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Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

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Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#201

Post by wakawaka28 »

questinthrow wrote: post #189
wakawaka28 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elites are hard at work trying to find ways to kill us off and stop us from reproducing.

Its not even about the elites, its about human nature and incentives. And nobody is going to take my hamburger out of my hand just because some people in a third world country are starting to suffer from climate change. This mindset is genetically encoded

Human nature does not make these WEF/Davos "elites" do the things they do. They are so rich that they can move anywhere and do anything. They want us to eat bugs and have zero kids, before euthanizing us at an early age. If they can't do that, they'll find a way to start a world war to kill us off.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#202

Post by master-lincoln »

cesarb wrote: post #169
CM30 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, nuclear seems to get a bad rep from a lot of people. I suspect this is because of a mixture of things: 1. The rare instances of it going wrong look catastrophic, while the many times it does better than coal/oil/gas go ignored. Kinda like how people fear plane travel more than driving, despite the former being far safer than the latter. 2. It's more expensive to setup, so there's an economic incentive…

You didn't mention what I believe is the true reason nuclear power got its bad reputation: nuclear weapons. (Tough you could argue that it's your item 3, since nuclear weapons and their open-air testing would be the reason the left/environmental/peace movement started to hate the concept.)

Wasn't it rather events like in Chernobyl and Fukushima?

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#203

Post by questinthrow »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #201
questinthrow wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not even about the elites, its about human nature and incentives. And nobody is going to take my hamburger out of my hand just because some people in a third world country are starting to suffer from climate change. This mindset is genetically encoded

Human nature does not make these WEF/Davos "elites" do the things they do. They are so rich that they can move anywhere and do anything. They want us to eat bugs and have zero kids, before euthanizing us at an early age. If they can't do that, they'll find a way to start a world war to kill us off.

This response is totally unrelated to my post however it does bring up a good point. There is this narrative where we are all victims of the elites and everything bad is because of the elites and so on and so forth. This is just a means to cope and protect our ego because we basically arent doing anything to help our current situation so we need a scapegoat. It's common human nature

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#205

Post by drexlspivey »

timeon wrote: post #163
drexlspivey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t just shut down the fossil fuel industry before you have alternative green energy infrastructure in place, this is a multi decade project. Otherwise the price of oil shoots up and you get inflation which affects most people’s ability to get by. “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills.

> this is a multi decade project Yes as Exxon report suggested: "Thus, even if solar or nuclear technologies were to be considered viable alternatives, they would not really displace fossil fuel energy for next 40 to 50 years, and CO2 growth would have to be estimated based on realistic market displacement of the fossil fuel technologies." This was 42 years ago. Maybe it is time for “Non-Populist anger” now.

Solar panels didn’t really take off until 10-15 years ago because their efficiency was very low and didn’t make much economic sense. Battery technology is still a big hurdle.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#206

Post by foxyv »

dougmwne wrote: post #52

I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip…

There are ways to reduce carbon emissions drastically without incurring populist anger. It's not so much the population that would be angry from these measures as the corporate interests that supply carbon fuels and products that use them.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#207

Post by ejb999 »

mlrtime wrote: post #195
ejb999 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't personally care about wealth inequality (or more specifically, I don't care that Jeff Bezos has more money than me - if he suddenly became poor, my standard of living wouldn't change). For me the bigger issue is not that the elite have so much money, its that they have egregious carbon footprints, while telling the little people they need to sacrifice their standard of living to save the planet. Read the othe…

Note: Not defending billionaires... However if a Billionaire did have the largest carbon footprint, would you still criticize if they bought credits to offset to be net 0? Or some other real practice to become net 0?

No, carbon credits are like beating your wife and then donating money each month to a battered women's shelter - virtue signaling at its worst.

No matter how many credits they buy, they are still disproportionately polluting the environment - donating money so that 'maybe' somebody else doesn't pollute as much, hardly undos the damage.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#208

Post by konschubert »

ta1243 wrote: post #109
beretguy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear can be useful too. I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.

Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports…

For thre few days a year, we’re also fine burning a bit of natural gas.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#209

Post by wolrah »

perfunctory wrote: post #114
tompccs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Environmental activists are almost entirely responsible for the killing of nuclear energy in the 1970s. Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet.

Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one.

> Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one.

It's a lot harder to affect something that's so firmly embedded in how we do things as a society. Blocking new nuclear developments was a lot easier than undoing generations worth of infrastructure around fossil power.

A comparison can be drawn to the USA's short-lived attempt at prohibition of alcohol versus the long-lasting prohibition of marijuana which is only now finally calling apart.

The one our society has been at least partially built around for generations has its problems normalized and mostly disregarded until something unignorable happens, which still often gets swept under the rug, where the alternative gets constant scrutiny and has to meet standards the established norm has never been held to.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#210

Post by tsylba »

questinthrow wrote: post #180

In my opinion the only solution is a drastic drop in number of human beings. Thankfully we wont have to do much since nature will do it for us when the droughts begin and the crops start failing. Its fun to think of how we will science ourselves out of this as we go over 8 billion people who all desire an ever increasing standard of living. However the only science we will science ourselves with are going to be fully…

I guess it's the logic behind the vaccine mandate fearmongering. If one would want to reduce the population maybe the easiest method would be a stochastic approach by injecting at random a malicious agent affecting health or reproduction globally. Of course it would mean we do have such an agent and we know how to control it, which I doubt, but it's sound (and kinda painless).

Oil is a hell of a drug for civilization, and I'm not sure how we will willingly tune off of it, unless we chose a radically different economical organization.

But as many I am kind of hopeless as it seems competition, which fuel this need, is at the core of mankind (or at least the leading West)'s mentality.

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