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Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

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Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#171

Post by toss1 »

noonespecial wrote: post #168
richev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't save the earth for the earth. We save it for ourselves. I was hoping that we were trying to save it (from us!) because this is simply the right thing to do.

Not trying to be the least bit facetious: What makes it the right thing to do?

For starters:

What says that we have more right to liver here, take the air, water and other resources than any of the other clearly sentient & intelligent beings among whom we live?

I have a hard time finding any good answers to that question that do not boil down to , i.e., we're more intelligent, capable, etc., so screw all the other animals and plants (upon which, BTW, our continued existence depends).

So, from an ethical POV, mere consideration of the other beings makes it hge right thing to do.

Even if we want to save it for only ourselves, we need to wise up damn fast. Look at the list starting with AGW shifting the climate faster than any time since the asteroid 65MM yrs ago (& now showing serious signs of runaway feed-forward effects), plastic debris and microplastics choking the food chain on sea and land, neonicotinid pesticides destroying the insect population & especially pollinators at well into double digit levels, monoculture industrial agriculture, massive habitat destruction... the list goes on and on. The result is that we are likely getting dangerously close to breaking the food web. When that happens (even without war) there will only be a few survivors, if any, and they likely not consider themselves lucky.

So, even if only for selfish motives, merely acting like it is right to preserve the earth's biosphere, is the right thing to do.

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#172

Post by tyfon »

perfunctory wrote: post #165
tyfon wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm far from being in the 1%, however the things I've done personally so far is * Use public transportation to work (bus/train) * Drastically reduced meat consumption from every day to once a week. I still eat fish about twice a week. * Converted part of my garden (my house is 150 square meters so I wouldn't exactly call it a mansion) to a vegetable garden. * Make sure the food I do buy is produced locally, it is cle…

> Recently I've mostly use air due to work I am wondering if you see any possibility to avoid work related air travel as well? I understand that certain jobs require flying but I also see, at least at my own company, that a lot of those flights are not really necessary and could easily be avoided. Would you mind to elaborate?

There are some ways to reduce air travel imho (and probably other ways to do so).

* Video conferencing

* Car/train/bus transportation if the hours used is acceptable. A good way to do this is a "night train" with a sleeping compartment.

* The big one: electric planes.

However it is a though one. Sometimes you just have to travel far to meet someone face to face and unfortunately the only way to achieve this in a reasonable way today is by hydrocarbon burning air travel.

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#174

Post by noonespecial »

toss1 wrote: post #171
noonespecial wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be the least bit facetious: What makes it the right thing to do?

For starters: What says that we have more right to liver here, take the air, water and other resources than any of the other clearly sentient & intelligent beings among whom we live? I have a hard time finding any good answers to that question that do not boil down to , i.e., we're more intelligent, capable, etc., so screw all the other animals and plants (upon which, BTW, our continued existence depends). So, from a…

>What says that we have more right to liver here, take the air, water and other resources than any of the other clearly sentient & intelligent beings among whom we live?

Nature does. In the same way it gave wolves the right to eat rabbits. By providing us with the indisputable power to do so. It also gave us the ability to choose:

We can live a tiny existence as a species, completely eschewing any and all anthropological climate impact until we are eventually extincted by natural climate change just as every other species that ever lived on this planet was or will be.

Or we can consume the entire world in a few generations in a desperate bid to show each other the maximum number ads for ephemeral crap that doesn't matter at all.

Or something in the middle. I personally vote for the careful, intentional consumption of most of this world to further human sentience and aid it in expanding into the universe. (And grieve for the fact that we seem to be irreversibly choosing the "ads" option when either of the others would seem much more preferable.)

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#175

Post by edejong »

noonespecial wrote: post #138
bin0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way this is happening is if the planet gets depopulated of humans rapidly. Please don't tell me you're one of those "earth would be better of were we all dead" people. I can't stand that kind of post-modernist, nihilistic garbage. I'm not mister optimist, but still, that's way too far. Also, that kind of rhetoric is going to end up being a justification for some one very evil doing some thing very bad. > T…

"earth would be better off were we all dead" The right answer to this is "for who?" and "why would it matter then?" We don't save the earth for the earth. We save it for ourselves.

We also do it to preserve our unique prestine environment providing higher-order evolution. And we do it to preserve our ideas, our discoveries and our memories.

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#176

Post by pbhjpbhj »

icxa wrote: post #77
bin0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way this is happening is if the planet gets depopulated of humans rapidly. Please don't tell me you're one of those "earth would be better of were we all dead" people. I can't stand that kind of post-modernist, nihilistic garbage. I'm not mister optimist, but still, that's way too far. Also, that kind of rhetoric is going to end up being a justification for some one very evil doing some thing very bad. > T…

If these people really believed that overpopulation was the problem, then why don't they start depopulating with themselves? * It sounds terrible I know, but it serves to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the stance. Like George Carlin said, "I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. Peopl…

Suppose we have enough people and resources to support the current population, but not enough to support 20% more at the same level of luxury ... you don't think we should bother to try and keep the population at the level where everyone can benefit?

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#177

Post by noonespecial »

edejong wrote: post #175
noonespecial wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"earth would be better off were we all dead" The right answer to this is "for who?" and "why would it matter then?" We don't save the earth for the earth. We save it for ourselves.

We also do it to preserve our unique prestine environment providing higher-order evolution. And we do it to preserve our ideas, our discoveries and our memories.

Then again, perhaps all worlds that develop truly high-order species require an quick evolutionary step wherein weird little monkeys fill the biosphere with plastic and get it suitably hot enough to being said high-order evolution. A period future historians will refer to as "the plasticene"?

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#178

Post by rleigh »

johnr2 wrote: post #64
midnitewarrior wrote: post #17

Telling a lie then saying 3 Hail Marys means you are forgiven for the lie, it doesn't fix the lie. As such, planting a tree to be forgiven for going on a flight that burns carbon-laden jet fuel doesn't fix what you did. Fossil fuels are excess carbon atoms sequestered safely deep inside the Earth. Unless you can find a way to put them back there, there's no fixing the situation. Planting a tree does capture carbon. H…

"Planting a tree does capture carbon. However, when it dies and rots, all the carbon gets re-released over time back into the atmosphere." Not all the carbon. Some of it stays in the ground to eventually form more fossil fuel.

Not really, not in any meaningful quantity.

That only happened once, on a geological timescale (the carboniferous period). During that period, there was no breakdown of dead trees; fungi and bacteria hadn't evolved the enzymes to break it down at that point, so it just sat there, piling up layer upon layer, and eventually got turned into coal seams and oil reservoirs deep underground. Consider just how long it took to get buried deep under all that strata. Millions of years.

That process will never happen again. Life subsequently evolved to break trees and all plant matter down fast, on the order of years for a whole tree. Much faster if it's chopped into smaller bits. It is ultimately metabolised by saprophytes and returned to the atmosphere. Very little is sequestered away. Consider that the layer between rock and atmosphere is just a thin film. Bare in some places, a few inches to a few feet deep in others. That's the biosphere, the bit of the planet that is living. That's the store the carbon has to be sunk into.

There are some places which do sequester some carbon. Peat bog would be one example. But when you look at how much a peat bog sequesters in a year though the slow growth of sphagnum mosses, heather and the other lichens and plants found there, it's a tiny drop in the ocean compared with the amount of CO2 we are pumping out daily. It's also not going to be super stable. It could catch fire if there's a really dry summer, for example.

Higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere will encourage plant growth. There are plenty of scientific experiments to show a direct correlation between CO2 concentration and crop size and dry weight. That's been known for decades. We learned this on a plant science course over two decades back. But there isn't a stable store for all the excess carbon we have released to be sequestered on a meaningful timescale, and the existing biosphere isn't going to be able to expand sufficiently to compensate or to store it long term. It's going to be cycled back into the atmosphere.

We have spent the last few hundred years ceaselessly burning unimaginably large quantities of stored carbon which took millions of years to originally deposit. There's no magic bullet to reverting to the pre-industrial state. The effects of this, and any corrective action, will take place on timescales much longer than a human lifetime. As a species, we aren't very good at dealing with problems which can't be solved in a decade or two.

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#179

Post by bin0 »

valw wrote: post #163
bin0 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> privileged people I don't eat a ton of beef, but no, beef is relatively affordable (at least in America). But I do eat a lot more chicken, and not a ton of beef. With that said, I want a good steak once every few months and a burger once a week. More importantly, I don't want the government saying "thou shalt" about my beef consumption, nor do I want people finger-wagging at me about it. America can sustainably rai…

> With that said, I don't emit that much (all things considered) Cool, how much? IIRC, sustainability would require an individual average below 2 teqCO2/year. > Besides, would money not be better spent curing cancer? Look at what the world would look like if climate change is not prevented: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l... . Think of the consequences in famines (whole countries transfor…

Dividing household total (according to the EPA calculator: https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator/) number of people, about 5.7 tons/person/yr. This is less than the American average. This is also considering that people in said household are required to drive long distances for work (I'm talking 300-mile distances several times per month). We do, however, drive mostly diesel. None of us are willing to give up our jobs. Transportation is most of our emissions; AC is the runner-up.

How about you?

> Look at what the world would look like if climate change is not prevented

I think global warming is over-exaggerated by alarmists who seek to push a political agenda. I'd say it's reasonable to say there's an issue, but certainly not of the magnitude many pretend. I hear 97% quoted a lot, but believe many are simply afraid to contradict the narrative blasted at every one from all major media outlets. 97% it may be, but it wouldn't be the first time the "scientific consensus" was wrong.

> You are in denial

Nope, see above

> we can't individually give up on our beef sandwich

I don't want to, and even if I do, someone else will feel like he is now able to emit more. As I said, tragedy of the commons. And I just don't buy the idea that our living spaces will "become uninhabitable". Why the predictions of a global desert? Greenhouses tend to be damp and flourishing.

Re: Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World

#180

Post by trophycase »

hokkos wrote: post #119
trophycase wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use "post-modernism" like Jordan Peterson uses "post-modernism"... incorrectly, and likely without having read any of it. If anything, reducing population (not through genocide obviously) for expedience is actually a very neoliberal idea

There is liberal in neoliberal, and there would be no population control like the one child policy with more limited intervention from the state.

Neoliberalism is a fairly conservative ideology ironically enough
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