151–160 of 395 posts
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I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.
> Do you have kids? This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate. You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?! "Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our…
Imagine you're a hyper-partisan and you learn that 'the other side' is spreading messaging amongst themselves encouraging each other to not have children. You're going to be doing backflips, because it's just the collective suicide of an ideology.
Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture indus…
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system. Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not b…
Every unit of fossil fuel we burn makes the earth permanently less reflective (or at least something on the order of 100 years). You could compare a 1GW solar array (for its lifetime) to a 1GW coal plant running for x days, though I don't have the value of x.
Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture indus…
I have been wondering: more solar means we are making Earth less reflective. Solar energy that might have been reflected back to space is now absorbed by the PV to make electricity. But that delta has to go somewhere? Where does it go in terms of Earth’s temperature. Same with more nuclear… we’d be pumping more energy into the system. Don’t take this as an argument against these technologies. It’s a huge win to not b…
As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.)
For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.
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There was an obvious path that the environmentalists mostly opposed. A decade is plenty of time for massive scale buildout of nuclear power. If we'd started that a decade ago we'd be in a good position now.
Indeed. At this point I’d say that the “green movement” has done more damage to the planet than the fossil fuel industry. The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago, because of a single accident that by its most pessimistic estimates killed fewer people in total than coal emissions kill every 3 days. It’s madness.
In hindsight it’s much easier to blame the accidents rather than face the structural problems nuclear power has.
Which has only been exacerbated by renewables and storage disrupting the global energy markets, forcing ”baseload” plants to become peakers. Against their will.
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No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing. "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's…
> "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action. This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model. Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you have kids? This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate. You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?! "Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our…
Reducing population is a perfectly valid (partial) solution, and it also doesn't mean extinction. Telling people not to have kids may not be realistic, but... it's also happening already.
Look at the time scales of action. Look at what needs to done. Advocating population reduction has nothing at all to do with climate action. Please stop.
You're just taking some idea that sounds vaguely "environmental" and extreme, and attributing it to somehow being climate action. It won't reduce emissions to stop climate change.
From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal. It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried". The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will. Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time w…
It was a New Year’s resolution that was broken by the next morning.
Systems and politics are not that. Not at all. They're cold, calculating and fundamentally sociopathic.
A more fitting analogy I think would be "Yes we were bought by a bigger company, but trust us, there will be no changes". Of course the buyout came with exact plans on who to lay off when, but panic would be bad for business.