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Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

phys.org

131–140 of 166 posts

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#131
post #3

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.“

Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.

I thought the current policy was "Drill, baby, drill!"?

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#132
post #74

Reminder that an individual can cut their emissions by a staggering amount by just not eating meat/dairy. Depending on how much you consume, you can cut your emissions by 50%! Regenerative ranching is a lie and is more based in "vibes" and "energies" than science. Making beef production 0.01% more efficient then increasing consumption does not help. Meat is a "status symbol" food based in excess, grass fed beef is ju…

Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyo…

Me in Europe: 5 different bins on 5 days of the week for all the different types of recycling.

Me in USA: insert John Travolta looking around meme consumer recycling is practically unheard of in large parts of the country.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#133
post #74

Reminder that an individual can cut their emissions by a staggering amount by just not eating meat/dairy. Depending on how much you consume, you can cut your emissions by 50%! Regenerative ranching is a lie and is more based in "vibes" and "energies" than science. Making beef production 0.01% more efficient then increasing consumption does not help. Meat is a "status symbol" food based in excess, grass fed beef is ju…

Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyo…

Why do the corporations pollute so much? Is it just for the love of the game?

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyo…

Me in Europe: 5 different bins on 5 days of the week for all the different types of recycling. Me in USA: insert John Travolta looking around meme consumer recycling is practically unheard of in large parts of the country.

Thank god for that. I can’t imagine spending more of my limited lifespan doing more busy work

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#135
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.

To be fair, looking from the outside, democrats don't seem to be very eager to do anything about it either, most politicians in the US seems to be playing for the same team; the rich and wealthy.

Huh??? Did you just miss Biden's entire term? Democrats literally passed a massive bill that included $783 billion in funds for renewable energy to fight greenhouse gas emissions. Exactly what else do you want them to do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#136
post #26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.

Obama takes credit for U.S. oil-and-gas boom: ‘That was me, people’ https://apnews.com/article/business-5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caa... You have to be born yesterday to believe that Democratic leaders haven't merely hand-waved and virtue-signaled about global warming for decades. I realized this back in the 1990s. Democrats have superior rhetoric, and they are less openly hostile, but their long record of doing nothing t…

I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries.

Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal.

> don't forget that Joe Manchin

No one on the left ever will.

That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) coalition is wicked hard to hold together.

Have you read Caro's (epic) biographies of LBJ? It's amazing how much skill, subterfuge, and manipulation was required to pass progressive legislation over the objections of the die-hard reactionaries.

Everything about politics sucks. Chaos, apathy, nihilism, grifting are the default. It's absolutely amazing that anything gets done at all. So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#137
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do the people causing this problem a great service with false equivocations like this. It is clear one group would prefer us to ignore the problem and do nothing at all - in fact encourage the problematic behavior - and the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.

> the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power. They had political power! During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration. Al Gore is a famous environmentalist... for making a movie after he was out of power. What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the Presiden…

Are you familiar with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics?

https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/ethics/2015-06-24-jai-theco...

And Murc's Law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#138
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard this take before. Care to elaborate? It seems like crop failure and disease are the typical causes of food shortages, if not outright human logistical failures. Sounds like saying pouring gasoline on a tiny fire is the only reason we aren't cold (ignoring that more firewood would be the solution). An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. So if your assertion is correct, then we should all…

You clearly haven't given a lot of thought to questions like "where does all this cheap food/housing/heating come from?" The fact that fossil fuels -- since their mass adoption in the late 19th century -- are the single largest cause of improved living conditions is standard economic history. > An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. It was a perfectly good solution. It replaced wood fires which are…

This all seems very confused. I would say you clearly have not thought this through, but that would be fairly rude given the tiny scope of this comment thread. If your definition of better (or perfectly good) is: makes me more comfortable in the short term then I can understand that perspective.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#139
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama takes credit for U.S. oil-and-gas boom: ‘That was me, people’ https://apnews.com/article/business-5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caa... You have to be born yesterday to believe that Democratic leaders haven't merely hand-waved and virtue-signaled about global warming for decades. I realized this back in the 1990s. Democrats have superior rhetoric, and they are less openly hostile, but their long record of doing nothing t…

I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries. Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal. > don't forget that Joe Manchin No one on the left ever will. That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) c…

> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.

What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. This was never a problem that we could wait on for "the occasional success."

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyo…

Me in Europe: 5 different bins on 5 days of the week for all the different types of recycling. Me in USA: insert John Travolta looking around meme consumer recycling is practically unheard of in large parts of the country.

There are US states that are very deep into multi-stream recycling with 5 or 6 different bins. (Most of them are on the West Coast.)

There's an interesting debate on single-stream versus multi-stream recycling and its perverse incentives. Multi-stream recycling is more labor efficient, so in some cases more profitable, pushing labor to the unpaid consumer so that fewer laborers are needed at the recycling plants. Multi-stream recycling is often less efficient at overall recycling. Improperly sorted items are more likely to end up in landfills when the specialized recycling plant is an entirely different company with its own delivery schedule and process, versus a single-stream company that has to sort everything anyway.

In a somewhat surprising twist, some of the most efficient recyclers are the landfill companies themselves. Landfills take up space and don't produce income on their own. Finding any things that are recyclable and resellable is sometimes big profit. Sorting work is thus incentivized as profit growth. There are cities investigating going truly "single stream" again for all trash and continuing to incentivize the landfill companies to grow their recycling sorting processes.

Not only is that itself an illustration that companies need to be incentivized to do the right thing more than people need to be incentivized to do extra labor that result in less efficient outcomes, but it is also another example of how certain corporation's propaganda pushed the narrative from corporate action to consumer action.

The original lesson plan in the 1990s designed by some smart teachers was the Three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They were put in this order specifically because they are in order of importance. Debates on if we are doing enough our own individual parts for Recycling have already lost the battle on how much corporations are helping us to Reuse things rather than recycle them, and better yet, to Reduce the number of things we need to even consider reusing or recycling or trashing. Both reduce and reuse require more collective action. They require companies to work outside of the "single use" box. Single use is more profitable, because it sells more single use things.

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