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I Choose Optimism

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Re: I Choose Optimism

#101

Post by marcus_holmes »

chongli wrote: post #86
s-lambert wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar energy isn't free, it takes a lot of metals just to turn solar energy into electrical energy (including batteries for storage) and they don't last forever. Here's a link to a talk from an associate professor doing an estimation of how much metals are needed to switch to renewable energy: https://youtu.be/MBVmnKuBocc?t=2406

Wow, that was a bucket of water in my face the likes of which I’ve never felt before! We are 100% completely screwed! We simply cannot maintain our standard of living into the future. The picture this professor paints is so incredibly bleak that it puts the war in Ukraine and a potential war in Taiwan into perspective. Imagine if all the passengers on the Titanic had nuclear weapons. That’s the situation we’re in. An…

Except that all these problems are soluble.

We can adapt to climate change. We can create new (clean!) energy sources.

Solar is getting more efficient every year. There are new storage solutions appearing every year.

As TFA says, despair is not the answer. We can (and will) overcome all these problems.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#102

Post by xupybd »

randcraw wrote: post #99
xupybd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the same with the last cold war. They were convinced over population would destroy the earth and Russia and America would start throwing Nukes around.

Unfortunately, the worst days of the cold war were appreciably less likely than we are now to immolate all of mankind. In 1963, the two nations capable of global annihilation were run by “company men” who acted with caution and tons of input from myriad experts who knew the real cost of global war all too well. Those bureaucrats understood that their rash act would end their “life at the top” in a heartbeat, even if…

There are more players now but I don't think the cold war Soviets were as stable as you're arguing here.

We've had mad men with nuke since we've had nukes. The more time we spend in that situation the higher the chances someone uses them but I think we're far safer now than times such as the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviets had their nukes on a dead man switch. That was insane and could have killed billions accidentally.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#103

Post by throwanapple »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #101
chongli wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that was a bucket of water in my face the likes of which I’ve never felt before! We are 100% completely screwed! We simply cannot maintain our standard of living into the future. The picture this professor paints is so incredibly bleak that it puts the war in Ukraine and a potential war in Taiwan into perspective. Imagine if all the passengers on the Titanic had nuclear weapons. That’s the situation we’re in. An…

Except that all these problems are soluble. We can adapt to climate change. We can create new (clean!) energy sources. Solar is getting more efficient every year. There are new storage solutions appearing every year. As TFA says, despair is not the answer. We can (and will) overcome all these problems.

Can you expand more on those new storage solutions?

Re: I Choose Optimism

#104

Post by systemvoltage »

mypastself wrote: post #81
systemvoltage wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media doesn't report good things that happen in the environment. From 2013-2019, they hammered constantly on how the Great Barrier Reef was dying. But, not a peep when they found that it is healthiest its ever been in recent history: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/parts-australia... No wonder the trust in media has fallen to the lowest. Reuters/AP are informative as a root source, but I have stopped tru…

Wouldn’t environmentalists be opposed to coal as well? Or is it simply that they favor it over nuclear power? I’m not particularly well acquainted with German green parties’ policies.

They are. But when they’ve cornered themselves into freezing this winter, lignite coal it is.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#105

Post by adrianN »

systemvoltage wrote: post #104
mypastself wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t environmentalists be opposed to coal as well? Or is it simply that they favor it over nuclear power? I’m not particularly well acquainted with German green parties’ policies.

They are. But when they’ve cornered themselves into freezing this winter, lignite coal it is.

Homes are not heated with nuclear power or lignite, they are heated with gas.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#106

Post by InfiniteRand »

I’m a bit ambivalent about optimism on the historical scale. History does have examples of things getting worse, it’s hard to pinpoint the cases where it got worse for the majority of earth’s population at once, since different regions sometimes prosper at the time others decline, but there are things like the Bronze Age collapse which are widespread enough to be likely candidates.

That particular scenario of civilization collapse I think is unlikely, however it does create the question of whether history always gets better over the long term.

And the long term scales of history are long, long enough to make it impossible to tell a definite trend from a possible one if you are looking for meaning behind history.

But I am a religious man and I have hope things will stay on the uptrend in some way. I think a CB lot of faith in history is ultimately a matter of faith, one with arguments behind it but I don’t think those arguments are bulletproof

Re: I Choose Optimism

#107

Post by BoxOfRain »

Animats wrote: post #70

Encouraging trends: - Energy is getting fixed. Simply because wind and solar are cheap, and electric vehicles work well. There will be lots of kicking and screaming during the transition, but 20 years out, it won't be a problem. - We seem to be past peak crazyness in major national leaders. Donald Trump is out. Boris Johnson is out. Benjamin Netanyahu is out. Putin remains a problem. - Vaccine technology has made hug…

>- We seem to be past peak crazyness in major national leaders. Donald Trump is out. Boris Johnson is out. Benjamin Netanyahu is out. Putin remains a problem.

Not to throw cold water over this too much but Johnson's likely successor is basically him again but without any of the charisma that sold many of the public on him in the first place. Liz Truss is an author of Britannia Unchained which pretty much accuses the British public of being workshy good-for-nothings and bemoans the fact they won't cheerfully volunteer for long hours and exploitative wages. The irony is by Dominic Cummings' account at least Truss is a bit of a chocolate teapot herself! It's said that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, I think Margaret Thatcher might be about to get her farcical repetition in a month or so.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#108

Post by neilwilson »

NovaVeles wrote: post #26
philipashlock wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ecological and resource extractive debt is not magic, they have limits and externalities that most financial systems don't fully account for in their balance sheets.

This is something I have to remind people of all the time - usually I just get blank stares. Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with. All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming th…

If I have a debt of £50 and you have the corresponding £50 asset that you like to look at, then you don't need any material amount of energy to get to that state of happiness.

I have to remind people all the time of a simple truth - there isn't a one to one relationship between money and stuff.

And money isn't real. It's largely an illusion. At best a social relation.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#110

Post by neilwilson »

xmprt wrote: post #31
neilwilson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I take out a loan to live it up for a year, but then have no way of paying it back, because I haven't invested the money into anything substantial did things really got better for me?" Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it. Therefore you caused things to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened. Debt is one of human's greatest inventions. It's w…

I'm not sure I follow your argument. I agree that debt is important for society to function however taking on debt that you don't invest into yourself is literally ruinous and not in a hypothetical way - tons of people's lives have been destroyed by getting into too much debt that they weren't able to pay back. > Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it Th…

You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.

The people doing the deal with you accepted your promise to repay. They don't do that for the fun of it.

Debt is just a way of spending things without selling them first. You can either borrow against your car to spend it, or you can sell the car to spend it.

Either way if you consume rather than buying another car, then you end up with no car.

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