281–290 of 422 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rich don’t care which side you’re on, as long as you’re fighting each other.
Both sides aren't fighting each other, one side has turned themselves into a weapon for rich pedophiles to attack the other side with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about economically viable fission power, right now.
That's the thing, can't be done
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/12mo/monthly
It literally has been done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You either tax the fuel and pass the cost down to the consumers, or decide as a society to share the cost of the externalities and use general taxation for that.
So… it’s like you completely understand the issue :) And obviously, you tax the fuel at the source, right when it comes out of the ground. Higher prices get passed down, changing behavior because the products externalities are priced correctly from the start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you've done here is called a fully-general counterargument. You should be suspicious of these! If capital inevitably follows destructive local maxima and defectors get eaten, then no coordination problem has ever been solved, right? But we banned CFCs! We got lead out of gasoline! The Montreal Protocol exists and worked. What you're describing is the default behavior of uncoordinated markets, not a physical law.…
The government is failing to control the problem because it got bought out by the capitalists who run the companies that continue to cause the damage. The law in the US explicitly allows this, though it's "decent" enough to hide it in a paper bag. It's certainly a governance failure, but I'm not sure what the fix for it is, and I don't see how capitalism gets off scot-free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Water vapor (clouds) also reflects sunlight. So it's complicated. We know the planet has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures in the past, and it did not "run away" Yes. But stars like ours burn brighter as they move through their lifetimes, and the Sun is a bit brighter now than it was back when we had higher CO2 levels. That's why a runaway GHG didn't happen back then, but is basically guaranteed to happen with…
So… the sun is hotter now than it was what… since the 1950s? The 1850s? The Jurassic period? What scale is do you need to make this claim reasonable? Also, I see a lot of things presented as facts in your comment, you seem to have convinced yourself quite thoroughly.
It is important to keep reminding ourselves that climate change is a real problem for humanity and that each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. It is a problem that requires solutions, but implementing these solutions involves so much inertia that it can sometimes be painful. And let's contrast that with the AI hype. It's more the opposite, a kind of solution t…
I‘ve travelled quite a bit and I find it hard to convince myself that I as a city dweller contribute any meaningful amount to pollution or waste. I‘ve seen rivers of trash flow directly into the ocean. The rich and wealthy pollute disproportionally in such a way that I don‘t think offloading the responsibility to the general public is fair.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prisoner's dilemma is a bad reference here. Prisoner's dilemma is about situation when optimal outcome requires cooperation from all participants. In the situation with climate change, personal decisions of 99% of Earth population do not really matter.
It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons. Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels. If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others). If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but…
The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained through subsidies and government regulation hostile to alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars while we still subsidize oil companies?
Are there any attempts to start geo-engineering to fix this? I'm assuming there will be no attempt to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere, can we at least do something to take it back out? Can we use solar or renewables to possibly do that at scale?
Putting sulfur into the right layers of the atmosphere seems to be the currently best viable options. It's not overly expensive, either. It acts fast and is reversible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
Very alarming. I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right ( https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-lambrou-alternative-f... ) I don't know what to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions. I have to disagree here. This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting. The fossil energy industry pulls the…
While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced! Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users. There are quantitative arguments against many silly co…