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Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

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Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#261

Post by TheCoelacanth »

epistasis wrote: post #147
alexfromapex wrote: post #9

Don't forget about the cows eating seaweed development, that will be huge for the climate too

Beef is only 3% of US emissions, meat has very little to do with the US's climate woes. The big problem is transportation. Ideally we'd have lots more muxed-use walkable neighborhoods than we have. Roughly 50% of people want to live in walkable neighborhoods, but centralized planning has virtually banned this type of low-carbon living over the past 75 years.

Every source of emissions is a small amount if you break it down granularly enough. Transportation of people is only ~15% of emissions. Realistically, we need to reduce every major source of emissions.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#262

Post by Geminidog »

29athrowaway wrote: post #259
Geminidog wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You brag about your soft skills, but are unable to explain a simple concept succintly and without aggression. I never bragged about my soft skills. I targeted you as someone who's using the extreme technicality of a definition to serve your agenda. It appears to be an intelligent maneuver but it is not. >Btw, name calling is also against the rules, and invoking the rules is against the rules. Name calling? You mean…

Savants are mentally impaired people with unusual abilities perfect memory and calculator-like ability to compute math operations, etc. Calling people mentally disabled is not a compliment. Then, anatomically modern humans did not start expanding millions of years ago. And most species do not have an innate fear of humans. Pretty much everything you said is a bunch of nonsense. I regret having read that. Clearly the…

> Savants are mentally impaired people with unusual abilities perfect memory and calculator-like ability to compute math operations, etc. Calling people mentally disabled is not a compliment.

I focused on the perfect memory and calculator like abilities of the savant as a descriptive analogy for the level of intelligence you're displaying. It is indeed a compliment of untold proportions.

>Then, anatomically modern humans did not start expanding millions of years ago. And most species do not have an innate fear of humans.

No other species has been called "invasive" after millions of years have passed. Look it up. Most apex predators do have an innate fear of humans:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190717084243.h...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/humans-p...

https://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/fear-human-superpr...

https://wildlife.org/human-presence-creates-fear-response-in...

The animals that don't fear humans are located here:

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

>Preserving the environment is not a political agenda, it is an extension of our survival instinct. Just like food security is not treated as a politically charged topic because everyone can agree that they need food.

But talking about things that are clearly not true to serve your agenda is wrong. Humans are not invasive. We are destroying the environment through technological development not by being invasive.

>Pretty much everything you said is a bunch of nonsense. I regret having read that. Clearly the educational system failed you. I do not have an agenda.

I'm a environmental biologist by trade, aka scientist. All I did was point out your mistaken attribution to humans being "invasive."

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#263

Post by 29athrowaway »

Geminidog wrote: post #262
29athrowaway wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Savants are mentally impaired people with unusual abilities perfect memory and calculator-like ability to compute math operations, etc. Calling people mentally disabled is not a compliment. Then, anatomically modern humans did not start expanding millions of years ago. And most species do not have an innate fear of humans. Pretty much everything you said is a bunch of nonsense. I regret having read that. Clearly the…

> Savants are mentally impaired people with unusual abilities perfect memory and calculator-like ability to compute math operations, etc. Calling people mentally disabled is not a compliment. I focused on the perfect memory and calculator like abilities of the savant as a descriptive analogy for the level of intelligence you're displaying. It is indeed a compliment of untold proportions. >Then, anatomically modern hu…

You can come up with alternative definitions of a word if you want, but that doesn't change the definition of the word. The word you used is an insult in most settings, as it refers to mentally disabled people.

Then, if you are truly a scientist then, please go and publish about how humans spread around earth millions of years ago, at a time where Homo sapiens sapiens didn't even exist yet. The only citations you will get will be from comedians.

When humans move into an area, other species lose their habitat. This happens every day. We are an invasive species, we disrupt ecosystems. If you want to feel better with yourself and believe in stupid fairy tales about how we humans are special, then go and create another concept for it. I don't care. In the end, what matters is understanding that we are ruining the environment everywhere we go, and causing the extinction of species everywhere we go.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#264

Post by lostlogin »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #91
whimsicalism wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, you're saying you would rather have one more year of lockdown than get the virus? And your girlfriend would rather have 3 years? For me, 0 - the reason I lockdown is out concern for others, I am not personally worried of the impact Covid would have on me.

For my part, the reason I oppose the lockdowns is out of concern for others: by the time the restrictions are over in the EU, young people will have been prevented for about two years from doing all kinds of traditional coming of age rituals, courtship opportunities, etc. And if European countries isolating themselves leads to a new wave of nationalism and lessened cooperation with neighbors, it is their generation w…

Just ignoring those who die is one option, however long covid is a thing. A huge portion of those who get covid are still very sick a long time later. A majority have symptoms 6 months later, and some are very significant and life changing. This needs to be considered when suggesting letting the disease run rampant.

You may actually be limiting lives more by not locking down.

My view is very coloured by living in New Zealand where aggressive lockdown has lead to normality (with limited international travel and mandatory managed isolation).

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#265

Post by jessaustin »

djrogers wrote: post #254
jessaustin wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, yes. In normal nations, mechanisms existed to pay for both health care and lost wages for all citizens. Those mechanisms don't exist in USA. We only have mechanisms to give lots of money to the already-rich people who control our elections. So, we got "The CARES Act".

To say that we have no mechanism to pay for unemployment or health care for the unemployed is disingenuous at best. The poor are exactly the people whose healthcare the government does pay for. And the CARES act largely just expanded existing welfare and unemployment benefits.

Perhaps you haven't spent much time on unemployment or Medicaid? I work in a dental clinic, and it seems like every month there's another wrinkle added to the Medicaid system to make it stingier and to chase away more providers. Unemployment only helps a quarter of those who are unemployed, and it pays those people on average a third of what they were making while employed.

This diagram shows that "CARES Act" was very much not about "expanding existing welfare and unemployment benefits". [0]

Americans who haven't traveled have no concept of how a functioning polity cares for citizens during a pandemic. If our government doesn't care for us, why do we tolerate it?

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/CARES_Ac...

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#266

Post by jholman »

cobookman wrote: post #78
snoshy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This I'm not so sure about. It will certainly be different, but it's still an open question whether it will be easier to secure from a national security standpoint. There's the physical security aspect of this, which is as you say, hard to take down when it's decentralized. However, as power generation gets more distributed, we'll naturally start seeing more (if not most) of these pieces of equipment be controlled ov…

I'm not convinced that it needs to be internet controlled. Hopefully it uses protocols like BLE or Zigbee requiring proximity. That way such an attack would require being physically near the device.

Zigbee devices can form mesh networks. That means viruses on them can form mesh networks. If, in addition to your Zigbee-only home automation gear, you've got a zigbee-enabled internet-enabled hub of some kind, you can get comand-and-control into the network from anywhere in the world. So much for proximity. I worked briefly in a SCADA-adjacent space a decade ago, and people were delivering PoCs back then.

IoT is a raging tirefire. It's hard to even imagine how bad the security situation is.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#267

Post by Geminidog »

29athrowaway wrote: post #263
Geminidog wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Savants are mentally impaired people with unusual abilities perfect memory and calculator-like ability to compute math operations, etc. Calling people mentally disabled is not a compliment. I focused on the perfect memory and calculator like abilities of the savant as a descriptive analogy for the level of intelligence you're displaying. It is indeed a compliment of untold proportions. >Then, anatomically modern hu…

You can come up with alternative definitions of a word if you want, but that doesn't change the definition of the word. The word you used is an insult in most settings, as it refers to mentally disabled people. Then, if you are truly a scientist then, please go and publish about how humans spread around earth millions of years ago, at a time where Homo sapiens sapiens didn't even exist yet. The only citations you wil…

> You can come up with alternative definitions of a word if you want, but that doesn't change the definition of the word. The word you used is an insult in most settings, as it refers to mentally disabled people.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/savant

Take a look at definition 1.

>If you want to feel better with yourself and believe in stupid fairy tales about how we humans are special

I'm not, I am correcting a technical mistake you made. We cannot be an invasive species because we already invaded practically every habitat eons ago. The term no longer applies.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#268

Post by yowlingcat »

29athrowaway wrote: post #239
Geminidog wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're no longer invasive. Almost every wild animal on every continent has evolved an innate fear of humans as a defense mechanism. We have been the apex predator across the world for a long long time and animals have evolved to deal with this fact. Only in small islands cut off from humanity for eons will you find wild animals that feel no fear against humans.

- Non-native organism to most places around the world: check - Negative environmental effect: check We are an invasive species. Our species originated in Africa, then as we expanded we negatively affected our environment worldwide.

> Our species originated in Africa

There is an increasing amount of evidence for the MRH (multi-regional hypothesis) which contradicts the idea that "our species originated in Africa." That's not to say that thinking of anatomically modern humans as "an invasive" species is a useless frame, but I think it does weaken the footing your argument stands on.

Re: Climate change: US emissions in 2020 in biggest fall since WWII

#269

Post by qes »

polka_haunts_us wrote: post #11
badRNG wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Anecdotally most folks I know have had to burn through their savings after living off of unemployment or going through underemployment this past year.

Anecdotally as someone in a family all of whom are thriving financially during the pandemic, here are possible reasons it could be true. * My student loan payments are frozen, I believe the total balance of student loans that are frozen is something like 85% country wide. * People working remotely = low transit expenses. * No live events = low entertainment expenses. * Raging pandemic = low travel expenses. * Investm…

Anecdotally, as someone who's work kept on trucking (surprisingly - we sell content for display in public spaces where people pass or congregate) - 2020 was a banner year for my family. We saved more than we ever have before and the price of our various assets soared.

We even had a 20% bump in gross revenue while bringing our costs down, and that's after 2019 was flat for us (prior to that we were hitting 30%+ for a handful of years in a row).

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