
BBC did a pretty good deep dive a few days ago on what we're in for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZCh8eDZFc DW also, similar stuff, but the guest is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcl5Mn373Oc Anton Petrov covered it from a much more science lens a couple months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRoU3whzX_Q
The eu is stupid for not engaging in active climate engineering right now. They are the most at risk and should take decisive action before they end up living in a glacier. All the downvotes are just showing why no action is being taken even though right now we are literally terraforming the planet with no plan, and it is going to stop the transatlantic currents that keep Europe from becoming arctic. But sure, just d…
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I'm in the US and _I_ don't want us to get credit. Even the worst of people do something good every now and then. But if you reward that, they won't change.
The self-flagellation has gotten too extreme. Photovoltaics were invented in the US, and the US helped subsidize it to the point where they were an economically viable source of energy.
Something one specific party has been fighting against for decades
I try to do my part to the best of my ability. But obviously it's only a droplet in the ocean (hah). But if I'm being honest, what scares me far more than this is the capability of humans to "force" a solution on the world.
We fixed the hole in the ozone layer. All the countries came together, worked together, and fixed the problem threatening to doom us all with skin cancer and worse. Humanity can come together. Unfortunately, the threat of total annihilation of human civilisation is currently not outweighing the short-term profit incentives of those in power, and they've turned the issue into fuel for their culture war so I doubt we'l…
Climate change has... well... none of that. Not only that, but by the time it gets bad enough to convince people, it may be literally impossible to stop.
It's grim to think about, but if the nuke is falling it's too late to build an iron dome. We have several nuclear bombs dangling above us. We know they're there - permafrost, AMOC, ocean life collapse - just not exactly where, and we're blinding swinging a knife on a stick while actively yelling for a longer stick and telling the research committees not to tell them if they're getting close.